Este verano toca Banville. Why not? Esta vez en inglés. Axel Cleave es la explicación que me faltaba para entender a Cass Cleave y su relación con Alex (que no Axel) Vander. Ahora sí. Y ahora veo que los personajes son los que constituyen la obra. No hay que buscar historias ocultas, son ellos, su pasado, su presente, sus muertos y sus vivos. Preciosa la imagen de los fantasmas en la casa, que resultan llegar del futuro y no del pasado. Y los personajes de Quirke y Lily, curiosos ocupas cuya propia historia es tan falsa como el semejo de paternidad que Axel ejerce con ella. Lo más difuso Lydia, fuera del mundo padre-hija y casi del resto de la historia. Triste papel. Gran escritor.

Thought on rereading: On second reading, I'm coming to realize how thematically rich and layered this novel (and his other novels) is.

My original review:
I'm now kind of embarrassed about my previous Banville reviews, where I harped on his similarities to Nabokov and basically characterized him as extremely talented but inherently unoriginal. The more Banville I read the more I appreciate him and realize that, aside from a love of poetic language and fascination with unsavory people, he and Nabokov are nothing alike.

Most of Banville's novels, however, are very much alike (hopefully this is not also an observation I will later regret). There are generally a few events that occur over the course of the 200-300 pages, but I'd hesitate to call their cumulative influence a plot. Plot threads are introduced (or at least hinted at) and then discarded. Dialogue is minimal, and what little of it there is is intercut with long reminiscences by the narrator, so that a question and its reply are often several pages apart. These reminiscences (which make up the bulk of most of his novels) also intercut any action, to the point where they almost seem random or meandering, except they are clearly assembled very purposefully and with great care. There's also always something mysterious and unknowable about his worlds and his characters, as though he were intentionally keeping the reader at a certain distance.

And it might seem like I'm being very critical of Banville, but in fact I love him. His approach is unusual, but it's also very effective. These intertwining reminiscences, combined with his incredibly rich and evocative prose have a hypnotic effect. Hypnotic is really the best word I can find to describe his work. Once I get into it, I become completely mesmerized and drawn into the inner lives of his broken, sad protagonists. It's almost like he intentionally discards all the elements of fiction that the average person would consider most important, as if to declare that none of that is necessary, as if to demonstrate how emotionally rich and satisfying prose and character are, even at the expense of all else.

Anyways, these are all general Banville comments, but they apply perfectly to Eclipse, which is kind of the quintessential (though probably not the best) Banville novel.

La obra de John Banville me deja extrañado por su lírica extensa y densa. Es como leer un poema en prosa, pero características novelísticos.
Alexander Cleave es un actor retirado, de estado agotado, absorto y un tanto depresivo. La introspección que hace de su vida revela fantasmas que siempre han estados siguiéndolo, pero por razones familiares; hay un fuerte vínculo materno que ha construido, en parte, la forma de ser de Cleave.
A medida que avanza la historia se muestra la dependencia familiar que requiere el protagonista, a tal punto de aceptar vivir con extraños con los que no se lleva, y de paso aguantar la inconformidad de su esposa y la separación de su hija.
Creo que en síntesis es eso, la vida informe y perseguida de Alexander Cleave, narrada con suma belleza y pesadumbre.

There is a commotion in the house, too. I hear what seems to be a woman wailing. It is a cry that unwillingly I recognise. It has been coming to me for a long time, through an immensity of space, like the light of a distant star, of a dead sun.

Kate Bush has a great song about house hauntings. Get Out of My House from The Dreaming. Though I’m sure neither Kate Bush nor John Banville really wanted to talk about haunted houses, nor are haunted houses really about ghosts. What can be said of any house that has sheltered the spectres of ordinary human life if not haunted?

Strange, how places, once so intimate, can go neutral under the dust-fall of time. First there is the soft detonation of recognition, and for a moment the object throbs in the sudden awareness of being unique—that chair, that awful picture—then all composes itself into the drear familiar, the parts of a world.

