A'ida writes to Xavier, a political prisoner, sometimes sending the letters, and sometimes not because they reveal too much about her political activities. We see only her side of the correspondence, punctuated occasionally by notes Xavier has written in the margins: quotes, aphorisms, statistics underlining his activism, remarks about prison life. The one-way epistolary format creates a series of short stories about what it is to live in poverty and oppression: outside the prison, women form a human shield to protect hiding dissidents; inside, inmates seek dumbly for meaning in the death of a kitten. A'ida's letters are also poetic declarations of love. What could easily have become a political tract is thereby personalised, albeit at a cost: too much poetry can give a distant, mythic quality to things that should be immediate. It is probably for this reason that From A to X is more challenging artistically than it is politically. Berger manages to hold these divergent aspects delicately together by evoking a domesticity that contrasts terribly with what most of us would recognise as everyday life.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpZ3JnkaW%2FcH6UaJ2rp51irm7AzmavZqqVq7amw4yjpqGmXZeys7PEqw%3D%3D