One of John Berger’s final books, Confabulations is a small, loose constellation of essays, drawings, memories and fragments about language.

Berger explores how words inhabit bodies, how stories carry experience, and how thought moves between what can and cannot quite be articulated. Berger writes about song, translation, political resistance, falling, memory, Camus, Rosa Luxemburg and the knowledge that can be contained in ordinary speech. Overall it forms a sequence of encounters, each worrying at the relation between experience and its expression. 

The title is apt: to confabulate is both to converse and to unconsciously make a story from incomplete material. Especially lovely are the pieces on song, where voice becomes a way of carrying absent bodies into the present, and the closing reflections on resisting collective forgetfulness.

The book includes Berger’s own drawings and pieces including ‘Self-Portrait’, ‘Some Notes about the Art of Falling’, ‘La Lalala Lalala La’, ‘Some Notes about Song’ and ‘How to Resist a State of Forgetfulness’. 

Penguin Books, London, 2016. First edition. Paperback. Illustrated throughout with drawings by John Berger. Light shelf wear and faint handling marks to white covers; minor edge and corner wear. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.