Tenho que ser sincero. Comprei esse livro numa promoção. Dito isso, a sinopse parecia interessante - descobri que muitas pessoas associam esse livro a Crime e Castigo -, o autor estrelado e tal. Mas o que acabei me deparando é quase um exercício de estilo literário, com o autor mais preocupado em desfilar seu vocabulário sofisticado em meio a divagações sobre suas motivações para um assassinato. Daí lembrei que já tinha lido um livro desse autor do qual tinha me esquecido completamente, então posso concluir que realmente - no meu ponto de vista - é um autor mais preocupado com a forma do que uma boa estória.

Exquisite writing as always from Banville. The story of a murderer who only murdered because he could. This is a character study of a "n'er do well" who bungles through life depending on the grace and help of others, until he has nothing left.

Había leído a varios especialistas comparar la escritura de John Banville con la de Nabokov. Tras leer esta magnífica novela, entendí perfectamente a qué se referían: el estilo de Banville es preciso, rico en metáforas y símiles ingeniosos, jalonado de una cierta intertextualidad y juguetón con la ironía como arma para desvelar las contradicciones humanas. Puede decirse que, si no está a la altura, al menos no se queda corto respecto a su homólogo ruso.

Sin embargo, la obviedad de comparar "El libro de las pruebas" con "Lolita" solo obedece a que hay un crimen y la relación que guarda el narrador con el mismo (no estoy haciendo "spoiler", esto se sabe desde las primeras páginas). Es más, simplificando mucho diría que "El libro de las pruebas" sería como si Nabokov hubiese escrito "El extranjero" de Camus. Freddie Montgomery tiene una mayor semejanza metafísica con Meursault que con Humbert Humbert. Ambos vienen marcados por una profunda conciencia de la indiferencia, que es el gran tema de esta novela. Exudan indiferencia por sus víctimas, sufren la indiferencia de una sociedad ante la cual son invisibles, su crimen es más irrelevante que el juicio moral que se pueda realizar sobre su imagen pública... Y la del universo es la mayor de todas, pues sigue saliendo el sol y es posible la belleza sensorial a pesar de haber arrebatado una vida.

Una auténtica joya de novela, aunque no apta para almas sensibles y virginales. De hecho, he llegado a odiar a Freddie en innumerables momentos de la lectura, pero no me ha dejado de parecer interesante.

The story of a self-absorbed and dissolute man, through his pompous murder confession (or one of many versions of it), whose ever-drifting life led him to steal a minor Dutch master portrait of a brooding woman and to unnecessarily kill the maid who caught him in the act. Oh dear, this was a bit of a drag for only 220 pages. I just couldn't get into this story, despite the fact that it seemed well written. Perhaps it was because Freddie Montgomery was somewhat implausible as a character through his unconvincing and absurd confession; Meursault, in Camus' Stranger, was absurd in his actions, but yet made more sense than this prevaricating low-life. The main benefit I got from reading this book is that it gave me many excuses to take breaks and switch to a more enjoyable and longer read (Count of Monte Cristo). I hope the other Banvilles on the list are better...

I was expecting to like this so much more than I actually did. There was a point half-way through when the beautiful writing suddenly went stale on me and turned into strings of fancy words without substance. Cold and superficial like its protagonist/narrator. Maybe that was the point. The whole Nietzschean idea of the depth of the surface thing, which I think comes from the Gay Science, a book Banville cited somewhere as one of his top 10 favorites. But then the so called epiphany at the end seemed contrived and injudiciously tacked on, like an empty paint can on a dog's tail. The book also felt much longer than its meagre 219 pages. Of course it's true that much of one's enjoyment of things, from a sunset to the experience of reading a book, depends on one's mood. Maybe my stars weren't aligned correctly for me to be enjoying this sort of thing right now? I'm certainly not going to give up on Banville at this point as I really liked "The Sea" and am willing to give him another try. But I don't think I'll be rereading this one anytime soon.

“This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.”

Freddie Montgomery, the first-person narrator confesses to murder and presents his confession as he sits in jail awaiting trial the readers therefore are the judge and jury. Freddie has spent years drifting. When he seriously gets into debt he leaves his wife and son as hostages and returns home to raise some cash to affect their release. However, it is not a happy homecoming and he shortly afterwards whilst attempting a clumsy art theft he kills a maid during the getaway.

