FICTION

TO THE WEDDING: A Novel by John Berger (Pantheon Books: $22; 207 pp.). Ninon, a young French clerk working in a coastal resort town, has contracted the HIV virus from a brief, enjoyable encounter with a prison-escapee cook. She isn’t afraid of her apparently inevitable death, though, far from it: She’s shocked and angry because she believes, “The gift of giving myself has been taken away.” Ninon’s story, told primarily through a blind Greek vendor of religious items, is the thread holding John Berger’s slim new novel together, but it has an ensemble cast, led by Ninon’s unmarried parents, Zdena and Jean. They are traveling from France and Slovakia, respectively, to attend Ninon’s nuptials in Italy--a ceremony her boyfriend, Gino, has insisted on, adamantly refusing to change his views toward Ninon despite her diagnosis, proclaiming they will live together “with craziness and cunning and care.” Berger’s narration is episodic, the story takes place all over Europe in many different times, and although these constant shifts in perspective can be confusing, the tone of the novel--simultaneously celebratory and elegiac--provides steadying ballast. “To the Wedding” can be read as a political novel, not because of its subject matter, and despite Berger’s inescapably poetic, lyrical prose; it’s political in being strongly anti-political, for the bravery displayed by Gino and Ninon in the face of AIDS forces those around them to transcend national, cultural and personal differences, to become more fully human. Berger--whose royalties from the novel, an end-note advises, will go to an AIDS support organization--closes the novel with dancing and descriptions of Ninon’s soon-to-be-ravaged body, as if to admit, with Wallace Stevens, that death may indeed be the mother of beauty.