A man, under the mercy of an oncoming haunting becomes a man and his ghosts. The hauntings are present as much as they are past and future. Unable to look or understand these abstract trajectories, our protagonist, Alexander Cleave, diverges from the subjects of horror as he leans into the haunting rather than try to escape, changing the terror into a kind of submissive sweetness or nostalgia.

I imagine it in there, filling me to the skin, anticipating and matching my every movement, diligently mimicking the tiniest details of what I am and do. Why am I not writhing in disgust, to feel thus horribly inhabited? Why not revulsion, instead of this sweet, melancholy sense of longing and lost promise?

He brings in the ghosts that occupy their own temporal space, his family and acquaintances, that sometimes shift to patronise him in several time frames.
If one thing can be said about this book it is that it’s so beautifully written it is itself haunting. John Banville pulls off a sort of temptuous prose in a series of Nabokovian confessions.

I retrieved a fragment of blue mantle and kept it, awed by the exposed whiteness of the plaster; such purity was almost indecent, and whenever afterwards I heard the priests recall that the Blessed Virgin had been born without stain of sin I experienced a troubled, dark excitement.

It is definitely a multiple-readings narrative. The end brings you back to the beginning. There were times towards the end where felt John was being pretentious with the plot, like the circus scene, which felt like part of a dream, and others where it felt like he was concealing information, though not consciously.
But it is a trilogy, so it’s not the time to be greedy like that.

I see what was my life adrift behind me, going smaller and smaller with distance, like a city on an ice floe caught in a current, its twinkling lights, its 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? 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.

bazı kitaplarda çok garip oluyor. özellikle erkek yazarlarda yaşadığım durum. genazino’dan tutun da dag solstad’a kadar içeriği kırılgan erkeklik olan romanlar bahsettiğim. seviyorum, okuyorum ama içten içe erkek karaktere acayip sinirleniyorum. ama şerefsiz yazarlar öyle güzel yazıyorlar ki adama sinir ola ola okuyorum işte.
bir üçlemenin ilk romanı “güneş tutulması”. bu arada “eclipse” ne güzel sözcük diye düşündüm okurken. orijinal dilindeki o hava maalesef türkçesine geçmiyor aslında. ama yapacak bir şey yok.
alexander cleave, orta yaşlarına gelmiş bir oyuncu. son olarak sahnede bir kriz (muhtemelen panik atak) geçirip, manşetlere çıkarak işini bırakıyor. tam orta yaş bunalımı gibi bir haller işte. sonra çocukluk evine görüyor bir şekilde, daha doğrusu bir gece bir bakıyo arabayla oralara gitmiş ve yalnız kalmak için çocukluk evine ve anılarına dönüyor.
karısı nerde, kızı nerde, hiiiiç… hatta sinirlenen karısını yargılıyor utanmadan. karısı lydia’nın maşallahı var ama bam bam geçiriyor lafları. bu çekip gitme ihtiyacı hep zaten erkeklerde oluyor. biz bir yere gidemiyoruz anasını satayım.
neyse pek bir olay yok, alex çocukluğundan beri hayaletlerle haşır neşir ve evde yine onlarla yaşadığını düşünüyor. romanın asıl başarısı günümüzle geçmiş arasında alex’in nefis salınımları. o kadar incelikle yapılıyor ki, sanki böyle paten üzerinde geçmişe kayıp sonra 180 derece dönüp bugüne geliyoruz. niye kaymak dedim? çünkü mükemmel bir dil. şiirsel ki ben pek sevmem yine de hayran kaldım ve benzetmeleri, imgeleri insanda çok şey uyandırıyor. bu arada suat ertüzün harika çevirmiş. türkçede unuttuğumuz öyle ince, detaylı sözcükler kullanmış ki bayıldım.
alex ve lydia’nın belki de kaçmaya çalıştıları şey problemli kızları cass. alex düşüncelerinde mutlaka cass’a uğruyor çünkü onun hakkında hep tedirgin. romandaki diğer baba-kız figürü, yunan mitolojisinden benzetmeler, incil göndermeleri gerçekten çok yerli yerinde bir ikili yaratmış.
netekim sirk gecesiyle climax’e yükselen roman bam diye bizi yerimize oturtuyor. beklediğimiz bir şey. ama anlatım yine hayranlık verici.
evet, adamlara ve kaçıp gitmelerine sinir olsam da güzel yazılmış romana lafım yok. bu kitabı bana ulaştıran editör mert tanaydın’a tekrar teşekkür ederim. ne seveceğimi biliyormuş.

