I read with surprise a UK review of Shroud by John Banville. It was quite critical saying that “a couple of passages midway point take the narrative clean off its hinges...a lesion in the book’s reality that never fully heals over.” The reviewer cites the main problem being Banville’s management of the points of view, particularly the merging of the two POVs in the middle of the novel. I noted the merging while reading it but found that it was (for me anyway) quite in keeping with the general tone of the book and with what I believe Banville was trying to achieve. This is not a spoiler and if anything will help future readers who are wondering what is happening around page 125 or so.
As readers of the first book in the trilogy Eclipse will be aware, one of the two main characters Cass Cleave is mad. “She looked at her watch and sighed. A single, gloating voice began whispering in her head.” Or this: “That was how it was with her, she was the plane and her mind was the jet engines trying to speed away from it. She was barely held together. The slightest jolt might make her fly apart into a million pieces.”
It was quite a relief (in this book) to finally discover what Cass is suffering from and it’s no surprise either that in many ways Axel Vander is mad too. As he says himself so eloquently - his life has been a series of poses. “I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie.”
The book is filled with references and allusions to real and imaginary characters. There are Nabokian references cited by the reviewer. (Note to self: Read Nabokov.) Allusions to Harlequin, Cordelia and the life of Paul de Man and of Nietzsche. I love the rendering of Vander’s youth in Antwerp and the onslaught of Naziism. The scenes are believable and tense. Turin is very much present too. “They came out into a long, cobbled piazza. A bronze horseman strode motionless above them in the dark air, with a light from somewhere gleaming on his brow.” When Vander arrives in London during WWII he meets the very wealthy Laura - a fascinating character who had me reeling with a decision she makes.
With Vander being a writer Banville has to be on top of his game when depicting the thoughts of this difficult, cantankerous and very old man. I loved this observation: “Some things, real things, seem to happen not in the world itself bit in the gap between actuality and the mind’s apprehending; the eye registers the event but the understanding lags.” Although much is gradually revealed by Vander to the reader we are still left wondering is the shroud still over our eyes? I was cursing Vander for a final tricky revelation at the same time praising his choice of just three simple words: TIME. NIGHT. WATER that finish one of the most important last scenes in the novel.
I found that after swimming through page after page of brilliant adverbs, dazzling adjectives, clever verbs in abundance, when I came upon these three simple words that the effect on me as a reader was staggering! How they stood out! How powerful they were! How powerful John Banville’s prose is. He is my new favourite writer!

...that was certainly my least favourite Banville!

“Media vita in morte sumus”

Shroud. White and pristine. Or soiled with blood and other bodily secretions.

Shroud. Perhaps a bed-sheet, on which life has been created, delivered, or ended.

Shroud. For binding, putting away, and death.

Shroud. Separation or disguise: everything hazy, faded, muffled, and detached.

Cass Cleave often detaches - from Axel Vander, from her father, and from reality.

The main narrative is set in Turin, home of the famous Shroud, and site of Shelley’s drowning. It is the second of Banville’s trio about the Cleaves (see the final section of this review), but despite overlaps and similarities, it pushes the boundaries of the recurring themes harder, challenging the reader to find some sympathy for Vander, some redeeming qualities. I found little of either, and think Banville takes it too far - even down to the blind eye and dodgy leg of a comedy villain, on top of heavy drinking,  petty theft, identity theft, mental and physical cruelty, and a relationship with a vulnerable young woman. The echoes of Lolita are strong, though the language is less bewitching.

Masks

“Rip the mask from his face to find - another mask. Father father father.”
“Verisimilitude is in the details. She had learned at the knee of a master.”

Shrouds are not just for the dead; the living adopt masks of various kinds: for deliberate deception, anonymity, social convention, or because they cannot help it.

Cass is the daughter of an actor: a man of many faces, roles, and voices. She hears voices. And Vander…? He plays more than one role: “I wanted to be him. And yet, I despised him.”

That is the crux of this story: an elderly literature professor is contacted by a young amateur researcher who may unmask unsavoury secrets about his past.

Unreliable Confession

“All this I remembered, even though it never happened.”

Vander narrates his past and present in explicitly confessional and increasingly self-serving terms, often distancing himself from the causes and consequences of his actions.

“There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text.”

