The Red Tenda of Bologna

In a perfect world, the writers we love would have all their stories published as beautifully as The Red Tenda of Bologna by John Berger (Drawbridge) has been: illustrated with simple line drawings by Paul Davis, bound in deep red boards and finished with oxblood-coloured cloth along the spine. In the book, Berger tells of his father’s elder brother Edgar, a man “apparently without ambition” who came to live with the family in his mid-fifties. “According to the standards by which I was being brought up,” Berger tells us, “he was a failure,” yet Berger loved Edgar for “his alternative vision, his shabby and royal intransigence.” In his 2005 book Here Is Where We Meet, Berger observes that “the dead don’t stay where they are buried”—and this tale could be another story taken from that generous and tender book. Long after Edgar’s death, Berger encounters his uncle once again: in a small shop selling fabric in Bologna. For Berger as for Dylan Thomas, “death shall have no dominion” over those who have been loved.