¿Qué es la felicidad sino una refinada forma de dolor?

I chose this book for a very strange reason which I will blog about soon. The reason - to clear my head of my own prose before completing the last two drafts of my manuscript. I'm not in a position yet to decide yet whether this worked but if I go on to read the other two books in the trilogy - I'm guessing by then the answer will be yes.
Because of course - as most readers of Banville know - he has a unique style that can be overwhelming at times. Reading his book The Sea was actually like being scoured by the sea, unrelenting wave after wave crashing over the reader and dragging them out into the depths of the ocean. At least that's how I felt after reading that wonderful book.
This book I discovered was quite different. More like being gently lead into a strange garden full of interesting things by an unreliable fairy that flits this way and that. It's hard to keep up sometimes but the lyrical musings, the doubling back and the reminiscences are mesmerising. Banville's metaphors are to die for!
Here is a particularly vivid passage:
"It was like clasping in my arms a big marvellous flustered bird that cooed and cawed and thrashed wild wings and shuddered at the end and sank down beneath me helplessly with faint woeful sounding cries!"
And I love when he writes about the ghosts in his childhood home:
"They have their own furniture, in their own world. It looks like the solid stuff among which I move, but it is not the same, or is the same at another stage of existence. Both sets of things, the phantom and the real, strike up a resonance together, a chiming."
I can't go into details of course but the ending was a shock and ensures that I read the next book in the trilogy - Shroud.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. My only criticism is that I'm unsure about what actually happened at the circus.

It never really pulled me in. I found Alex Cleave as a narrator rather solipsistic. Definitely unreliable. Prone to digressions. My reaction could be coloured by the fact that I read v3 in The Cleave Trilogy first. No matter how many authors of linked or sequenced novels claim their books are "stand-alone" and can be read in any sequence, I find the sequence of appearance almost invariably best.

Retreat

“At the core of it all there is an absence.”

When empty, broken, and destroyed, where does one go for solitary reflection? For a few hours, I head to the forest, step confidently off the path, and lose myself among the trees. No wolves round here, so I may wear my blood-red coat. But to live alone for a period, I would seek an uninhabited version of my grandparents’ farmhouse: rooms, corridors, and cupboards sheltering deep memories and aromas from a distant age; fur and pawprints of the only dog I ever loved; hidden nooks crammed with curious mementos and friendly phantoms; a fragrant fruitful garden tapping at the leaded windows, and sunlight twinkling through the sheltering shade of the giant cedar, as it sings in the breeze. But would that heal, or hurt?

“When I fled the peopled world I had no one except myself to keep me from coming to grief. And it was to grief that I came.”



After the crisis of corpsing on stage, Alex Cleave retreats to his abandoned childhood home. He leaves his wife Lydia behind, and is out of contact with their troubled adult daughter Cass. As a child, he was familiar with the “alien presences” of lodgers, and once saw his father’s ghost. Returning, he finds there are phantoms still: real, imagined, or both.

Haunted by memories and premonitions, he devotes himself to indulgent introspection, “A way of being alive without living”, until “I catch myself, red-handed, in the act of living; alone, without an audience.” One of many contrasts and contradictions.

Poetic Incongruity

Almost every page is studded with highly-polished gems that distract from unsettling suspicions. There is something ghostly and intangible about the startling, but carefully chosen words, and about the images and ideas they simultaneously conjure and conceal. Read Banville for the language (the plot is sparse and uncertain).

“n  In the corners of the room brownish shadows thronged.n”
The rhythm is perfect, and several of the words carry so much unexpected meaning they’re irreplaceable.