After initially claiming to “speak only of what I know, or what I can vouch for”, Vander rambles, fully aware of the inadequacy of his memory, his flights of imagination, and that “all my life I have lied… even when there was no need”

Regular, shorter passages are described from Cass’s point of view, but why should we trust them, plausible though they are? Her delusions make her inherently confused, and Vander's motives and thus inferences can't be trusted either.

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

Mental Health and Identity

“So often the train of her thoughts carried her far beyond herself, or went off on its own way, without her. Did she think, or was she thought? She could get no steady hold on things.”

Cass has the fictitious Mandelbaum’s Syndrome: since childhood she’s heard voices and been prone to seizures and blackouts. She is “fully conscious, but… conscious somewhere else”. Afterwards, she retains a sensation “of being afloat, dulled and motionless… while everything rushed past her on all sides, the world itself and all that was in it, dense, clear and swift.”

At other times, her attention to minutiae is akin to hyperaesthesia, akin to the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine (my review HERE). She sees the details, but struggles to connect them into the portents she craves.

“In her version of the world everything was connected; she could trace the dissolution of empires to the bending of a blade of grass, with herself at the fulcrum of the process. All things attended her. The farthest-off events had a direct effect on her, or she had an effect on them. The force of her will, and all her considerable intellect, were fixed upon the necessity of keeping reality in order. This was her task, and hers alone.”

Vander is a WW2 refugee now living in Arcady, California, where “everyone had been someone else”. He has written about the “inexistence of self” and views identity as fragmentary and mouldable. “Am I not, like everyone… thrown together from a legion of selves?”. But that is no excuse.  Although an intelligent adult, Cass is almost as unable to consent as Lolita. Vander is not only aware of the fact - he explicitly relishes it.

Names

“To name another is somehow to unname oneself.”

Banville plays with names, as is his wont. We have a trio of alliterative women: Cass Cleave, Kristina Kovacs, and Lady Laura. Meanwhile, Axel Vander, (grand)father figure, is a near acronym of Alexander, the actual father of Cass, who is properly Catherine, although Cass, redolent of sign-seeking prophetess, Cassandra, is more apt.

The distinction between Axel Vander and just Vander echoes the issue of identity and selfhood. The first refers to the real original young Axel Vander, beautiful son of a rich diamond merchant. The second refers to the friend, now old, who took on his identity. Similarly, there is Cass and Cass Cleave. The former is used in Vander’s first person narration. The second is used in the third person sections told from her point of view.

Cleave is ripe with contradictory meanings, exploited to the full, and various forms of the word recur, not just as a surname. A symbolic vase spontaneously cleaves when its owner dies, triggering the analogy that Cass is “another tall, tense, fissile vessel waiting to be cloven in two”, but meanwhile, she clings.

Sacred and Profane

There are many nods to holy ritual and iconography, often soiled by sin: a pen is a “sacred sceptre… with its profane relics wrapped safely inside”; a waiter proffers a drink as if it were a chalice; a couple stand like an altarpiece; a doctor gives a blessing, and a protruding lower lip is “in permanent expectation of receiving some drop of sacred distillate from above”. And until Cass finds the key that unlocks the connections and meaning in everything she studies so meticulously, “she must simply perform the rites”. When Vander is unwell, she nurses him with “an almost sanctified sense of purpose… He was her vocation now”.

Vander’s distancing from events hints at a visceral desire for excuse, if not expiation. “Everything had been taken from me, therefore everything was to be permitted.”

And sex, of course, can be both, though Vander makes it sound ugly: “To thrust a limb of one’s living flesh into the living flesh of another, how can that be other than a sacred or sacrilegious act?”

Fathers and Daughters

Banville’s obsession. Lines are blurred, and dark things implied. Is it better to keep such things wrapped and buried?

Cass tells someone that Vander is her father, though he’s actually old enough to be her grandfather. It is strongly, regularly hinted here, and in the other two books, that  her relationship with her own father is more intimate than it should be: “She had always been fascinated by her father’s mouth”, including his breath and bristles. And “there were times when she would feel shy of him… almost revulsion, and more even than that”. When her mother says in a phone call that he has gone “to live with the ghost of his Mammy” (the plot of Eclipse), Cass is glad that he has gone. Yet she tells Vander she was in love (note the preposition) with her father, and when she dies,  she imagines her father behind her, telling her to jump.

Quotes about Light

As with all the Banvilles I’ve read, there are many beautiful descriptions of light. (There are also numerous mentions of smells and stinks, and in this story, Cass’s blackouts are preceded by the smell of almonds - which is also (though it's not mentioned) the smell of cyanide.)

Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers.

•t“The cone of gold-dusted light that bathes me in its underserved benevolence.”

•t“Phantoms of shadow hung about, trying not to be noticed.”

•t“The neuralgic light of early morning.”

•t“How uninsistent was the sunlight in this part of the world, a matt radiance, unvarying and calm.”

•t“At the corner, where an angled block of buttery sunlight leaned.”

•t“The sun was being stealthily swallowed by a fat, bare moving cloud, putty-grey and burning silver all along its forward edge.”

•t“Gauzy folds of shadow.”

•t“Scintillas of rain were sprinkled through it [hair], an incongruous jewelling.”

•t“The moon’s scurfy silver face gloating over the city.”

•t“An English spring all sleet and spiked, wet sunlight.”

•t“In the spiked sunlight of morning the place had a slightly sweaty, panting atmosphere.”


Quotes About Relationships

Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers.

•t“My life with her was a special way of being alone… [living] in a state of mutual incomprehension.”

•t“Smiling at me with angry brightness… he murmured with honeyed bitterness.”

•t“Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves?”

•t“Those bloated prototypes” - older siblings!

•t“Only someone incapable of love could love so selflessly.” (Said of Vander.)


Miscellaneous Quotes

Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers.

•t“The dead, though, have their voice. The air through which I move is murmurous with absences. I shall soon be one of them.”

•t“Weaving through the lies a few, fine, shining threads of truth.”

•t“Her black eyes bright with fond malice and amusement.”

•t“Her skin was warm and dry, and seemed to vibrate tinily all over its surface.”

•t“A faint breeze… put its ineffectual hands against her face.”

•t“In the frost smoke of winter mornings their [chimneys’] upper reaches would crumble into dreamy insubstantiality.”

•t“Dressed with the studied negligence of the true dandy.”

•t“The stolen object… takes on a mysterious weight.”

•t“Anyone can die, of course, at any moment… Afterwards… we seem to discern in even the unlikeliest extinction an inevitability… This is where ghosts come from.”

•t“Tyranny triumphs by offering its helpers the freedom to fulfil their most secret and most base desires... its victims too can be made free men.”

•t“Grown old, the imagination… tends to play unnerving tricks. Visions that in youth or even middle age would seem no more than daydreams… reify into what feel overwhelmingly like actual and immediate experiences. The familiar will shift and slide… A known face will turn into that of a stranger.”


Vander at his Vilest

Hidden for brevity, good taste, and minor plot spoilers.

•tVander realises from first meeting that Cass is “one of the crazed ones”. That just stokes his libido, “For certain, I would have fun with this one” and “The chaos and violence of her mind… fascinated me”. He knows what he has done: “She was demented, and hardly more than a child… I betrayed that trust.”

•tHe claims to love Cass, but thinks “Love is only an urge to isolate and be in total possession of another human being”. Who would want “love” on those terms?

•t“Deep down it is all I have ever wanted, really, to step out of myself and clamber bodily into someone else.” He says this when writing about desire for Cass, but it applies less literally to the original Axel Vander.

•t“I would open up her flesh itself like a coat, unzip her from instep to sternum and climb bodily into her, feel her shocked heart gulp and skip, her lungs shuddering, clasp her blood-wet bones in my hands.” Yuk.

•tHe’s physically repellent, too: “the pot belly and the shrunken acorn below and its bag suspended by an attenuated string of yellowed skin like a head of garlic on its stalk”.

•tSex and death, the “little death”. Inextricably linked in Vander’s mind. He imagines - in detail - a dying woman having sex, and sucks the soiled knickers of a dead woman, her “profane relics”.


Image and Latin Sources

Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers.

Veiled women by Antonio Corradini: http://www.lionesswomansclub.com/1902...

“Media vita in morte sumus” means “In the midst of life we are in death”. Cranmer’s English translation is in the burial service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Or as T S Eliot extrapolated a similar idea, "I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me."



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.

Banville consegue escrever sobre a morte, a memória, a doença, a literatura, a vida, de uma maneira fascinante. Aqui, junta-se o ingrediente "mentira", mantida durante quase uma vida, sob um argumento fantástico. Dotado de uma sensibilidade literária para mim acima da média, Banville tem aqui mais uma obra altamente recomendável.

I couldn't even finish it, the paragraphs brimming with pretentious and boring text were more than I could bear. Not a book to be enjoyed.

Šta ti je ovo trebalo, mili moj Banvile?

