Reviews

an IDNCREDIBLE novel swept much under the rug probably possibly partly because misogyny is. in the publishing industry but
ann quin is really just one of the best prose stylists I've read lately she's remarkable and very fun and this is one of those novels i'd encourage. out of print for nearly 60 years until &OTher Stories brought her back. liked Berg very much & will come back to something other of hers I am sure

ggarsi's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

variousfictions's review against another edition

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4.0

There's something peculiar and off-kilter about British seaside towns. They attract the artist, the outsider, and the wanderer. The final destination of the runaway. The edge. Preserved in time since the collapse of the coastal resort boom in the 60s and 70s, they are often places stricken by poverty and life in stark contrast to the bustling beach-filled summers of yesteryear. The once shiny attractions and freshly painted shopfronts now decaying and rusting from neglect in the humid salt air that blows in from the sea.

It's in such a place that Ann Quin sets her debut novel, Berg. A Shakespearean farce that unfolds into a surrealist tragedy. Half an Oedipal legend. Not discounting the possibility Alistair and his mother once pushed each other on the swings of some incestuous playground, and given Quin's tendency towards scenes of absurd eroticism and Freudian overtones, there is a good chance of that.

Having spent a childhood in and out of the waters of places like Southend and Clacton, the setting for the novel, with its strange and disconcerting atmosphere twisted its way between old memories, leaving me changed. The rose-tinted echoes of youth reshaping themselves into something increasingly sinister and psychedelic. As if the filter of my childhood was disintegrating purely by coming into contact with Quin's prose until all that remained was the residue of a reality that I had previously remembered so fondly. And to cement my anxiety—the haunting image of a ventriloquist dummy. Nothing in the world frightens me more than that, except perhaps the kind of person who is willing to use one.

But Greb is here to save me. To save himself. A patricide to annihilate the sins of the past and to be reborn into something new. Something better. But vengeance is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to suffer. And so Greb must suffer. And we suffer with him in this fever dream, on the other side of that partition where our base animalism is goaded into action. A Father, his mistress, and a ventriloquist dummy wrapped in a carpet; a rotten holy trinity who appear and reappear in sequences unknown to normal time. Walking around this crooked house, like the one I used to stumble through with my family on Adventure Island; the distorted reflections of my parent's bodies and faces in the array of warped mirrors becoming what is now my undeniable truth. It's just like Faulkner said: Memory believes before knowing remembers. And for Greb, whose surrogacy for this new life has been incubated in a timeline stretching back to his conception, is ready to slip into the old man's shoes as seamlessly as if he'd been wearing them all along. Not so much a rebirth as an inescapable destiny.

buying_time_'s review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

There's a reason why a lot of reviews of this novel start with quoting its opening line: "A man named Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father." After all, it's a pretty snappy noir-tinged opening line. But, dear reader, there is much more to the sentence than it being a simple opening statement. Quin's use of summing the entire plot up in twenty words is pretty clever, by any writer's standards. However, it may be the last line in the novel that means what it says, or what you think it means as a reader...

A young hair tonic salesman, Ali Berg/Greb, rents a room next to his estranged father, Nathy Berg, and his lover, Judith Goldstein, with the express intention of killing him at the first opportune moment. However, Berg Snr., it would seem, is not as easy to 'off' as Jnr anticipates. And what follows, is a reality-bending story of a who-is-what and who-is-who murder plot. Quin's use of language, time, place, space and free-indirect discourse all meld together to discuss what you can only assume was on Quin's mind when she wrote it, whatever that actually may have been (British avant-gardists, such as B. S. Johnson, who she was friends with, did like to write biographical novels in the form of fiction, rather than out-and-out autobiographies). Also, the connection with Quin and the seaside is significant in both her life (she was from Brighton, and drowned in the sea there) and in the novel, with the final acts involving the sea itself. I know next to nothing about Quin, but I'd guess that there's a lot of the writer in the writing.

However, there's a reason why I am telling you this, and not telling you what the story is...well, it depends on what I understood of it. Quin's wonderful use of language and style is about murder, death, and escaping where you are but never being able to leave. Then there's the Oedipal aspect -- is Judith really his father's lover or something other, perhaps? It's all very darkly comedic, beautifully written and deeply melancholic at the same time.

Berg is a twisted, darkly witty story of a man who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.

chillcox15's review against another edition

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4.0

A man named Berg who rolls into town to kill his dad, changing his name to Greb to disguise himself, is some top-tier Tim & Eric material if it wasn't a pretty great experimental British novel.

kiramke's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Huh.

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