I'm going to paraphrase Jack Kerouac, who once said that there are writers of talent and those of genius, born to write a certain work that no one else could. Although Banville is often compared to Nabokov, I believe he belongs to the latter group, geniuses or perhaps rather artists who do not care excessively about the norms and expectations of the audience but stick to their path.
"Eclipse" is a pure example of genius at work, starting with the very structure that seems nonexistent at first because Banville's hero of this novel, Alexander Cleave leads readers with his lyrical and often monotonous narrative through the past and present, jumps from the subject to the subject without some visible order, but it is only towards the end that the grandiosity of "Eclipse" is understood.
Cleave is a fallen actor, figuratively and literally. One of those who is too in love with themselves, their egotism does not allow them to think about other people. After falling on stage in the middle of the show, Cleave returns to his parent's home, an old abandoned house he hasn't visited in a long time. There, in this place full of memories, he begins his questioning and conflict with the ghosts that torture him because there is a stage he is not even aware of. By running away from people, his roles as husband and father, in which he is worse than in the roles of fictional dramatic characters, he finds a new audience. Alive and dead.
The grandeur of Banville's writing gift makes us want to dissect every sentence and study them to understand how he arranges them, what sorcery he’s using. Some will say that pretentiousness is the main ingredient because it doesn't say anything with its dense, poetic sentences, but wastes time on something that could be put in fifty pages. They're somewhat right because Banville doesn't have a plot, his pace is slow and carefully read, but he's got a lot to say.
Despite its flaws, "Eclipse" is a solid novel worth reading because if you look closely, Banville's genius of assembling characters, their works, and lives is clear, as well as him guiding the thread throughout the story, carefully revealing the details of it along the way.

I laughed when I read one review that called this book a word pile collapsing into a jumble. Banville is one of those writers whose words are gorgeous (Life is everywhere, even in the stones, slow, secret, long enduring), but there's a niggling joker on your shoulder groaning and snorting over the meandering, apparently directionless journey those words take you on. Oh, god, the Irish, it says, what masters of misery! all pallid, jiggling flesh and backed up drains.

That, of course, is part of Banville's, shall I say, charm? He renders a state of mind that is, finally, mesmerizing. You sink with his characters into the texture of their vivid gloom. Everything is highlighted, every odd memory inserted into a queer semblance of a plot.

I read this after Ancient Light (which has more get up and go than Eclipse) and am beginning to think Banville is writing about writing - poor old Alex Cleave locked up there in his room sorting through a jumble sale of memory and plucking out the most salient. Cobbling them together as best he can, trying to make sense of them. It's not a job for the weak.

..ο Αλεξαντερ Κλιβ, φτασμένος ηθοποιός του θεάτρου, αποφασίζει να εγκαταλείψει επ' αόριστον την σκηνή κ την οικογένεια του κ να καταφύγει στο πατρικό του σπίτι κ να υποδυθεί έναν άλλον κ πιο απαιτητικό ρόλο, την ανάγνωση της θρυμματισμένης του ταυτότητας ..το επώδυνο και γλυκερό ανασκαλεμα του παρελθόντος, η επακόλουθη υπαρξιακή αναζήτηση, η μοιραία καταβύθιση στην Αβυσσο της ψυχής, η καταγραφή ονείρων και η επισήμανση ανείδωτων μορφών, ο αδόκητος θάνατος, η ψυχική διαχείριση της απώλειας, αποτελούν μερικά από τα θέματα με τα όποια καταπιάνεται ο Τζων Μπανβιλ, έχοντας ως σύμμαχο έναν μαγευτικό ποιητικό λόγο και μια επιδέξια χρήση των λέξεων όπου όλα τα υλικά, άυλα αντικείμενα, τα στοιχειά της Φύσης κ οι υπόλοιποι χαρακτήρες του μυθιστορήματος, δείχνουν να παίζουν τέλεια τον δικό τους ρόλο, σε αυτόν τον 'θίασο' της μιας και πραγματικής ζωής όπ��υ ο μεσήλικας Κλιβ τυγχάνει ο μόνος εύθραυστος

Captivatingly lush and poignant

Eclipse is a captivatingly lush novel. Telling a poignant story, the language and writing is rich and regal. Banville’s mastery of the craft and his lush style makes one savor every passage he invents. It is very fine literary wine.

I gave up about a quarter of the way through. Banville's writing style is so mannered and affected, showing off with obscure words like Buckley... how about some real characters and dialogue instead of hyper-erudite descriptions from a self-absorbed narrator?