Da mi već dva puta nije pokazao da je stilski otmen, pametan i odmeren, popljuvala bi ga na pasja kola, crnje nego Makjuana onomad.

O, kakvi izlivi saharinske otužnosti, sveto nebo!

Redom, stvari stoje ovako: priča je množina živopisnih scena, uzbudljiva, napisana dinamično (sve sa pojedinostima o koitusima i felacijima), čak kao i misteriozna (iako predvidljiva). Uz to je i Banvilova leksika prilično raspojasana, ne smara ni za trenutak nekakvim eksursima, pa bi trebalo da se dopadne onima koji čitaju pre svega zbog radnje i obrta (dakle, kome se sviđa Makjuanovo "Iskupljenje", na primer ili Išigurov "Zakopani džin" - tu vrstu mučnine mi je izazivao ovaj roman).

Protagonista je odurna ličnost, grozomorna matora drtina, prevarant i lažnjak u svakom smislu, koji se, zahvaljujući drskosti i beskropuloznosti, ozbiljno nabludeo i naprovodio u životu, silno prosperirao svakoraznim malverzacijama, pa i čak izašao na glas uglednog profesora književnosti (recimo). Protagonistkinja je luđakinja, triput mlađa, opsednuta njegovim delom, te, zahvaljujući revnošću fanatične obožavateljke (i malo odurno mističnih okolnosti koje Banvil dodaje) uspeva da prokljuvi pojedinosti koje je ovaj tajio pola veka. I tako se oni, gomilom detalja razrađivani od korice do korice knjige, no ipak neubedljivi – sretnu. Zovu se Kes i Aksel što mi je došlo kao dodatna bljutavost.

E onda Banvil doda a p s o l u t n o s v e što bi teško moglo pasti na pamet i najnaloženijem scenaristi C produkcije, pa samo kita i svatovi fale.

Međutim, koliko god „Pokrov“ ličio na pokušaj da se izađe u bestselerje, a ja bila na ivici šinem u venu špricinu insulina, iz drugog plana (petog, ako ćemo pošteno) nije baš tako i to je jedini razlog što ću i dalje tvrditi da je Džon Banvil dobar pisac i nastaviti da ga čitam. Glavni lik je, zapravo, Hambert, lujka je evropejski obzirnija Lolita i ovo je, uz sve aluzije na Šelija, Bajrona, Petrarku, komediju del arte i svakakva čuda – omaž Nabokovu (za početak i najočiglednije). Ima se još koješta tu istresti – poigrava se formom, smisleno likove oslovljava čas ovako čas onako, planski menja naratore i prepliće događaje, krati ili duži rečenice, namerno patetiše, prilično često mu bljesne sjajna metafora ili stilska bravurica i tako redom, pa bi pregrubo bilo reći da je u pitanju trećerazredni filozofski roman koji palamudi na temu identiteta. Al’ po mnogo tankoj ivici hoda. Što se mene tiče, preko ga strovaljuje pitanje ljubavi koje je suvišno, neuklopivo i trebalo je da ga se mane.

Da smirim savest, još jednom ću istaći da nema ni cele dve smarajuće rečenice, pa je u tom smislu idealna za neko dugačko dosadno putovanje ili čekanje, ali da bi, uprkos tome, sve ispalo mnogo bolje da je kraće za (najmanje!) polovinu. Ovo je deo neke trilogije, mislim drugi, i moguće je da bih promenila utisak kada bih sastavila celinu, ali mi to ne pada na pamet. Ostaću uverena da Banvil ima kapaciteta za poduhvat koga se latio, pa ću mu dati tri, ali da - iz već nekog razloga - stvar nije uspela.

Sad idem da nađem nekog Nemca da me detoksikuje.

Compared with many of his other works, this novel benefits from a redemptive arc traversed by the narrator. It's still hard to read this book, like many others by the same author, however, because there are few sympathetic characters to engage the reader. The prose is excellent, the topics are sometimes interesting, but it is just really tiring to have to wade through all this stuff not liking anyone in the book.

https://delsharm.blog.ir/1400/08/14/s...

