Este é o segundo livro de uma trilogia de livros que podem ser lidos separadamente, é o que dizem. Mas ler fora de ordem tem lá seus impactos. Isso porque no primeiro livro (Eclipse) temos o pai e a mãe de Cass, e ela apenas aparece em terceira mão na história (a mãe conta dela, ela telefona, lembra-se dela, refere-se a ela). Já neste, temos a Cass como uma protagonista - e sua história com o impostor Vander. Só que são acontecimentos paralelos, de modo que os dois livros terminam no mesmo tempo. Então quem leu o primeiro antes já sabe como este vai de encontro ao mesmo fim.

A leitura deste segundo me pareceu um pouco mais complexa, porque varia de narrador ao longo da história, sem anunciar. Simplesmente vamos percebendo quem está falando, com foco variável e também a linguagem, os pensamentos de cada um, o que torna os acontecimentos muito mais dinâmicos, pois os vemos de diferentes ângulos. E todos os ângulos são humanos, com suas doenças assumidas ou não, em confissões confiáveis ou não.

De certo, curiosa para o terceiro.

El término “imposturas” es demasiado elocuente, considero errónea la elección del título para la edición en castellano. En el original en inglés el título es Shroud (Sudario), que hace referencia al Santo Sudario de Turín, y trasluce una vinculación con cuestiones de autenticidad, a la vez que sugiere la existencia de un lienzo que cubre como un velo la realidad.

El título Imposturas es casi un spoiler. Podría haber restado suspenso a la lectura si no fuera porque Banville se mueve bien en zonas pantanosas y yo soy medio dormida y, cuando sueño, sueño pesadillas.

Esta novela forma parte de la trilogía The Cleave, de la cual el año pasado leí y reseñé Eclipse, un libro lleno de sombras; ahora bien, la oscuridad en Imposturas es más agobiante, el miedo y las dudas se intensifican y los personajes bordean la locura.

Axel Vander, el protagonista y narrador, recibe una carta que lo perturba:

“No tengo un talante apocalíptico, pues he visto muchos mundos que parecían acabar y acababan sobreviviendo, pero aquella mañana tuve la certeza de haber cruzado, de haberme visto obligado a cruzar, una frontera invisible, y de hallarme en un estado de que ya sería por siempre post-algo”.

Ese mal presentimiento y el ambiente enrarecido me llevaron a creer que se trataba de una amenaza del doppelgänger. Pero no, eran cosas mías. Soy fantasiosa.

Alguien cita a Vander en Turín, la ciudad donde ocurrió la transfiguración de Nietzsche. Allí conoce a una chica que parece salida de una pintura renacentista, es Catherine Cleave, apodada Cass, la hija del protagonista de Eclipse. En Eclipse, Cass apenas es mencionada, ahora, en Imposturas, vamos a presenciar su inestabilidad y conocer su endeble identidad:

“Había visto antes esa expresión, caía sobre ella siempre que la intolerable dificultad de ser única e ineludiblemente ella misma la dejaba en una inmovilidad perpleja en medio de alguna acción necesaria de la vida, perfectamente vulgar y trivial. Para ella, un par de zapatos, derecho e izquierdo, podía ser algo tan insoluble como cualquier acertijo que el mundo pudiera proponerle”.

¿Qué relación pueden entablar estas personas? ¿Acaso pueden crear algún vínculo?

Cada historia de la trilogía es independiente, pero están habitadas por personajes que se repiten y por el vértigo que les da la existencia a ellos y al lector que va a compartir instantes ”en los que todo se vuelve de pronto laxo y vacío, como si el aire hubiera huido de las cosas, y las personas atrapadas en ese momento vacilaran, se sintieran desplazadas, se empujaran a un lado de sí mismas”.

Es una novela magistral pero no es para el lector ansioso ni para el que busque sobresaltos. Es una escritura cuidada que cuenta de a poco una historia donde más importantes que los sucesos son los pensamientos y personalidades de los personajes. Pero no es que no pase nada, pasan cosas, muchísimas. Es un libro fascinante.

The man is a genius, isn't he? An absolute stunner, again.

