Not one of the best I've read by Banville, but intermittently engaging. He remains one of my favorites. I loved the female protagonist "Miss Nemesis". Probably the best Banville female I've found so far.

Often a writer will express with sculptured eloquence an idea or an impression one has had oneself but never clearly formulated. Twice, early on, Banville did the opposite. He took an idea and an impression I have and got it completely wrong! This is a descriptive passage of a night-time train journey across Europe - “The train kept stopping at deserted stations and would stand for long minutes, creaking and sighing in the night-deep, desolate silence.” Desolate? No! I often get the Paris to Florence night train and the silence when the train stops at stations in the middle of the night is anything but desolate; it’s like the silence that arrives after a fresh covering of snow when you have the illusory impression that all can be begun again from scratch. Then he compares hotels to hospitals. No! Hospitals are scary; hotels are exciting!

This is a tough one. I really should have enjoyed this – it’s set in Italy and it’s written by a novelist who treats sentence writing as an artistic discipline in itself. And yet I was often bored by it and couldn’t help feeling that he was striving so hard to be Nabokov that at times it read like fan fiction. It’s a clever novel but it’s also a bit crass – it was obvious from the start we were going to get a kind of Scrooge like redemption tale. Was the (Turin) shroud a clever stroke as a metaphor for an inward truth making an outward appearance or was that a bit crass too? Was it clever or was it crass to call the female keeper of Vander’s secret Cassandra?

“Banville's protagonist, and the narrator of most of the book, is Axel Vander, a European intellectual with an international reputation. Vander has achieved eminence by reading texts against their grain and rubbing people up the wrong way. He has spent his time 'trying to drum into those who would listen among the general mob of resistant sentimentalists surrounding me the simple lesson that there is no self.”
I especially struggled with the first half of this novel. The unrelenting melodramatic interior life of both characters was exhausting, as if they both continually ingested huge amounts of peyote to sustain their ongoing relationship with external life. Ideas of identity, selfhood play a big part in the novel’s central charge but, like almost everything else in this novel, were often unfurled in exaggerated and blustering forms. Vander is possibly one of the most wilfully obnoxious characters in literature (and I suppose Banville deserves some credit for this achievement). Problem for me was that there was too much strain and panting in Banville’s stylised prose and as a result rarely did Vander seem credible in his monstrous lack of generosity; rarely did Cassandra seem credible in her bottomless misery. Also it just went on too long. The first two hundred pages are essentially given over to creating Vander’s character which involved a relentless fusillade of showing us just how obnoxious he is. Banville was clearly enjoying himself and probably got carried away.

The novel all hinges on Vander’s wartime secret. Without giving away what the secret is I didn’t really buy the supposedly massive import of this secret. Vander was a Jew in occupied Belgium. In the circumstances who’s going to blame him for telling fibs to elude capture? I enjoyed the war section much more because the tension and tragedy of war was much better able to sustain the high melodrama of Banville’s stylised prose.

I also enjoyed the Shelley motif – the wide-eyed idealism of Shelley the polar opposite of Vander’s caustic misanthropy. Ultimately Cassandra will align herself to Shelley.

It’s a dangerous game trying to write a Nabokovian novel. So often I was reminded while reading this how infinitely better were Pale Fire and Pnin. Quite possibly it would have been a much better novel had it been shorn of about 100 pages. I remember The Sea being a better novel though.

I usually love Banville. But despite the usual extraordinary writing, this book left me cold. The story is of an elderly man who has been impersonating someone else for nearly his whole life. I could not find a way to like or even empathize with the main character. He is completely self-centered, is an alcoholic and his relationships with women are exploitative. The ending contains one incomprehensible event, and a final revelation that it was hard for me to care about. Why, Banville, did you write this? All this effort and beauty devoted to this appalling person. Hm.

Banville writes dense, introspective novels that leave you a little exhausted but wiser and tenderer. In Shroud he plays with the stereotype of the famous lecherous elder scholar, a character we can hate at first, but come to almost love by the end of the novel. A remarkable trip into vanity, regret, and history.

I read this as part of The Mookse and the Gripes group's project to revisit the 2002 Man Booker longlist. This was one of the longlisted books that missed the cut. It is also the second part of a trilogy that includes Eclipse and Ancient Light, which are both books I have read, but too long ago to remember clearly.

