King: A Street Story (Vintage International) Book

King lives with Vico and Vica on a rubbish dump off some European motorway. Subsistence is by scavenging and petty theft, with occasional fruitless recourses to vending chestnuts outside the local Pizza Hut. Perhaps the eponymous narrator of John Berger's street story is a dog, perhaps all the inhabitants of Saint Valery are. When home is a four-by-three metre hovel erected on a toxic garbage dump, can anyone be human--even a descendent of the great Humanist Giambattista Vico? Berger, who became famous in the early '70s for sharing the sugar spoils of Booker-McConnell with Caribbean resistance groups after winning the Booker Prize for G, has advanced the claims of the dispossessed in writings on migrant workers, peasants and people with AIDS. His dog's-eye view of these desperate lives is strange and tender, transforming waste into keepsakes, as the poor must do. Poisoned with the poetry of polymers (polyurethane, polycarbamide, polytetrafluoroethylene) and the smell of high octane, Saint Valery is the last resort for its inhabitants and a greenfield site for the speculators. When we're told that Vico believed "humanitas" to be derived from "humare", to bury, we know the ending. A dog's life indeed.--Mandy MerckRead More