Just as people take on ghostly forms, so light takes on corporeal form.
“n  Around us the shocked shadows congregated... On the lino... a sunburst streamed and shivered.n”

In the examples below (spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets), there is at least one ordinary word that gains heft by incongruity
:

•t“The garden’s menacing greenery crowding in the windows.”

•t“The sun was causing a livid commotion behind a heaping of clouds.”

•t“A tall sharp wedge of sunlight leaned against the white wall of the convent, motionless and menacing.”

•t“Calm summer light stood in the hall.”

•t“The open door of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me.”

•t“The protuberant pale eyes reminded me of a virulent kind of boiled sweet.”

•t“A flabby smell of overcooked food stood in the corridors night and day.”

•t“A white-capped sea of a deep, malignant blueness.”

•t“The plane unzipped the flooded runway and lifted.”


Banville even makes the “desolating rapture” of masturbating to “antique smut” transcendent and almost beautiful.

Voices, Phantoms, and an Unreliable Narrator

Amid a mix of inadvertent and deliberate dishonesty, truth is hinted at, whether Alex realises or not.

When he first met Lydia, he “was not entirely what I pretended to be”. Alex is always a performer; he toys with truth and dodgy memories, “unknown, even to myself”..

When Cass was born, he saw “a host of shadowy ancestors, all of them jostling together”. As a child, she started hearing voices - an inverse of Alex being an actor, something he silently accuses her of being. Seeing phantoms helps him empathise with her “uncertainty as to what is real”, but it makes his account more questionable.

Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons

Alex is an outsider in his own town, in his own family. Like an anthropologist or a vivisectionist, he stalks, observes, and collects strays and “anomalies”. Phantoms are more enticing than his living, breathing family.

He is a lifelong “devotee of the goddess… in various forms” starting with his misunderstood mother. The allure of an older woman is a major theme of his teenage years, told in Ancient Light (my review HERE), and there are strong Oedipal overtones in his marriage.

But Alex was always committed to Cass and her needs - at least in his telling. Lydia sees it differently: jealousy, or something else? Certainly there is always the hint of tragedy to come that reminded me slightly of Emperor Augustus and Julia (see my review of Augustus) and Stoner and Grace (see my review of Stoner).

There is another father and daughter here, initially in the shadows: Quirke the caretaker, and teenage Lily. They have a curious and rather detached relationship. Alex’s arrival disturbs that dynamic, and distorts the lens through which he views his estrangement from Cass. His interest in Lily is overtly paternal. But unspoken spectres hover.

Solar Eclipse



The certainty of an eclipse is that the sun so suddenly extinguished will reappear just as abruptly. But despite the many and glorious mentions of light, this book is shaded by the fearful expectation of darkness, foreshadowing the title of the next book, Shroud.

Near the end, Alex experiences the partial (and cloudy) solar eclipse of 1999: “Peculiar light, insipid and shrouded, like the light in a dream.” I visited Cornwall then, where it was total. Despite the clouds, there was an instant unleashing of visceral, elemental, primordial power that made me eager to experience another, better eclipse.

Quotes about Light



Light is a leitmotif, just as in Ancient Light (and maybe in Shroud, tbc), but where there is light, there are also shadows. Smells, usually unpleasant, are frequently and vividly mentioned, as in The Sea. But sound (except for a wonderful passage about manic seagulls), taste, and touch are secondary.

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets.

•t“The evening sun… an ancient light, golden, dense, dust-laden.”

•t“The woods leaned inward… blackly brown against the last faint radiance of the dying day.”

•t“The damp half-darkness folding me about, making me its own.”

•t“The room in sunlight was a luminous tuat tend held down by studs of light reflecting at many corners.”

•t“The sunlight was turning brazen as the afternoon lost its strength.”

•t“The oleaginous slither of light… a livid twilight.”

•t“Even the sunlight seems bored.”

•t“The early sun had an intense lemony cast, and the morning was all glitter and glassy splinterings.”


Alex’s Aphorisms

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets.

