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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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…

“There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone–at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this–a part that does not care for anything other than itself. I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my centre, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching.”

So I finally read John Banville’s The Sea, after reading all of Banville’s pseudonym John Black’s books, mysteries. So I decided to try the first of this trilogy principally about Alexander Cleaves and his daughter Cass.

Cleaves is over fifty, an actor, who has a moment of stage paralysis, stops speaking on stage, and decides to quit and go to a childhood home, leaving his wife and daughter. He’s done. Or, call it an existential crisis. What we have here is a first person series of reflections, a dramatic monologue, or soliloquy, perfect for a life-long actor. And what does he reflect on?: ". . . the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be.”

“I was an unknown, unknown even to myself.”

Banville is concerned in this novel with “the elusive and unstable nature of identity.” The epistemological theme is a time-honored one--what is the difference between performing and being? Judith Butler revived notions of performance in her work on Gender Identity, but Shakespeare also wrote about it: “All the world’s a stage. . .”

Not much happens in the book, really, in terms of actual events, but it’s not about plot, mainly. It’s about character, consciousness, identity. At his childhood home Alex finds “security” guy Quirke (who has his own series later), and a teen, Lily, doing housework. The woman Alex leaves behind is his wife, Lydia, and the daughter he was always close to, Cass. Oh, and there are ghosts, so there’s maybe a touch of Irish gothic/supernatural here, too. The ghosts are from the past, and maybe also from the future.

“I was looking the wrong way. I was looking into the past, and that was not where those phantoms were from.”

But yeah, ghosts. Alex believes his visions to be ghosts, "sightings, brief, diaphanous, gleamingly translucent, like a series of photographs blown up to life-size and for a moment made wanly animate."

I said plot isn’t central, but an event happens near the end that the spirits may anticipate, and this event changes everything, maybe even revives him from “the dead,” raises him up from his own ghosted state. Maybe the most important aspect of the book is language, from the actor who travels in words. Banville is an amazingly good writer, who brings new insights to the ways the tragic can (ironically?) transform one.

*John Lahr, “Petrified,” about stage fright:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

If the idea of stage fright as an actor pertaining to identity crisis interests you, check out also the classic film Persona (1966) by Ingmar Bergman.

*So I am reading ghost stories this summer in preparation for a fall ghost course I’m teaching (oh, for academic purposes call it hauntology or limnology).

*Some of this is personal for me as I have a son who seems to be (oh, and I believe him!) prescient of images of the future, and who also sees ghosts presumably from the past. Skeptical? Well, most people, push come to shove, admit there are psychic members of their families. It’s a lifelong quest for me to confirm this, though I personally have little connection to this world. You can’t hypnotize me--I’ve tried-- and aside from the sense that my father’s spirit may have been near me at key times, I am crushingly disappointed to announce I have no psychic capacities. I don’t even recall my dreams, usually!

*The other personal aspect of my ghost project is connected to another son who is interested in liminal photography, taking hundreds of photographs, and sometimes with me. Just a personal note there mainly for myself.

Alexander Cleave our unreliable narrator is an actor who after being struck down by a nervous breakdown returns to the old family home to face the ghosts of his past. He discovers that the house is not as abandoned as he assumed it would be.

Relations have strained between himself and his wife Lydia and his daughter Cass. He is trying to rediscover something of his youth and by delving into his past he hopes to discover something about who he is now. We sink into the mire of his psychological confusion as Cleave struggles to describe his psychological state. Of course when we are depressed we forget things, our mind fogs. The pitch is ever changing. The caretaker Quirke and his daughter provide Cleave with a kind of surrogate family. He of course has repeated his own parents mistakes mirroring their parenting. His relationship with Lily seems to be a way of making amends for this. There is an event at the end of the book that knocks him out of his reverie but he seems to be still hopelessly inward turning. Like 'Brichwood' a circus comes to town and sets up close to the great old house and causes an event to take place.

Banville throws up some wonderful similes and metaphors,
"I see what was my life adrift behind me going smaller and smaller with distance like a city on an ice flow caught in a current it's twinkling lights it's palaces and spires and slums all miraculously intact all hopelessly beyond reach. Was it I who took an axe to the ice? What can I do now but stand on this crumbling promontory and watch the past as it dwindles".

This is a novel for Banville fans, I think anyone else will require a large dose of patience. As always his novels are technically accomplished pieces of writing but there is little momentum. The reader must abandon all expectations of plot. This is a psychological novel, there is barely any change of location. I felt detached from the narrator just as he was detached from himself. I'm not sure if Alexander comes to any true revelations in the end.

Selle raamatu lugemismuljetel oli vaja lasta veidi settida, alles siis hakkasid erinevad kihid ja allhoovused pinnale tulema. Lugemisega kuskil 2/3 peal olles tundus, et see on seni Moodsa aja sarja raamatutest minu jaoks kõige kahvatum. Mällusööbiv lõpplahendus päästis päeva ja teosele tagasi mõeldes tajun, et tegelikult oli see täitsa nauditav lugemiselamus.

Peategelane Alex on näitleja, kes ühel päeval lihtsalt lavalt minema jalutab ja lapsepõlvekodusse tagasi kolib, et seal vaikselt elu üle mõtiskleda. Elu - see on ka naine Lydia ja haigushoogude käes vaevlev tütar Cass, kuid samuti ka seni maja korras hoidnud kummaline Quirke ja tema tütar Lydia. Eelkõige aga Alexi enda mõtisklused, mälestused, hirmud, viirastused.

Raamat on osa triloogiast, mille järjed on "Surilina" ja "Vana valgus". Hetkel neid lugema ei kisu, kuid mine tulevikus tea.

I read John Banville's Cleave/Vander trilogy backward, starting with Ancient Light, then reading Shroud, and ending with Eclipse. This first book, which introduced Alex Cleave, his wife Lydia, and his daughter Cass, is the least satisfying of the three, but John Banville continues to be my new obsession nonetheless. Those who love his work often comment about the beauty of his prose; I completely agree. Eclipse brings 50-year-old Alex Cleave, a stage actor who believes his career is finished, back to his boyhood home. This book is much more descriptive than the other two, even Ancient Light, which primarily takes place in the same location when Alex was 15-years-old. Despite the thread of common themes, it is hard to believe that Banville was planning the other two novels when he wrote this one. Alex does not appear in Shroud, which is Axel Vander and Cass Cleave's book, and the Alex -- boy and man -- in Ancient Light is almost unrecognizable in Eclipse.

So what do these books have in common? Themes: the unreliability of memory ("But am I rightly remembering that night? Am I remembering anything rightly? I may be embellishing, inventing, I may be making everything up" (page 55); the difficulty of parenting an ill child -- especially one with a mental illness; the grief of losing her; Alex's similarities with Cass, his struggle to separate the real from the imaginary; our various personae and the masks we all wear.

This book stands out in its portrayal of mood and atmosphere: "There is an archaic quality to certain summer days, the ones that come at the close of July especially, when the season has reached its peak and is already imperceptibly in decline, and the sunlight thickens, and the sky is larger and higher and of a deeper blue than before...In that dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge" (page 135). Is that not a sentiment familiar to all of us? The house where Alex grew up is a character: "Air stands unmoving here, unchanged for centuries, it seems; vague draughts swim through like slow fish. There is a stale, brownish smell that haunted me as a child..." (page 140).

I've marked many such passages, with notes about connections with the later books. I tell people that it's not necessary to read Eclipse before Shroud and Ancient Light, but I'm glad I have now read all three. I hope that Banville gives us another volume about Alex. I still want to know more.