Otra magnífica traducción pero igualmente de un material muy complejo. Realmente, aún no sé por qué Alex Vander tiene tanto miedo a ser desenmascarado. ¿No sería más bien un héroe, un superviviente? Sin embargo, se pasa la vida creyendo que oculta quién es a su mujer (muerta terapéuticamente), a sus colegas y amantes… No encuentro delito alguno en su pasado, salvo su egoísmo inmenso que le impide respetar a cualquier ser humano que no sea él. ¿Por qué Cass Cleave se acuesta con este despojo físico? ¿Realmente es un sustituto del padre? Creo que me he perdido algo por el medio; o tal vez, me empeño en buscar lo que no hay.

Beautiful sentences, as in Eclipse, but a much more interesting story, hence a better score. For more details: see this review, or this one.

I don’t know what to make of this book. It has one of the most unpleasant narrators I’ve ever come across, and his preoccupations are mostly nauseating. Added to that, I can’t work out the significance of the title and its allusion to the Shroud of Turin, and I’m still not clear about what actually happened at the end.

‘Alex Vander’ seems to be an academic who assumed the identity of the real Vander just after Kristallnacht when he returned home to find his parents gone and his own life at risk. Is this true? Is it just one of the lies he tells to cover up his anti-Semitism? Or was his friend Vander the one who wrote the anti-Semitic articles? I haven’t the faintest idea.

To see the rest of my review you could visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2009/02/08/sh... but actually its the links there to reviews by experts who know what they're talking about that are the best bits...

The Shroud written by John Banville in 2002 starts out with an intriguing idea. The literature professor Axel Vander living in California receives a letter from graduate student Catherine (Cass) Cleave who threatens to denounce him as a fraud. Vander arranges to meet Cass in the city of Turin, Italy, famous for the Holy Shroud of Jesus Christ.

If you were looking for a Da Vinci Code style thriller, you will most likely be disappointed. The text is very dense, with paragraphs going on and on. This is more of a character-driven rather than plot-driven book. Yes, the main protagonist Vander turns out to be a fraud. He swapped identities in Belgium during World War II to avoid being deported and killed during Nazi purges. He has an affair with Cass, the woman that wants to denounce him. She turns out to be schizophrenic, hearing voices in her head.

Other characters include Kristina Kovacs (another woman that Vander had an affair with) and Franco Bartoli who he meets at a literary conference in Turin. I didn't really feel very connected to these characters during the story.

The book is divided into three parts. We hear about Vander’s wife Magda in California, who ends up killing herself, or perhaps it was Vander who killed her? There are pages and pages of descriptive prose, going down all kinds of rabbit holes. I found it hard to keep straight what exactly was going on in the plot. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Perhaps that was by design in this “shrouded” story.

I see on Amazon that some people really enjoyed Banville’s rich vocabulary and highly descriptive text. I felt more like I was drowning in his prose and was glad to just get to the end of the book. I am not really a big fan of Banville, although I appreciate that he can write very detailed and long descriptions.

This book is on Boxall’s “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list.

Guau

John Banville raya a gran altura en este libro. Con una escritura hipnótica y sofisticada, en 'Imposturas' nos ofrece una historia inteligente, ingeniosa, con momentos crudos y de desesperación, en la que disecciona dos mentes, las de los dos protagonistas, Alex Vander y Cass Cleave. De manera muy habilidosa, Banville crea una nueva novela dándonos a conocer a Cass Cleave, la hija de Alex Cleave, el protagonista de su anterior novela, 'Eclipse'; pero esto no supone que se tenga que leer necesariamente una novela antes que otra, son de lectura totalmente independiente. Es como si las dos novelas hubiesen sido escritas al mismo tiempo, y cuyos argumentos también transcurriesen paralelamente, para desembocar en un mismo final.

