Banville may be one of the best living writers.

sorry, this is a stub review without quotes, as I managed once again to lose my electronic footnotes and bookmarks in the text. e-ink is a wonderful technology, but it still has some kinks left to straighten up. I am especially peeved this happened with my first John Banville novel, as I was both enthusiastic and baffled by the text.

The title is an oblique reference to the famous holy / faked image of Christ captured in blood on an ancient piece of fabric and stored in a shrine in Turin, Italy. Alex Vander and Cassandra Cleave wander the streets of the ancient city, looking more inward than outward, attempting in vain at one point of the journey to see the celebrated shroud. They are forced to confront instead the ghosts of their past, the misunderstandings and the missteps of the present, the true faces that they hide from the world behind the masks they wear for public consumption.

Alex and Cass as a couple are about as incompatible as you can get in a relationship. He is a cranky old intellectual with a volcanic temperament and a lifelong habit of lies and dissimulation. A lion in winter, is how I picture him, thinking of a famous movie with Peter O'Toole. He is in his seventies, crippled in one leg and blind in one eye, allegedly as a result of torture in Occupied Europe during WW II. His physical illness is not helped along by his heavy drinking and aggravating disposition. she is very young and very shy, an introvert who is fighting a crippling secret mental condition (revealed as Mandelbaum's syndrome later in the book). What brings them together is again connected with the events in Belgium before and during the German Occupation. Alex Vander is brought out of his California retirement from a very successful academic career in letters by a short phone message from Cass, who has information about the past he has been trying all his life to hide. They arrange to meet in a hotel in Turin, and Alex does his worst to dominate, disgust and drive away Cass  including rape . Perversely, he is also hugging her close, delving into his past like worrying over a broken tooth, relishing the pain and the horror he reveals to the young girl and to the readers.

If I mentioned the words plot and action in the context of this novel, it's better to ignore them. The focus is on higher concepts, mainly the idea of 'self' as an elusive, misleading and inconstant element. It starts easy, Vander doing what all of us have probably done at one point or another in our lives: reinventing ourselves to fit into our environment, putting on masks that eventually become our 'true' personality, telling lies about our past and about our emotions in order to gain prestige or to be accepted socially.

In Alex Vander's particular case, the lies that Cass Cleave is forcing him to confront relate to his youth in Belgium, his friendship with an intelligent and relatively rich Jewish young man  whose identity he would later steal , and his early efforts at writing for a newspaper some strongly anti-semitic articles that can still ruin the older Vander's reputation. In a deeper sense, Alex Vander is still lying to the reader and to himself, hiding behind his brilliant way with words, alternately showing us a sensitive, caring side of his personality that will be contradicted a couple of pages later with gleeful callousness.

The whole novel long interior monologue is a veritable tour de force of literary excellence, playing with the reader's expectation like an expert angle fisherman patiently bringing to shore a difficult catch. The few reviews I browsed in compensation for my missing bookmarks are all comparing John Banville with Nabokov, and there is a strong case to be made, both regarding the unpleasant, even disgusting protagonist, and the literary sparkle of the text. In an interview, the autor claimed what he is trying to do with his prose is to achieve the density and the intensity of poetry, and I must admit that he is succesful here, in the first but probably not the last of his books that I read. On a personal level, I felt like I have wandered into a Michelangelo Antonioni movie, a space of silences and anxieties where everything happens behind the mirrors of the actors' eyes, and the viewer is experiencing everything on a very subjective and emotional level.

I wil end my improvised review with the only word that has survived my electronic bookmark fiasco:

apocatastasis as in reconstitution, restitution, or restoration to the original or primordial condition. Is the whole literary exercise of Alex Vander's confessions an effort to win redemption for his past sins? Can this be done by making new sins against an innocent soul, like Cass Cleave?

Questions that will probably need a more careful re-read in order for me to find some pertinent answers.

