Shroud

The title Shroud is a reference to the famous sacred relic known as the Shroud of Turin…

History is a hotchpotch of anecdotes, neither true nor false, and what does it matter where it is supposed to have taken place?

Shroud is a tale about identity and mentality…
Do we ourselves know who we are?

The voices in her head started up then, as she had known they would, as they always did when she was uncertain or nervous, seizing their chance. It was as if a motley and curious crowd had fallen into step behind her, hard on her heels, and were discussing her and her plight among themselves in excited, fast, unintelligible whispers. She stopped for a moment and leaned against a shuttered shop window with a hand over her eyes, but with the world blacked out the din of voices only intensified. She took a deep breath and went on.

Or are we just a sum of lies that we tell the others and the others tell about us?

When she came out into the sun she felt fluttery and light, and the air seemed to have turned into another medium, a kind of bright, viscous fluid that both sustained and hindered her. It was always like this after an attack, the sense of everything around her being different, as though she had stepped through a looking-glass into the other, gleaming world that it contained.

Shroud is the strangest and excruciating love story…
Does love make us happy?

The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves?

And similar to this famous relic human identity may be true or it may be false but any individuality is, after all, an enigma.

I read this without realizing it is the middle book in the Cleave Trilogy. No problem; it can stand alone. The trilogy follows Alexander Cleave, 60-ish, about ten years after the death of his daughter. The three books are Eclipse, Shroud and Ancient Light.

Banville likes to write about people with identity issues. I recently read his The Untouchable about a British spy in the Cold War who is secretly gay.

In this book we have an academic scholar, a specialist on Nietzsche. He’s an old man, recently widowed. He’s in ill health and he has secrets. This late in life, a young woman has discovered some? all? of his secrets and threatens to expose him. He agrees to fly from California to Turin to meet with her. He wonders: does it even matter at this point if his secrets are exposed?



Supposedly he grew up in Belgium during WW II. There are hints of his family being carried away in trucks when he was a youth. Although we don’t know at the time if this is his real background or his made-up one. You can’t say he doesn’t warn us: “All this I remembered, even though it never happened.”

He’s a misogynist and downright rude to waiters, hotel people and colleagues. He’s rude to the young woman as well especially since she has seizures and he considers her crazy. Of course they have an affair and maybe even fall in love.

He’s a self-admitted fraud in terms of his academic expertise: “I could discourse with convincing familiarity on texts I had not got round to reading, philosophies I had not yet studied, great men I had never met.”

Like Calvino and others, he rails against the pomposity of academic proceedings with phrases like honeyed bitterness; elegantly humorous conceits; sphere of precocities and trivial arcana.

Other passages I liked:

“Body: that was a word she did not like, the sound of it, the bubbled b, the d’s soft thud, the nasal, whining y.”

“America was emptiness. In my image of it the country had no people anywhere, only great, stark, silent buildings, and gleaming machinery, and endless, desolate spaces. Even the name seemed a nonce-word, or an unsolvable anagram, with too many vowels in it.”

“How would one detect the encroachment of senility, when what is being attacked is the very faculty of detection itself?”

Of his late wife: “Only in death has she begun to live fully, for me…My life with her was a special way of being alone. It was like living on intimate terms with a creature from another species; she was to me as remote and inaccessible as some large, harmless herbivore.”



A lot of people are dying in this novel: he’s old and ill and his colleagues and old flames are old. The title is a play on the Shroud that is kept in Turin, and Turin was also home for a while to Nietzsche. It a very dense work structured in page-long paragraphs without any dialog. A good read but I still prefer his The Sea and the Untouchable.

photo of Turin from booking.com/city/it
photo of Shroud from dailymail.co.uk

I had no idea while reading this book that it was part of a trilogy, together with "Ancient Light" and "Eclipse". I read "Ancient Light" a while ago and although the characters' names from "Shroud" seemed somehow familiar, I thought that it was just my memory playing tricks on me. I was amazed to find out that Cass Cleave here is the daughter of the main character from "Ancient Light" and that Axel Vander is the Axel Vander from "Ancient Light". However, it does not matter much: the story there doesn't influence much the story here and although reading about Cass Cleave here is like understanding somehow the mystery of the Cass Cleave's story narrated there, reading this novel is experiencing a whole new world than the one created in "Ancient Light".