•t“Boredom is the brother of misery.”

•t“Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.”

•t“Lodgers… like actors compelled to play themselves.”

•t“Grief takes the taste out of things.”

•t“Death bores the young, like a glum intruder come to spoil an already dull party.”

•t“It’s a parent’s posthumous revenge, the legacy of increasing resemblance.”

•t“What is happiness but a refined form of pain?”

•t“I wonder if my ghosts would have known I was not in the house. Do they appear when I am not present? Is a rose red in the dark?”

•t“There is no present, the past is random, and only the future is fixed.”

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

•t“Now that the worst had happened, I would no longer have to live in fear of it.”


Miscellaneous Quotes

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets.

•t“One of those vague hazy days of early June that seem made half of weather and half of memory.”

•t“The countryside’s slovenly and uncaring loveliness.”

•t“Maundering chaotically in my disordered heart” made me want to return to bed, to be “swaddled in flocculent warmth”.

•tAn old phone “had the osseous heft of a tribal artefact, shaped and polished by a long and murderous use”.

•tProcessed ham, “pallid, marbled, evilly aglisten”.

•tAt the cinema, “phantasmally peopled darkness” and “luminously peopled darkness”.

•tA man near death was “lost inside his clothes... moving wraithlike... a stooping figure flickering from sunlight into shadow... leaving no trace of his passing save a sort of shimmer, a fold in the air, and a coiling question mark of cigarette smoke.”

•tSmoking with “negligent deftness, as if it were a tricky exercise in prestidigitation… tapping and twirling the miniature white baton… with a magician’s fluency.”

•t“The surface of the water, taut and burnished like billowing silk… The waves… more a wrinkle running along the edges of a sluggishly swaying vast bowl of water.”

•t“Water is uncanny in the way, single-minded and uncontrollable, it keeps seeking its own level.”

•t“Drowning is strange… for those on shore. It all seems done so discreetly.”

•tIt “happened out of time… not as a real event… [but] in some special dimension of dream or memory”.

•t“Lily’s bare arm beside mine, each tiny strand of down on it agleam; the evening sunlight in the window, goldening the draining board… my plate, with one limp round of tomato, a bruised lettuce leaf, a smear of crumbled egg yolk.” Triva are more memorable and evocative than headline events.

•t“The trees were white with hoar-frost and a crepuscular pinkish mist hung on the motionless air.”

•t“A forgotten cigarette was smoking itself in surreptitious haste.”

•t“She gives herself to inaction almost sensuously. She is a voluptuary of indolence… exudes a kind of negative radiance, a dark light.”

•tAt music school, “five-fingered exercises tinkled, precise, monotonous and insane”.

•t“The silence that radiated off her like heat had a furious force.”

•t“What is it about such occasions of timeless time that afterwards makes them seem touched with such a precious, melancholy sweetness? Sometimes it seems to me that it is in these vacant intervals… that my true life has been most authentically lived.”


Notes

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets.

•tAlice: A revelation is likened to stepping through a looking glass, where “everything is exactly as it was and at the same time entirely transformed” and is followed by a comparison with Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

•tBible: There are surprisingly few Biblical allusions, with the notable exception of a longish scene where Quirke, in priestly mode, proffers water to a distraught Lydia, as if it were the sacrament.

•tBlood: The red stuff of life can never be insignificant, and it is casually mentioned several times, literally, and as a colour. But towards the end, there is a more disturbing and ambiguous memory of a white dress, apparently splashed - deliberately - with a stranger’s blood.

•tCircus: Lily’s childish enthusiasm for the circus has an oddly sinister air. Darkness, always darkness lurking.

•tNames: In Banville’s books, names have import, and characters often have similar names, whether by rhyme or near anagram. It was less obvious here, even when Alex considers the possible impact of changing names: his wife is really Leah, but he misheard her name as Lydia (which stuck), and when he started acting, he used his full first name (which didn’t stick). And then there’s Lily, which is not dissimilar to Leah and Lydia. Quirke’s name is too obvious to merit attention.