I think I stumbled into a jungle of complexity by reading this as my second experience with this incredibly gifted writer. My first sense was similar to Pale Fire by Nabokov in the intellectually-dense, often darkly funny narrative voices employed. The writing in Shroud is more often poetry than prose in some ways, it is so stylistic and dense. So beautiful, really. I had to review some of the Nietzsche I was exposed to as a college boy to get my bearings at times. I don't recommend this as a pleasure to read: the protagonist is a monster in many ways, the resolution of the plot is not satisfying, and the exploration of what is ugly in relationships is visceral and thorough. Yet, it's a masterful work, and I should spend more time trying to figure out what I just read!

Banville writes beautiful prose, and he deals with serious themes. I can't help feel, however, that he's in danger of writing the same story over and over. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good book, but it is another ornate, precise, heavily allusive novel about an elderly male character who is the unreliable narrator of his own story, whose identity is fluid, and who spends a lot of time reflecting on the themes of truth, representation, and memory. Now, I love all those techniques and themes, but I feel like Banville has used them and examined them in at least three of his novels (that I have read) already, and I don't think Shroud is his best treatment of them (in my opinion, that would be The Untouchable). Still, this is a better, more serious, more engaging, and more stimulating novel than 99% of contemporary novels.

Alex Vander, an aging scholar, carries a deep secret. He fears he is going to be uncovered at last by the daughter of a noted actor. The story is told in meandering internal dialogue. The writing is brilliant, but so eccentric that it may put some off -- including me! I am a huge admirer of Banville, but I found this style of story-telling occasionally frustrating. There is a real plot, however, and a dramatic ending.

Bravo, maestro! Banville is indeed "Hypnotic... Demonstrates the continuing relevance of words like artistry and masterpiece," according to the New York Times Book Review. As I think I say in every review of a Banville book, he is my new favorite contemporary author. His narrators are complex and complicated - rarely truthful, often thieves, reliably unreliable. This book is part of his favorite theme of exploring one's identity. Who are we truly? Although I didn't see it at first, "Shroud" is the perfect title for this book on many levels. I won't spoil it for you - you'll see it too.

In "Shroud" Banville creates a monstrous protagonist, a train wreck of a man who is not who or what he seems, whose identity is lost even to himself. Yet, despite the deck that Banville stacks against Axel Vander, this reader was compelled to follow his unconscious quest to be revealed - and reviled - for who he truly is. He knowingly flies too close to the sun but does not exactly suffer Icarus' fate.

Pick up a John Banville book today. The man is a master of the English language, plot, character development, and entertainment. He's brilliant. I've got a mad literary crush on him!

Reconozco que lo he tenido que dejar, porque no podía más.
He leído con envidia las críticas donde hablan de lo maravilloso que les ha parecido, y el asombro por la manera de describir de Banville en este libro.
Yo sólo puedo decir que cuando dedicas media página a describir la vida de un médico, que sólo ha venido a darle una medicina al protagonista, me aburro.
Me aburro mucho cuando no pasa nada, y sólo hay extensísimas descripciones de todo. La primera mitad del libro son 100 páginas de nada. Un encuentro y sus preparativos.
La segunda mitad, hasta donde he podido llegar, tiene algo más, pero tan poco, que no ha justificado el esfuerzo

While I think I enjoyed this book more than the only other Banville I've read so far, Eclipse, and I recognize its merits, as I did with Eclipse, I still can't say I really like it (4 stars) as opposed to just liking it.

I recognized, and enjoyed, the allusions to mythological gods and oracles and shrouds of all kinds, and the musing on the nature of identity(-ies), but I still felt as if I missed a lot, especially after reading the acknowledgments (at the end of the book) to Althusser and Paul De Man, writers I don't know.

I suppose the book does stand on its own without one knowing all the references, but I'm still not sure what to make of it all. In many ways, I feel about Banville the same way I feel about Peter Carey -- I'll try him again, but I'm not sure he's for me.

*

Addendum: I went back to Eclipse and reread all the parts mentioning Cass Cleave (amazing what you forget in only 2 years, though also amazing how it comes back as you read mere phrases), as she is a common denominator. In Eclipse, she's seen through the eyes of her father Alex; here, it's Axel Vander, who is old enough to be her great-grandfather, as he says.