All that said Freddie does not really come across as a particularly depraved man. In fact the reader will empathise with him. He is his own man who loves gin and seedy dives but hates dogs and moustaches. The crime was not inspired by any discernible motive. Rather Freddie is a sort of accidental killer suggesting that anyone can become a monster. Portraying Freddie like this I believe suggests Banville is trying to influence the readers' conventional thinking about crime, criminals and their motives. The murder was in no way planned rather it was the result of an unleashing of some sort of a primitive urge. ''I killed her because I could.''

At times I found myself smiling at Freddie at others I wanted to shout at him, yet despite all this and enjoying the author's writing style I cannot in truth say that I found this an overly captivating read, thought provoking maybe thrilling not really. It was OK but little more than that.

Why do Irish writers always seem to so predisposed to tell the story of the cad?

Percy Montgomery is the cad on this occasion, who tells his tale of selfishness and greed to the imaginary jury which he will soon face for real after committing a brutal, senseless murder.

He tries to explain his motives. Not an easy task for a man who abandoned his wife to gangsters and treated both family and friends with equal fecklessness at every turn.

The writer who came most to mind as I laughed and winced through this wonderful riot of a novel was Vladimir Nabokov, the master of the petty, pompous, delusional narrator.

Like Nabokov's preposterous protagonists, Banville's bozo is also blessed with a juicy vocabulary, capable of describing his basest thoughts and actions with such esoteric words and phrases as "accidie" and "araraxic bliss" (just to quote a couple of the "a's").

I always like a book where the writer walks the tightrope of presenting an unsavory character completely bereft of sympathy and redemption, with only humour to make it work. Call it the "Basil Fawlty Factor" if you will.

Banville pulls it off with aplomb, so much so that I just bought the (narratively unlikely) sequel called Ghosts, which I look forward to reading before too long.

Banville's novel has many echoes of Camus' L'etranger. Except that Freddie Montgomery is more articulate and clearly more self-serving than Mersault. And Banville is a master prose stylist rather than an existential philosopher.

A chilling account of a brutal murder in a book length confession by an unremorseful killer. Banville puts the reader in the shoes of the murderer Freddie Montgomery. His writing is so masterful that you can almost identify with Freddie and sense his emotions. A very uncomfortable place to be.

Banville describes things as no one else does yet they are immediately familiar and perfect. I copied out whole sentences, wrote down words to look up. This is the description of the waste of a mind and it spirals downward accordingly. How can someone make clouds seem new? He does.

This book introduced me to John Banville, one of my favorite writers, even though it is not my favorite of his novels. The story is told by 38-year-old scientist Freddie Montgomery, who kills a servant girl while trying to take a painting from a neighbor. Freddie is an aimless drifter, and though he is a perceptive observer of himself and his surroundings, he is largely amoral. In addition to recounting his life story, he is an untrustworthy narrator who describes how he was arrested for the murder of a servant girl in one of Ireland's "big houses." After running afoul of a gangster in the Mediterranean, Freddie, a sophisticated but slouched Anglo-Irish scientist who has lived overseas for many years, returns to his ancestral home in search of money. Shocked to discover that his mother has sold the family's collection of paintings, Freddie attempts to recover them. This leads to a tragic series of events culminating in Freddie's killing of a maid while stealing a painting. On the run, he hides out in the house of an old family friend, Charlie, a man of some influence, before being arrested and interrogated.

Because Banville, like Ford Madox Ford, has cleverly constructed a novel about sex, betrayal, and self-deception—a novel whose narrator's testimony is notoriously unreliable and laced with internal contradictions—it made me think of one of the best books I have read and reread, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Mr. Banville's book also recalls other, mostly French, novels, among them Andre Gide's The Immoralist (which, like Mr. Banville's book, depicts the consequences of sexual repression) and Albert Camus's The Stranger (which concerns a senseless murder).

Did not finish reading …. The Book of Evidence / John Banville … 31 August 2016
ISBN: 9781447275367

I picked up the “25th anniversary edition” at the library. It comes with an introduction by Colm Toibin and “Supplementary Material complied and edited by Raymond Bell”.
So, whatever makes this book deserving of such treatment on its 25th anniversary passed me by.

I didn't get very far before flicking through (something I almost never do) to see what was ahead. It was more of the same smug, self-satisfied, first person narration. I don't need it, life's too short.