•tBonnie Tyler: I wanted an excuse to weave her Total Eclipse of the Heart into this review, but other than the novel’s title, I can’t make a worthwhile association. Nevertheless, here she is singing it.

Image Sources:
•tBruno Catalano sculpture of an empty man: http://www.boredpanda.com/hollow-scul...
•tIrish eclipse, 11 August 1999: http://www.mythicalireland.com/astron...
•tShaft of light, with photographer’s comments: http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/a...



The Cleave Trilogy

The ancient light of the past illuminates the present and future.

The publication order of the Alex and Cass Cleave father/daughter trilogy is Eclipse, then Shroud, and finally, Ancient Light.

However, there’s no need to read them in sequence, as they all have a current storyline intertwined with reflections of earlier events. (My reading order was 3, 1, 2.) The middle one is more about Cass, and the other two focus on Alex.

Hidden for brevity.
Read the additional spoilers below only if you have read the book and want to jog your memory. Links are to my reviews, where any further spoilers are hidden.

•tEclipse, 5*: The main narrative is set in 1999, when Alex, the narrator, is ~50, and returns to his abandoned childhood home, after a catastrophic episode of stage-fright. The reminiscences are of his childhood, and that of his daughter, Cass, who has blackouts and hears voices.  He develops a friendship with the caretaker’s teen daughter that hints beyond the mere paternal. It ends shortly after Cass’s death.

•tShroud, 3*: The main narrative is set over a few months in 1999, narrated by literature professor, Axel Vander (in his late 70s), who meets adult Cass in Turin. Aspects of her story are told in the third person, probably by Vander, though with implausible omniscience.  Vander wrote a famous essay about the play which was her father’s most successful role. She is now an amateur researcher who has discovered secrets about Vander’s past, so the reminiscences are primarily about his teen and young adult years. Vander and Cass have a brief and disturbing relationship, and the book ends shortly after her death in 1999.

•tAncient Light, 5*: The main narrative is set around 2009, when Alex, narrating again, is ~60. The reminiscences are of his teen relationship with his best friend’s mother, of Cass’s teen years, and the aftermath of  her death a decade ago. Things are muddied when he takes on the role of Axel Vander (Cass’s lover in Shroud) in a biopic. The woman playing Cass has recently lost her father. She and Alex become close: another father/daughter relationship, with sexual undertones.


Oedipus, meet Humbert.

The writing is certainly intricate and extremely well-thought out. However, the style was at places peevish, especially when the introspective monologues extend like thin vapors -- delicate and frail but nevertheless impotent.
Some lines that I thought were characteristic of this rather jaundiced style:
Page 28: After he died, or finished fading - his physical demise was only the official end of a slow dissolution, like the full stop the doctor stabbed into his death certificate that day, leaving a shiny blot -she in her turn began gradually to fall silent.
Page 173: Heads were briefly lifted from desks, dark eyes looked on us with remote inquisitiveness.
These are some examples from the many instances where the prose becomes overly obtuse and imprecise and the piercing melancholy effect is dulled by an inability to pinpoint with force the physical effect of thoughts. I got this sense throughout the book. A bathetic tinge is a dangerous weakness when prose seeks to soar but gets lost along the way, reaching places where the obvious desired effect is hampered.
There were exceptionally beautiful passages. These were mostly physical descriptions. The novel gets progressively better towards the end as the monologue doesn't stand on its own. All in all, I felt like I was reading a piece of experimentation by a talented writer.

"أظنني لجأت إلى المسرح كي أمنح نفسي شخصيات أسكنها أكبر، وأعظم، وأثقل وزنًا وحضورًا من كل ما تمنيت يومًا أن أكونه".
كسوف، حين تُعاش الحياة كمسرح دائم، كتعويض عن حياة غير مرغوبة

No question, his prose is absolutely gorgeous; however, I struggle with Banville because his stories never really resonate with me.

Have to digest this one for a while.

I’m the meantime I’m going to retry The Sea and a few more. Not giving up yet.

*4 stars for his beautiful writing