«چه کسی حرف می‌زند. صدای اوست در سرم. می‌ترسم تا سکوت نکنم، بس نکند. تا با خودم در این خیابان حرف می‌زنم، با من حرف می‌زند، چیزهای می‌گوید که دوست ندارد بشنوم. گاهی پاسخش می‌دهم، بلند با او مخالفت می‌کنم، و از او می‌خواهم مرا آرام بگذارد.» (اولین جملات رمان)



«کفن» اثر «جان بنویل» در سال ۲۰۰۲ منتشر شده است و آخرین کار قبل از رمان «دریا» برندهٔ جایزهٔ بوکر است. این اثر از چند جهت حائز اهمیت است. اول آن که از حیث راوی غیرقابل اتکا بنویل خواسته تا ته امکانات این سبک روایت را دربیاورد. راوی پیرمردی است که برای سخنرانی‌ای دربارهٔ نیچه به تورین ایتالیا می‌رود. بعدتر می‌فهمیم او از بیماری فراموشی رنج می‌برد. در میانهٔ داستان متوجه می‌شویم هدف اصلی‌اش از سفر به تورین دیدار با زن جوانی است که بعدها دلباختهٔ او می‌شود. کمی که می‌گذرد می‌فهمیم پیرمرد در جوانی از هراس این که نازی‌ها او را به خاطر یهودی بودنش آزار دهند، هویت «اکسل وندلر» که نویسنده‌ای معروف بوده و جوان‌مرگ شده از آن خود می‌کند. جاهایی خط روایت از زاویهٔ‌ دید «کَس» بیان می‌شود و گاهی شک داریم این زن است که داستان را بیان می‌کند یا پیرمرد. پایان‌بندی داستان غافلگیرکننده است. دومین نقطهٔ اهمیت داستان جمله‌بندی‌های هوشمندانهٔ نویسنده است و گاهی فلسفه‌بازی‌های اوست. قبل‌تر در مورد کار دیگر «بنویل» نیز گفته بودم که با همهٔ این نقاط قوت داستان‌هایش کشش کافی برای دنبال کردن ندارد و چند بار وسوسه شدم خواندنش را نیمه رها کنم.



عنوان داستان چیست؟ اشاره به قرار دیدن «کفن»ی است که در کلیسای تورین به عنوان کفن به جامانده از صلیب مسیح به نمایش گذاشته شده است اما هیچ وقت نمی‌توانند به آنجا بروند. در زبان انگلیسی این واژه به معنای «در لفافه گفتن» نیز است که این دوپهلو گفتن عنوان شبیه خود روایت است و به کلیت داستان می‌آید.

Shroud is the second novel in John Banville's father-and-daughter trilogy involving Alexander and Cassandra Cleave, and can be read as a companion to Banville's novel, Eclipse. (Ancient Light is the third novel in the trilogy.) Whereas Cassandra appeared in Eclipse through her father's melancholy reflections of his estranged and possibly schizophrenic daughter, she appears in Shroud through the dreamlike reflections of her lover, Axel Vander, an aging European intellectual. Much of the novel tells the story of their troubled love affair in Turin, ending with the events described in the final pages of Eclipse. The story resonates with issues of identity, duplicity, and loss. Although Banville has described Shroud as "a dark, hard, cruel book," his writing in Shroud is luminous.

This is a mysterious and riveting book. Read it if you love words and language and the old-fashioned well-crafted sentence. The story is rather ordinary. And there is almost no dialog or action. But the baroque lushness of the prose is enough to keep the reader engaged.

This book sucks. The story line is predictable and boring, and the flowery language attempts to prop up the whole fiasco but, I’m my humble opinion, fails miserably. I read this book because I had it on my shelf for almost 9 years and after what felt like countless abortive attempts to read it, I decided this summer was the summer where I would prevail. I spent 3 weeks force feeding myself this book and when I was oh so very close to the end - like 15 pages? - I buckled. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I skimmed the remainder and then read the last page. And you know what? The last page sucked too.

Never again.

On re-reading Shroud, my admiration for John Banville and this book has grown. Banville is quoted as saying that Shroud is his favorite among his books, that it came closest to his conception of the novel, but it is his "monster child" that he loves best and readers find hard to like. That has been true for me. Shroud has not been the one I would have chosen first among Banville's books, or fifth. But familiarity breeds esteem in this case. I re-read it to prepare to read Ancient Light, and I find myself drawn into, and continuing days later to puzzle over the enigma that is its central image. Axel Vander is one of the least sympathetic in a long line of unsympathetic Banville protagonists, but I find myself thinking that he is me and that Banville has revealed the dark secrets that torment me, even as I wonder over the mystery of this book, who tells the story and whether I believe him, the crime at its heart, and even if there is any crime at all.