{"id":74342,"date":"2014-07-22T20:00:26","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T00:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74342"},"modified":"2014-07-23T09:48:28","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T13:48:28","slug":"thomas-berger-1924-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/22\/thomas-berger-1924-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Berger, 1924\u20132014"},"content":{"rendered":"<script>\/* <![CDATA[ *\/ portfolio_slideshow.slideshows[968] = {\"timeout\":\"4000\",\"autoplay\":\"false\",\"trans\":\"fade\",\"loop\":\"true\",\"speed\":\"400\",\"nowrap\":\"true\"}; \/* ]]> *\/<\/script><div id=\"slideshow-wrapper968\" class=\"slideshow-wrapper clearfix portfolio-slideshow-centered\">\n<div id=\"slideshow-nav968\" class=\"slideshow-nav\">\n\t<a class=\"pause\" style=\"display:none\" href=\"javascript:void(0);\">Pause<\/a>\n\t<a class=\"play\" href=\"javascript:void(0);\">Play<\/a>\n\t<a class=\"restart\" style=\"display:none\" 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class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slideshow-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slideshow-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slideshow-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slideshow-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slideshow-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slideshow-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<p class=\"slideshow-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t<div class=\"slideshow-description\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n<\/div><\/div><!--#slideshow-wrapper-->\n<p>The <em>Times <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/07\/22\/books\/thomas-berger-little-big-man-author-is-dead-at-89.html\" target=\"_blank\">has reported<\/a> that Thomas Berger died a little more than a week ago, on July 13, just shy of his ninetieth birthday. Berger wrote twenty-three novels, the best-known of which is 1964\u2019s <em>Little Big Man<\/em>, a western picaresque that was later adapted into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QPTjmpOusm4\" target=\"_blank\">a movie starring Dustin Hoffman<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Times<\/em> obit finds a through-line in his work: \u201cthe anarchic paranoia that he found underlying American middle-class life.\u201d \u201cIt was Kafka who taught me that at any moment banality might turn sinister, for existence was not meant to be unfailingly genial,\u201d Berger said in a rare interview. He enjoyed a cult readership throughout his prolific career, and his books bear blurbs from the likes of John Hollander and Henry Miller; in 1980, <em>The New York Times Book Review <\/em>proclaimed, \u201cOur failure to read and discuss him is a national disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Today, his most outspoken advocate is probably Jonathan Lethem, who discusses an early (and d\u00e9mod\u00e9) fondness for Berger in his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews\/228\/the-art-of-fiction-no-177-jonathan-lethem\">Art of Fiction interview<\/a>: \u201cWhen I got to Bennington, and I found that Richard Brautigan and Thomas Berger and Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme were not \u2018the contemporary,\u2019 but were in fact awkward and embarrassing and had been overthrown by something else, I was as disconcerted as a time traveler.\u201d And Lethem effused <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/04\/08\/books\/review\/fan-mail.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">in an essay for the <em>Times<\/em><\/a> a few years back,<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Berger\u2019s books are accessible and funny and immerse you in the permanent strangeness of his language and attitude, perhaps best encapsulated by Berger\u2019s own self-definition as a \u201cvoyeur of copulating words.\u201d He offers a book for every predilection: if you like westerns, there\u2019s his classic, \u201cLittle Big Man\u201d; so too has he written fables of suburban life (\u201cNeighbors\u201d), crime stories (\u201cMeeting Evil\u201d), fantasies, small-town \u201cback-fence\u201d stories of Middle American life, and philosophical allegories (\u201cKilling Time\u201d). All of them are fitted with the Berger slant, in which the familiar becomes menacingly absurd or perhaps the absurd becomes menacingly familiar.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Berger, who spent most of his life diligently removed from public life, seemed to submerge himself in a goulash of genre fiction, emerging every few years with something new and piquant. The variety of his books is borne out by their incredible first-edition jacket art, some of which I\u2019ve gathered above\u2014vibrant pastiches of everything from noir to Arthurian legend, many of them with a unabashed lowbrow strangeness that\u2019s anathema to jacket designers today. As the author himself put it: \u201cI am peddling no quackery, masking no intent to tyrannize, and asking nobody\u2019s pity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Times has reported that Thomas Berger died a little more than a week ago, on July 13, just shy of his ninetieth birthday. Berger wrote twenty-three novels, the best-known of which is 1964\u2019s Little Big Man, a western picaresque that was later adapted into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman. The Times obit finds a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[11494,1351,14694,12777,11989,14695,14696,14693],"class_list":["post-74342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-cover-design","tag-jonathan-lethem","tag-little-big-man","tag-neighbors","tag-obituaries","tag-postmodernism","tag-teddy-villanova","tag-thomas-berger"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Thomas Berger, 1924\u20132014<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring remembers the \u201cLittle Big Man\u201d author.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/22\/thomas-berger-1924-2014\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thomas Berger, 1924\u20132014 by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 22, 2014 \u2013 The Times has reported that Thomas Berger died a little more than a week ago, on July 13, just shy of his ninetieth birthday. 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