Alexander Cleave, outworn actor whose glory days are gone, sets the elegiac tone of his first person narrative as part of the setting of a performance ill-omened from the start. There is little in terms of plot line in this introspective journey into the mind of a tormented character that assimilates the structure of a Shakespearean tragedy. Like a deft snake charmer, Banville reconstructs the inner purgatory of a man in five acts, leaving no space for cathartic redemption or hopeful light at the end of the tunel.

Something has died inside Alex. Fictional life on the stage, which had been truer than reality in the past, doesn’t fill the gaping void inside him any longer. Haunted by memories and dragged down by the rarified relationship with his wife and his mentally unstable daughter Cassandra, the apple of his eye, Alex struggles against a growing sense of disembodiment as he gropes in the darkness of his subconscious, searching for the secret well of grief from which springs of sorrow benum him into a detached stupor. In a desperate attempt to shake off the impending sense of doom that plagues him, the actor retires to the abandoned seaside house of his childhood, which has fallen into disrepair over the years, expecting to reconnect with the missing part of himself.

Once more, it’s in waves of detailed images that Banville stirs the waters of his swelling, unreliable narrative. Grey ash on a carpet, the glowing stub of an unfinished cigarette, a bloodstain, red like passion, on a gauzy dress, white like the pallor of a corpse drowned in a foreign sea, grimacing clowns in a morbid circus, doors ajar in mute stillness and disquieting sensation of being observed, stalked, of life being usurped by ghosts blind to the past but prescient of a stillborn future.

Straddling the classic gothic and the psychological thriller, Banville presents the veritable protagonists of his tale of woe. Loneliness, identity and erratic memory merge the currents of present and past, fiction and fact, prose and poetry in an ongoing contradiction between thematic lines and stylistic deployment. The exquisiteness of Banville’s writing, full of light and suggestive natural imagery that stimulates all the senses, doesn’t match the gloomy background of a scene never static but ceaselessly fluctuating between unbearable beauty and sordidness that attracts and repels the reader at once.
Banville is a sensualist, a linguistic sybarite, a sorcerer of the word, he probes and taunts and smirks with delectable artistry, making the reader fall prey to the ballast of his deeply charged lyrical overture. There is no escape for those who bask in texture, cadence and impeccable sentence structure when submerged into Banville’s works, to sink into the writer’s murky waters means to drown in agonizing rapture.

Amidst the climatic display of flawlessly developed metaphors that go full circle, I can’t help but wonder about the trait that distinguishes Banville from other writers. There is something of the foreigner in his use of English, maybe something to do with his Irish heritage that places him as a Pilgrim in his own language, a native of his own style, an insurgent of standardized limits.

The result of what appears a fragmentary chronicle on the surface is an understated, maybe also predictable, requiem that shakes the reader like an authentic classic.
And Alexander’s last invocation of his lost muse, his Miranda his Perdita, his Marina, achieves the quality of the divine in its cold, remote aloofness like the dead light of stars that brighten the darkest night without giving off any warmth nor any hint of exoneration.
Words are the only artifacts left to hold on to after the curtain falls and the actors have abandoned the stage, and memory becomes the only means to remember their faint echo, their fading scent of sweat, tears and remorse.

“I brooded on words. Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.”

Astonishingly beautiful prose effectively evokes the hollowing out of a man's soul.

Interrupting the Voice in Your Head

Self-improvement isn’t just an industry, it’s an ethos, arguably the most central in modern society. We owe it to ourselves as well as to society to realise our potential, to develop our talents, to discover our true selves. What could be more self-evident? But self-improvement requires, at some point or another, self-diagnosis. And therein lies a problem that is the subject of John Banville’s Eclipse.

Self-improvement is founded on an implicit and verifiable principle: There is no man without his other. The other is there even when one is entirely alone, especially when one is alone. There are always two selves involved, one who acts, thinks, feels and the other who reflects on acting, thinking, feeling. It’s called consciousness and it is an abiding enigma of being human. It also undermines the very principle of its own existence, and with that the prospects for self-improvement. The point of John Banville’s Eclipse is that neither one of the selves, the acting or the reflecting, knows the other very well. Alex, the protagonist is well aware of the problem. “I was an unknown”, he confesses,” unknown even to myself.”