En 'Importuras' hay dos voces narrativas. Una es la de Alex Vander, un anciano filósofo de origen europeo afincando en California, cuyos libros lo han hecho célebre. Su mal genio y acritud son habituales en él. Un buen día recibe una carta de una desconocida. Dice que está en Amberes, ciudad natal del escritor, y asegura haber descubierto su verdadera indentidad. En la carta dice que quiere encontrarse con él, y, aprovechando una conferencia que ha de impartir en Turín, acepta. No cabe duda de que está preocupado; oculta secretos que no quiere que salgan a la luz. Vander espera encontrarse a alguien que desea vengarse de él, pero le espera una sorpresa...

La otra voz narrativa del libro es la de Cass Cleave, cuyo padre (que curiosamente también se llama Alex, al igual que Vander), ya conocimos en 'Eclipse', una joven que está de viaje por Europa recabando información para su tesina. Es una chica compleja e inteligente, pero con problemas mentales: oye voces en su cabeza que intenta no escuchar y sufre ataques de vez en cuando. Decir que mantiene una relación difícil con su padre, es quedarse corto. Y también es una ferviente lectora de los libros de Alex Vander...

Como comentaba en la reseña de 'Eclipse', la crítica adora a John Banville, comparándolo con Navokov, Beckett o Roth. Pienso que tienen, salvando las distancias, algo de razón, y el personaje de Vander tiene ciertas similitudes con el Humbert Humbert de 'Lolita', en las pasiones y en ese querer huir de sí mismos.

'Imposturas' es una novela que te arrastra a los oscuros abismos del alma humana, en un viaje de dolor, desesperación y humanidad.

"[...] soy un ser hecho completamente de poses. Es posible que en esto no sea único, puede que le pase lo mismo a todo el mundo, no lo sé ni me importa. Lo que sé es que tras haber vivido en la conciencia, o aunque fuera sólo en la ilusión, de estar constantemente bajo la observación, soy todo fachada; mirad detrás de mí y sólo encontraréis un poco de serrín, unos cuantos pavoneos y una confusión de cables. No hay un hueso sincero en todo el cuerpo de mi texto. [...]"

Shroud (2002) has a slightly misleading reputation as a roman à clef on the Paul de Man affair; it is really more of an audacious variation on that scandal, with added themes from the life of another notorious theorist, Louis Althusser, as Banville allows on the novel's "Acknowledgements" page.

(Paul de Man was an influential deconstructionist literary critic, revealed after his death to have written anti-Semitic articles for a collaborationist newspaper in his native Belgium during World War II; Louis Althusser was a major French Marxist theorist who strangled his wife. Both de Man and Althusser are renowned for anti-humanist theories stressing how we and our works are determined by the impersonal operations of language and other structures. Critics have linked their transgressions to their ideas, which seem to remove moral responsibility from individuals.)

Shroud is also Banville's favorite of his own novels, at least as of his 2009 n  Paris Reviewn interview:

INTERVIEWER

If you don’t want your book reviews to be remembered, is there a single novel that you would like to be remembered for, more than the others?

BANVILLE

Perhaps Shroud. It’s a dark, hard, cruel book. It’s the novel in which I got closest to doing what I aimed to do at the start of writing it. That had only happened once before, with The Newton Letter. Everybody hated Shroud—even, I think, the people who admired it. It was favorably reviewed, but it was not and is not a book a reader could readily love. Shroud is my monstrous child whom I cherish but who horrifies others. The odd thing is that, for all its harshness, it’s a love story of sorts. I never thought I’d write a love story—what an idea!

That sounds appealing, at least to a bad person such as myself, who believes literature is often at its best when it confronts the hardness and terror of the actual, rather than, well, shrouding these in moralism. Unfortunately, there is no actuality, no reality, in Shroud, and consequently no real cruelty, and no real love either.

There is page after page of perfect prose. Banville can describe the things of this world with words so apt—apt both to our own experience of those things and to the themes and motifs of his novel—that there is hardly any point in anyone's describing them again:

A window streamed with rain, and opposite in the room a patch of wall rippled like dark silk.

He moreover creates the sound effects—alliteration, consonance, assonance, sibilance—that allow prose to merit the admittedly overused honorifics "lyrical" and "poetic":

I flared my nostrils and snuffed up a draught of the room's deadened air, seeking to savour again the civet smell of her sweat.