This one is a complex story full of allusions, and I suspect I missed many of them. Most of the book is narrated by "Axel Vander", an elderly widowed academic who was born in Belgium and has spent most of his life working in America. He travels to Turin, where he meets and falls in love with Cass Cleave, a much younger Irish woman who has been researching his life and work. His past is shrouded in secrecy - Axel Vander was actually the name of the narrator's dead friend, and he assumed it as part of his escape plan when his family were arrested by the Nazis. From time to time the focus shifts to Cass's perspective, and these sections are told in the third person.

As always Banville's writing is fluent, but he does use a lot of obscure words (the most memorable of which is pococurantish), and his paragraphs can be very long, so it is a book that demands concentration, but it is ultimately quite a rewarding read and it does have plenty of lighter moments, even as it builds towards a tragic conclusion.

I'm not really sure why this book made the list of top 1001 to read before you die. I have yet to figure out the message or the appeal to the novel. The writing was very poetic and a bit tough at times using words that are unfamiliar to me but that's probably the books only redeeming quality. There is next to no characters, or dialogue and everything that is written is very convoluted.

Voy a dejar que respire un poco. Si en unos días mi opinión es la misma que ahora, le doy 5 estrellas.

Ya han pasado unos días y sigo hipnotizado. 5 estrellas muy merecidas.

Meh. Shroud was well written and certainly led me to a good bit of interpreting, but it failed as a book because it was just so unapproachable. This is the problem with most contemporary fiction, I think. Shroud also suffers from another problem of contemporary fiction: too many readings are possible. When I go to a book, I don't want to do all the work myself; I like learning something from the author and being led by the plot to a certain idea. Though it is a good example of why contemporary fiction is a horrible wasteland, it also shows that, at times, there's always the chance of finding something that doesn't make your gut wretch. Hopefully we'll be out of this darkness soon...

"Mientras pensaba todo esto experimentó un momento de tan intenso –no supo cómo llamarlo-, de un algo tan intenso que la hizo palidecer. Todo tenía un significado, una función, un lugar en esa estructura, y nada era gratuito." JB

"Quando um nobre pensamento
conduz um coração jovem para além da morada mortal
e a vida e o amor lutam para assim decidir
qual era o seu destino terrestre, ali, vivem os mortos
e, nas noites tempestuosas, chegam como ventos de luz."
— n  Percy Shelleyn

THE CLEAVE TRILOGY - Livro II
O Impostor


(Francisco Goya, The Madness Of Fear)

Personagens principais
Axel Vander
n  Catherine Cleaven (filha de Alex e Lydia)
Magda (mulher de Axel)

Pequeno resumo
Axel Vander (o narrador) é um conceituado professor e escritor, com um passado obscuro, que se desloca a Itália para se encontrar com Catherine Cleave que lhe diz conhecer o seu segredo. Entre a jovem e o idoso desenvolve-se uma dramática e complexa relação.

n  "O tempo e a idade não me trouxeram a esperada sabedoria, mas confusão e uma incompreensão cada vez maior, traçando de ano para ano um novo círculo de ignorância. Que sei eu?"n

Nota: não dou muita importância às capas dos livros, mas a desta edição incomoda-me por ser completamente inadequada ao conteúdo deste livro. Quem a seleccionou não o pode ter lido, pois não é um romance cor-de-rosa, nem uma história amorosa entre dois jovens, como sugere a foto.

Usually when I finish a book I'm in the right frame of mind to rate it properly. I imagine someone asking me what I thought of it: "I really liked it..." or "It was amazing...!" and ascribe a star rating from there. With this book I'm totally torn.

I really loved the book. The prose, as others have said, is fantastic. Though at times the effusive description is laid on too heavy for its own good (e.g., "The coffee machine was still at its diarrhoeal labours..") I also thought some of the secondary characters lacked much depth.

What really sold me on this book was the love of detailed descriptions. Banville often takes you into soft focus on small objects and events to add detail to the story. I also really enjoyed how the plot shifts back and forth between stories, eventually building up to a conclusion; I thought it was skillfully done.

i was intrigued by the premise but found all of the few characters quite unappealing, especially the 2 main characters. 1 was an awful person & the other was quite pitiful. i couldn't tell where the story was going but i still wanted to know how it would all tie together. but it had an unsatisfying ending w/ too much confusion that was never clarified. the author's great writing was the only thing i enjoyed.