And that situation isn’t helped at all by trying to mould, shape, fix, improve or otherwise transform one or other of the parts of oneself. Alex has spent most of his life as an actor in self-improvement of one type or another - diction, performance, carriage, dance. The result of course is that he has learned how to act, a worthwhile skill in itself but not if one thinks it makes a better person: “The self-made man has no solid ground to stand on,” he has come to realise. He suffers from "...an insupportable excess of self...a malady of selfness." How then to unravel oneself, this most profound of mysteries, if the mystery itself arises and is compounded from trying to manipulate, heal, improve or otherwise modify oneself?

This is where the idea of grace comes from: if either of the two parts of a person is going to change, that change will be initiated from somewhere or someone else - God perhaps, or another human being like a therapist or an unwanted houseguest, or an event as prosaic as children singing. Or, as most notably in Eclipse, an unexplained apparition, sometimes called a ghost.

Whatever it is and wherever it comes from, a ghost interrupts the conversation between self and self. Alex is at first confused about this ephemeral source of help: “So if the purpose of the appearance of this ghost is to dislocate me and keep me thrown off balance, am I indeed projecting it out of my own fancy, or does it come from some outside source? Both, somehow, it seems…” But he eventually understands the new rules of the game; something is real about the ghostly: “…they are not in my head, they are outside.” Ghosts, as Dickens knew, stop the flow of reality so that “The actual has taken on a tense tumbling quality.”

Eclipse for me has echoes of the Oxford Inklings, particularly of the lesser known Charles Williams. Wiliams's novels The Place of the Lion and The Greater Trumps employ similar devices and tropes to Banville to the same end: enlightenment, insight, authentic consciousness. Banville is a much better writer of English prose than Williams ever was. Nowhere in Williams will you find anything like the lovely, lilting, laconic Irishisms such as "The day is damp and fresh as a peeled stick." Nevertheless, the alternative ethos to self-improvement, namely self-abandonment, is something they largely share, and something needed in a world dominated by Trumpian self-will masquerading as morality.

Alexander Cleave is an actor who is plagued by ghosts and an identity crisis, but he is blessed with the ability to represent his own experience and memories to himself (and to you, dear reader) in great and sometimes poetic detail. What he struggles with is staying on topic, staying in the present, and being honest with himself. He is also the sole narrator of this tale, which focuses on his decision to return to the home of his youth (much to the chagrin and perplexity of his wife) to stay for an unspecified time, communing with the resident ghosts and a couple of surprising guests. Banville's prose and penchant for fascinating interior dialogue (monologue?) are on full display here, and that makes the novel a page-turner, even though my sympathy for Cleave as a protagonist was constantly being challenged by my frustration with his self-sabotage and irony. The redemptive moments come late in the novel, one involving his daughter Cass, and the other a kind of pseudo-daughter named Lily, but they are powerful moments indeed.

O livro é muito bem escrito. A história contém nuances de psicologia, crises existenciais e algo de absurdo na normalidade, que me interessam bastante. Uma pena, porém, é o fato de eu estar me cansando desse tipo de protagonistas homens que ficou tão comum na literatura contemporânea: não um herói, nem um anti-herói, apenas um frouxo com crise de meia idade querendo de repente abrir mão das reponsabilidades (a dizer a casa, a esposa, a filha) que na verdade nunca assumiu. De todo modo a escrita de Banville é ótima, e penso que se um autor consegue pôr no leitor algum sentimento de raiva do narrador é porque o desenvolvimento do personagem foi bem-sucedido.

Spurred on by a review of Banville's Shroud by my Greek Goodreads friend, I picked up Eclipse. This is the first of the informal trilogy that includes Ancient Light (the third book) which I read recently and thoroughly enjoyed. I have also read The Sea and to no surprize, I enjoyed Eclipse as well.

Banville is an elegant, poignant and heart-breaking writer. Different than Julian Barnes but in the same league. He captures simple things, a moment, a glance, an ancient light (yes he used this term to decribe the Irish light filling the place), a passing person. His descriptions of the everyday are very powerful. He writes with an artist's eye, and brings them to life in his poetic writing style. I realized that half way through this book, not much had happened and yet so much had happened. 

This is the story of Alexander Cleave, an actor who is having a crisis and returns to his mother's home where he begins to see ghosts. What continues on (and sadly I knew from reading Ancient Light) is heart wrenching and powerful but oh so intensely enjoyable to read. This is English lit at its finest.

next, Shroud (the middle book).

Intricate, bizarre, but not to my taste. A ghost story. Not enough plot to sustain and undergird his annoying accumulation of adjectives, and indulgent self-reflection, and yet not enough depth and beauty (as in The Sea) to compensate for the lack of storyline. Characters are vivid, but very unattractive and (intentionally) flat. Something, at any rate, is missing —