Can a novel, of all literary forms, live on language alone? Banville does supply an impressive plot upon which to drape his supple style, improving the de Man affair with two unpredictable if implausible twists—one revealed in the middle of the novel, one at the end, in the expert manner of the thriller writer.

The plot is this: Axel Vander is a celebrated and elderly European literary theorist who has settled in California. An imperious, brilliant, womanizing, alcoholic, and often cruel man, he has just lost his wife, Magda, apparently to dementia, though we receive intimations that he may have killed her himself. Then a letter comes from a mysterious graduate student claiming to know about his dark deeds during World War II. Vander takes an invitation to speak at a conference in Turin, on the 100th anniversary of Nietzsche's going mad in that city, where he plans to confront his accuser. At the conference, he meets his old rival, Franco Bartoli, and a former lover, now dying, Kristina Kovacs, and also witnesses or hallucinates a series of odd characters stalking him through the city: a flower seller, a woman struck by a car, a strange red-haired man. Then he faces the student who had written to him: a fragile Irishwoman named Cass Cleave. Cass suffers from seizures and other symptoms of mental illness (hearing voices, missing time), not to mention the legacy of a quasi-incestuous relationship to her domineering actor father. These two damaged people begin an affair, and, when Vander is felled by his alcoholism, bedridden in a hotel room, he narrates to her the true story of his past.

The novel's second part, comprising Vander's narrative flashback, now begins. Yes, he allows to Cass, he appears to have written an anti-Semitic article during the war for a newspaper in occupied Belgium. The truth is that he is not Axel Vander, the scion of a cultivated bourgeois gentile family. He was rather reared in a poor Jewish household, but befriended the wealthy Vander family, despite their own haughty anti-Semitism. It was his best friend, Axel Vander, who wrote the anti-Semitic article. This real Axel Vander dies in mysterious circumstances (was he, as rumor had it, a secret resistance fighter?), after which our own nameless antihero is called by a mysterious benefactor from his home to be spared a Kristallnacht that claims his family. Without family or identity, he assumes the mantle of Axel Vander, and under these false colors travels to America—but not before having a protracted affair with a aristocratic and dipsomaniacal demimondaine in London—where he meets Magda and begins his storied academic career.

I will leave readers to discover the novel's third part for themselves, except to say that it is marked less by Vander's fear of exposure than by Cass's spiraling madness, Kristina's oncoming death, and by a final revelation that puts the second part's plot twist in a different and more disturbing, if also ambiguous, light.

My recitation of this narrative misleads insofar as it does no justice to Banville's narrative method. Vander retrospectively narrates most of the novel, though intervals focused on Cass's inner life are given in the third person. This discrepancy is never explained, though we are teased throughout with questions about who really narrates:

"Perhaps," I said, "you really should write my biography. […] You could write it in the first person," I said. "Pretend you are me. I give you full permission. I grant you the rights to my life."

[…]

He, I, saw again the empty bottle on its side, the mauve pills in my palm. I closed my eyes. I listened to the wind washing over the rooftops. The girl rose and came forward and knelt beside the bed and took my hand in both of hers and brought it her lips and kissed it. I.

Also, given that Vander is often drunk and Cass often hallucinating, the novel's events have the mysterious, riddling, unclear—should I say shrouded?—air of a dream or vision. Images of veiling and reflection, of mist and submersion, recur. Not only did Nietzsche go mad in Turin, but it is also the home of the eponymous shroud bearing the image of Christ, which our characters discuss but never manage to see. Consider the deconstructive paradoxes of Turin's shroud: a covering that reveals, a fake revered as holy truth. Do we ever see what is real? Or is what we cast out of our psyches onto the outer world the only reality we can know? Can Vander and Cass really love one another, as they claim they do despite the manifold abuses of their relationship and the derangement of their whole situation, or do they only love what they have projected onto each other?

