Bento's Sketchbook

From the author of the modern classics Ways of Seeing and To the Wedding (“Wherever I live in the world . . . I have this book with me.”—Michael Ondaatje), a singularly conceived, beautifully written consideration of how we can refresh the way we perceive our world.

Over the last half century, John Berger has created a body of work like no other, distinguished, as Susan Sontag wrote, by its “attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.” In Bento’s Sketchbook Berger continues his exploration of the relationship between experience and expression, giving us a book of dazzling, inventive, and, ultimately, deeply moving impressions of how stories embedded in visual art provide us with the impetus to see and understand our world in extra-ordinary ways. Using as his jumping-off point the sketchbooks of the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza—books believed to exist but never found—Berger moves between his own quotidian experience of seeing and the imagined experience of Spinoza in a narrative that weaves its own surprising, poignant picture, inviting us to contemplate the mystery of what and how we see.

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