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The Cleave Trilogy #1

Eclipse

john banville damià alou

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Alexander Cleave ha vivido siempre con la sensación de ser mirado y tal vez por eso decidió ser actor. Ha tenido éxito, y las miradas se han convertido en admiración; él mismo se describe, y no se equivoca, como el Hamlet perfecto: pelo rubio y lacio, helados ojos azules y una bien dibujada mandíbula, delicada, pero también refinadamente brutal y, a los cincuenta años, aún es razonablemente guapo. Hasta que un día se queda mudo en el escenario, huye y se retira a la casa de su infancia; su mujer lo acompañará los primeros días, pero luego se quedará solo. No es una separación, pero hay muchas cosas que no funcionan en su vida y Alexander cree que esta vuelta a los inicios acaso le permita comprender. La casa ha estado largo tiempo deshabitada y Alexander comienza a percibir presencias extrañas, fantasmas tenues, pero también las huellas de seres mucho más terrenales. Porque Quirque, el cuidador de la casa, y Lily, su hija adolescente, viven allí clandestinamente. Y también una joven mujer con un niño, entrevista apenas, y que quizá no sea un fantasma del pasado, sino del porvenir.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1,2000
Series
The Cleave Trilogy

This edition

Format
224 pages, Hardcover
Published
April 1, 2002 by Editorial Anagrama
ISBN
9788433969682
ASIN
8433969684
Language
Spanish; Castilian
Characters More characters

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About the author

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john banville

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William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W.B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.
Banville has won the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer.
Banville was born and grew up in Wexford town in south-east Ireland. He published his first novel, Nightspawn, in 1971. A second, Birchwood, followed two years later. "The Revolutions Trilogy", published between 1976 and 1982, comprises three works, each named in reference to a renowned scientist: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. His next work, Mefisto, had a mathematical theme. His 1989 novel The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of that year's Guinness Peat Aviation award, heralded a second trilogy, three works which deal in common with the work of art. "The Frames Trilogy" is completed by Ghosts and Athena, both published during the 1990s. Banville's thirteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In addition, he publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black — most of these feature the character of Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.
Banville is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives in Dublin.

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Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 100 votes)
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Profile Image for Kimberly .
swamped
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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John Banville escribe muy bien,eso es innegable,pero a mi el libro se me hizo eterno e interminable,y eso que sólo son 224 páginas....Supongo que no me pillo en el momento adecuado,pero para los que esperen mucho argumento desde luego éste no es el libro.Es más una introspección de un personaje a lo largo de todo un libro.
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adrienjc
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Fairly ornate writing, but to what end? There wasn't one character, or a single mood, emotion, or sentence that gripped me. Or even made me pleased to be reading. Just one of an endless stream of examples of why most contemporary literary fiction is not for me.
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turbo2x
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Now that I’ve read a few of John Banville’s books, I can see a few recurring motifs at play, and on that basis, ‘Eclipse’ is probably the archetypal Banville novel. This is the tale of a self-centred, washed-up old actor who’d been unable to fully give of himself to anyone, who decides to cut himself off from the world by returning to his childhood home in order to ‘find himself’. His preoccupation with himself, and the ways in which his previous experiences may have informed his self-consciously uncommitted approach to life and work, leads him to believe that the apparent presence of ‘ghosts’ in the house is in some way connected to his past.

The reader knows full well that things are never that simple. Neither these ‘ghosts’ nor the constant stream of interruptions Cleave endures with such bad grace are quite what they seem. This is no surprise and nor is it meant to be – if Cleave’s naval-gazing makes him a difficult narrator to warm to, that’s exactly Banville’s intention, so without the barriers of sentimentality, we know that a lot of his assumptions are fundamentally wrong. And also that, in his bizarre, painfully platonic bond with his caretaker’s daughter, he’s unconsciously making up for his failures with his own daughter.

None of this is accidental, of course – we’re in the hands of an exceptionally skilful writer whose poetic yet economical prose style means the reader is swept along even if the character telling a very introspective, personal story isn’t particularly likeable.

It’s also an eye-opening warning about trying to retreat from one’s responsibilities – the past, the present and the future all have a nasty habit of catching up with us, and we do ourselves no favours by thinking we can solve all our problems by hiding from them. It’s a salutary lesson for Cleave, and one we could all do with bearing in mind.

Humorous, lyrical and thought-provoking.
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MorgansGFX
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Such great reviews and was recommended but ... groan - I couldn't handle the slow, drawn out story. The story's description sounded really interesting and although it's only 213 pages I struggled through to page 160, wondering, why am I reading this? I don't care how it ends, the main character is annoying and pretentious. This author loves to go off on such detailed tangents that can last pages.
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Kynov
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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La prosa de Banville me parece una maravilla. No es un libro para quienes quieren que sucedan cosas todo el tiempo. Este libro es como esos regalos donde hay cajas dentro de otras cajas, hasta el infinito. Toda palabra, todo acontecimiento, todo sentimiento, tiene una envoltura y Banville las va desenvolviendo con la naturalidad que se desenvuelven las flores en primavera. No encuentro registro forzado ni rebuscado en su caminar prosaico. Cada palabra refuerza la anterior y la la vez la destruye. Como las agujas del reloj. Prosa poetica y trama introspectiva son la clave de este libro.
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MsIndependent
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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3.5 stars. A beautifully written, character based, sad novel about Alexander Cleave, a fifty year old actor, who one night on stage, freezes. He stops working and goes to live in his childhood home that has not been lived in for years. Whilst in his childhood home he meets the house’s caretaker, Quirk, and a fifteen year old girl, Lily. Alexander reflects on his past. He is married to Lydia and they have a teenage daughter, Cass. Lydia comes to stay with him.

There are lots of very well written, interesting sentences:
‘Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.’
‘Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averting itself from my unwelcome return.’

This book was first published in 2000.
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Jakeman
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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The caption here on GR asks "What did you think?"......man oh man, I think John Banville is a worthy successor to Vladimir Nabokov, that's what I think! I had not read anything of Banville's for a couple of years, aside from the new Benjamin Black mysteries. And, while the prose in those is as gorgeous as in his "usual" books, it still ain't the same. :)

Eclipse is the story of a man falling apart at the seams, told by himself. Unreliable narrator, maybe. After all, the best we can do is to tell the truth, as we see it. Both funny and tragic the story is told beautifully and hauntingly.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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WeebyRaeven
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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John Banville is a marvelous raconteur and he mesmerized me with his language right from the first sentence.
A spasm of sweetish sadness made my mind droop; I thought perhaps Lydia was right, perhaps I am a sentimentalist. I brooded on words. Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.

And nonetheless Eclipse is very nostalgic… It is an elegy of the irreversibility of the past… The memory full of bygone shadows and bitterness of disappointments… The fear of the future…
What can I do now but stand on this crumbling promontory and watch the past as it dwindles? When I look ahead, I see nothing except empty morning, and no day, only dusk thickening into night, and, far off, something that is not to be made out, something vague, patient, biding. Is that the future, trying to speak to me here, among these shadows of the past? I do not want to hear what it might have to say.

But the future arrives anyway, even if uninvited…
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