Banville raises these inquiries, impressively reminiscent of Paul de Man's literary theory, at the level not only of narrative form but of literary allusion: Shroud is a sustained pastiche of literary modernism. Verbal, descriptive, or narrative references to the masterpieces of the movement can be found on every page. The novel's first sentence is "Who speaks?" which is pure Beckett. There is an excursus on how Cass might treated in a sanitarium that evokes n  The Magic Mountainn. The two Vanders give us the doppelgänger motif of Poe and Dostoevsky, while their contrasted domiciles and Jew/gentile rivalry recall the divergent "ways" in Proust. The language of the novel resounds with echoes of Yeats, Stevens, and above all Eliot ("mein irisch Kind," "[t]he city looked unreal," "voices from a farther room," "spawned in an estaminet"). There is a hint of Eliot's and Joyce's mythic method, with asides throughout that suggest Cass and Vander are enacting the Harlequinade, not to mention that Vander resembles the countenance of Christ on the shroud. The exaggerated and disturbing affair between the dissolute old professor and his young and incapacitated charge can't help but remind us of n  Lolitan, especially since Vander sounds so much like Humbert Humbert. He brandishes his macaronic erudition with defensive irony at the reader-jury, pleading genuine love and guilt all the while. Banville also masters Nabokov's technique of hiding a secret narrative behind an overt one through slips and hints and potential misprisions:

"I know you killed your wife," Franco Bartoli said. I coughed, spluttering grappa. "What?" I croaked, gagging. Kristina Kovacs patted me solicitously on the back. "He says," she said, "you dropped your knife."

This pastiche is the novel's chief pleasure, not its tastelessly twisty plot or the fairly standard late-20th-century philosophical divagations on the impossibility of truth. If George Steiner characterized 19th-century bourgeois Europe as "the garden of liberal culture," then Shroud, with its dissolving and unreal twinned cityscapes of Turin and Antwerp and its dying, despairing intellectuals, takes place in that garden's gorgeous ruin. It is, to go from the sublime to the Insta-ridiculous, an anticipation of #darkacademia.

It is not, however, as academic as we might expect. I called the novel's plot "tasteless" above because of its over-the-top play with real events that Banville, on the "Acknowledgements" page, shamelessly trumpets as his inspiration. Do we really need a story in which a stand-in for Paul de Man is revealed to be secretly Jewish? What, moreover, are the ethics involved in Banville's embroidering the de Man scandal? Vander is a womanizer who sleeps with students and colleagues and regularly beats women, while de Man was known for a monastic temperament even in the atmosphere of male professors' sexual entitlement that notoriously characterized the '60s and '70s. De Man also helped to launch the careers of two of the most prominent academic feminists of their generation, Barbara Johnson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (He was a bigamist, which is explicable not by excess sexual appetite but by political opportunism: he abandoned one family in Europe to start another in America, where having a native-born wife would help him with his immigration status.) All novelists paint from life, but most don't name their traduced models in the acknowledgements. By what right does Banville exercise his speculations on fiction and reality at the expense of a named man's real life, other than that the dead can't sue for libel?

As for Vander's literary theorizing, it is hardly discussed. He insists on "the simple lesson that there is no self," which is vague and common to most postwar radical Euro-intellectuals. Another character attributes to him the belief that "every text contains a shameful secret," the type of vulgar Freudianism that de Man and Althusser distinguished themselves by rejecting. Vander also makes the hoary insinuation that Nietzsche, one of the novel's tutelary presences, is to blame for Nazism, which presumably arraigns linguistic skepticism and modernest aestheticism for fascist indifference to suffering:

Aestheticise, aestheticise! Such was our cry. Had not our favourite philosopher decreed that human existence is only to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon? We were sick of mere life, all that mess, confusion, weakness. All must be made over—made over or destroyed.

This is a commonplace of commentary not only on Nietzsche but also on the de Man affair (see David Lehman's absorbing Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man); to my mind, such an accusation tells the story too neatly, as if the Nazis were pyrrhonists rather than essentialists. Nevertheless, in the novel, Vander carries this fascism into private life when he aestheticizes Cass rather than recognizing her reality. "She would be my Beatrice, my Laura, my Trilby," he exclaims. The first two names evoke medieval idealism, while the third, in deflationary reference to George du Maurier's bestselling late-Victorian Irish grisette, makes of Vander a mere monster, the Svengali of the anti-Semitic imagination. Is the name "Trilby" in the absurdly august company of Beatrice and Laura Banville's own tacit admission of guilt?