The main character from this story seems to be a highly abominable person. He is certainly not a character that is popular among readers, but rather the opposite. He has however a sad history and his lies are somehow motivated by his history. His story is the story of one of the few Jews that are scarred by the Nazi, but manages to somehow escape and while struggling to survive, he commits the deeds of a common delinquent and he seems to be transformed in the very image of a monster, both his inner side and his outer side developing such an ugliness that he ends up terrifying people around him. However, like most people, he is just a refuge of innumerable and contradictory selves. He commits one of the most abominable sin: he steals from the person who helps him most to survive and he is physically scarred forever for this act and has to live with this print of the past on his body for the rest of his life. He doesn't do this out of lowness of character, but because he wants to fulfill a dream (or is it to escape and forget the awful fate of his people?): he wants to go to Arcady (America), which in his mind is the place where he would be able to be "pure existence", "an affectless point moving through time, nihilism's silver bullet, penetrating clean through every obstacle, shooting holes in the flanks of every moth-eaten monument of so-called civilization." In other words, he wants to start over in a land where the history of his people doesn't hinder him to do so. Axel Vander is one of his friends, a person who, with the raise of the Nazi, starts to show him bit by bit his lowness of character. I don't think that taking his identity after his death is such an awful fact as the author sees here. From the list of his deeds, this would be the least negative one, in my opinion.

We all are, Banville says, like a plane which is able to "hold on to the engines". We are the planes and our minds are the jet engines trying to speed away from them. We are however held together. Cass Cleave who has a mental disease is however barely held together. "The slightest jolt might make her fly apart into a million pieces. Everything was like that, the particles all fused together and trying to pull asunder. One instant of imbalance...and it will all explode." The story here seems to be the same: made of stories fused together which at times seem to lack focus. And this makes me wonder: what do I appreciate most in a book, the story or the style? The story here has shortcomings and it seems unfocused. But the writing! The writing is a delight, every line cast a spell on me. I loved this book: its style is so lyrical, the words seem like woven with grace, with delicacy, with the talent of an artist. This is yet another confirmation of how great a writer Banville is! So, it seems I have my answer: the story might be common...the writing however conquers souls...or at least my soul.

Banville should be better known and appraised at a worldwide scale: he is one of the best contemporary writers Europe has!

simplemente ✨no✨

Axel Vander survived WWII Germany. He survived a long, rather puzzling marriage. He has gained success in his literary field. And then he is contacted by a young woman who wants him to come to Italy to meet her, because she knows his real name, and his secrets. He is not who people think he is, and she is not what he expects when he meets her.

This book is beautifully written. It's no surprise that the author has won many awards and is considered a contender for the Nobel prize in literature. After the first pages, I ordered the other two books in the trilogy. But subject matter is a big deal for me, as is plot, and I had problems with both of them.

Any book set during and/or right before WWII is usually a big downer for me. With the exceptions of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Catch-22," I don't think I've ever been able to enjoy a book depicting this era. Those books had such unusual style, and the odd laugh, that I was able to read them and even re-read them.

My other concern is plot. It pretty much goes nowhere, despite all the plane tickets purchased, except in the heads of its characters. Vander's revelations rather disappoint. A few characters interact, and go do what they were going to do anyway. I do believe that Banville will win the Nobel someday, as I have never read a Laureate who didn't depress the hell out of me. Meantime, I think I'll wait on reading more of him.

"En cada instante, por todo el mundo, hay gente que nace o muere, que grita de pasión o de dolor. Es aterrador pensar en elll, aterrador".

"En la tierra de las mujeres, siempre soy un viajero que acaba de llegar".

Like an expensive meal, this book delivers delicious prose, dripping with heady aromas. There is also the occasional surprise as you bite into a collision of spices. By the 7th course tedium can set in but the experience is clever and rewarding.
It makes me want to re-read The Eclipse. But I probably won’t.

Axel Vander is victim and a brilliant, abusive boor who is struggling with issues of identity in his old age. Given this unappealing protagonist, why continue reading? Because the writing is so incredible that it pulls you along in spite of intermittent revulsion. This is a story of a man who has denied his identity for so long that he no longer feels that the old self is his any more. A troubled young woman demands answers from him after studying his writing. Faced with exposure, Axel gradually begins to tell his story. A difficult and compelling to read. An interesting subject for an Irishman.