And what resistance does the novel itself offer to Vander's imposition? Cass, too, is supposed to be a graduate student, an intellectual, but we hear little of her ideas, and what we do hear strains credulity. She is a paranoid who believes everything is connected, and seems, as well, to believe literally in the conspiracy theory described in n  Foucault's Pendulumn: "Cathars. The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The revocation of the edict of Nantes. Freemasons." Banville pathologizes Cass; he subsumes her characterization under her mental illness, a fictional schizophrenia-like condition called Mandelbaum's Syndrome. That she appears in an earlier Banville novel, Eclipse (2000), is no justification, since nowhere does Shroud advertise itself as one in a series. If the terrible genius of Lolita is the real little girl immured but crying audibly within the prison of Humbert's rhetoric, Banville, by contrast, leaves his heroine as hollow as his antihero. Vander concedes as much—

There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice, as I once manufactured a reputation, from material filched from others.

—but his concession, while it explains the novel's faults, cannot excuse them. That the faults are almost overwritten by the precision and music of Banville's prose and the addictive unreality of his atmosphere is the measure of his great gift. All the same, what can we call a pastiche of modernism with no sense of modernism's actual stake or pathos? A postmodern novel, I suppose, and in the worst way—a beguiling shroud with nought underneath.

Perfecto para causar bloqueo lector. Aburrido, tedioso, incomprensible, sin sentido. Lastima, el primero de la trilogía me encantó. Este fue la peor decepción del año sin duda.

Shroud. John Banville

I’m certain I don’t read Banville for the story subtle though it is. I read Banville much in the same state of mind as I might visit an art gallery, just for the quality of the writing. The story in ‘Shroud’ is actually quite slight – false identity and its consequences – but Banville manages to imbue the slightest observation of life and living with an aura of exquisite similes and metaphor.

By copious use of ‘… as if …’ and ‘…. like a ….’ where the narrative stream is disrupted by description for the joy of description. Maybe this is what ‘good’ literature is all about. The disruption can extend to paragraphs, even pages, and then he hauls you back to where you were in the main text.

“The light behind him was a glare of azure and gold, and there was a slash of purple shadow there, and a parrot-green something , a palm leaf, perhaps, that kept moving to and fro in an odd jerking, agitated way. What caught her attention though was the bead of blood, the size of a ladybird, on his lip, where he must have cut himself on the razor, without noticing” # 130

“It was only when the waiter had lifted the paper lid off the glass of orange juice, turning his wrist in that slow, solemn way, that at last it had come to her. It was as if a light had switched itself on in her head. Or no, no, it was if she had been submerged in something dense and dark and suddenly had risen up and broken soundlessly through the surface into the light, the radiance. And it was all so clear, so simple.” #194

He is a master of distilling a state of mind onto the page as well. I guess we have all had moments in our lives where the ‘me-ness’ of living forces intense introspection. Banville picks these moments up and allows his characters to portray them perceptively.

“A vast weight, the weight of the world itself, was pressing against her, so that she could not breathe. It was as if something frightful had happened and this was its aftermath, this scorched sky, these turbid relentless waves, the savage murmuring in the front seat. And she was alone, that above all. The hawser had fallen away, the prow had turned toward the open sea, and she knew that now she would never come back.” #128

However there is a caveat.
Why are his characters so unlikeable? Miserable, decaying, immoral, mad. In the absence of strong storyline this starts to matter, especially in part 3 where the direction of parts 1 and 2 are flowing. It all comes rather to pieces.

Part 3 is a rather slow, depressing decline into oblivion (In Cass’ case a necessary development for the third book of the trilogy). It hurts me to say but Banville’s writing becomes prolix and ceases to enthral (a page or two to describe buying ink for his pen) . What’s more the pity is that there are significant reveals which are pushed to the back of the book and lose impact. Like the reader, Axel discovers the truth behind his own back-story but is left confused and unsure. As his whole life has been about avoiding truth then this maybe is no great surprise but it’s not great for the reader.