Not sure if it means anything, but here Axel mocks a colleague who's written a work on Rousseau's (abandoned) children and in Eclipse, Cass attempts and abandons such a work, with Alex not thinking highly of such an endeavor.

Impressive and disappointing.

Part I is very exciting--Paul de Man in the voice and body of a Beckett cripple. The malevolence and disdain may feel a little borrowed, but no one will deny the facility with which it is carried off. Fun language, fun thought. The story of a man who took the name of a beautiful Aryan friend to escape Nazi Europe, even though the dead, beautiful, wealthy friend wrote a few anti-Semitic newspaper articles. Then the changeling goes on to reach the heights of academia as a critical theorist in America. At 80+, he is threatened with exposure, of a Nazi past that is not his, of a name that doesn't belong to him, by a deranged young woman who may only want to get near to him.

The question is posed, What is our true nature? Are we closest to our true selves when we self-create, which is to say lie? Are we closest when we steal the identity of the man we wish to be and make of the theft and our own will to transform something greater than what we were or what the desired man might have been? And the account we are reading--its integrity is unstable. Whe de Man character falls in with a young woman who threatens to expose his impolitic past, they become lovers, and at one point he tells her she can write his biography. She can even write it in the first-person, he says. A lovely trick, adding onto the identity theft in the narrative another that we might have no way of knowing for sure.

Then the final third of the novel, which is not so much disastrous as it is puzzling. Because it begins packing up its uncertainties and disturbances at the moment when they should be proliferating out of control. Not to mention that Banville has the narrator fall in love, which may be a nod to Beckett's "First Love," but which is all the same out of place, a betrayal of the character, and perhaps a misreading of Beckett. Rather than uncertainties and questions of identity, we are left with received certitudes, and these are of the usual WWII-Holocaust kind, the persistence of blood, the penalties of turning one's back on the tribe, etc. Killing off the girl while pregnant makes a certain "literary" parallelism sense, but Banville ought to be strong enough to resist easy symmetries for the more roilsome energies a story like this can unleash.

The most overwritten book I’ve ever read. Don’t bother.

Las dos historias de Banville que he leído hasta el momento están protagonizadas por ancianos que han perdido a sus esposas y vagan por territorios que rodearon sus años jóvenes y van desgranando recuerdos.
Pasaron su juventud en ambientes de clase media-alta a la que no pertenecían ni pertenecerán nunca.
Ambos relatos no parecen ser la alegría de la huerta , o mejor dicho, de la estantería, pero sus respectivos protagonistas poseen la huella del viejo gruñón de la casa Banville ; viven entre achaques, esputos,gases,caspa, vómitos y sudor frío. No son del agrado de nadie ni tienen ganas de serlo.
Dignos de vivir la pantalla del cine en la piel del más crepuscular Clint Eastwood.

Me estoy refiriendo a la laureada "El Mar" (2005) y a ésta "Imposturas"(2003) que teóricamente se encuadra en su propia trilogía.
El libro está en cierto modo inspirado en la vida del crítico literario belga Paul De Man, crecido en un país ocupado por los nazis y luego emigrado a los Estados Unidos.
Alex Vander, setentón de gran prestigio en el mundo de las letras, vive en su artificial refugio californiano y aparece ante todos como héroe salido de la Europa en guerra y personaje hecho a sí mismo hasta llegar a ser una autoridad literaria.
En realidad "Vander" es un superviviente nato, judío renegado y alcohólico que ha ido perdiendo toda ligazón con la vida y topa extrañamente con una extraña y perturbada joven, la irlandesa Cass Cleave.
La novela posee dos partes bien diferenciadas;
Un comienzo áspero, sórdido, surrealista por momentos, donde narra la ruinosa existencia de Alex Vander y su encuentro-encontronazo sexual en Turín con la delicada e inestable señorita Cleave. El monstruo cojo, mancado y tuerto .La lívida doncella.

Una segunda parte, más fluida, que va desenterrando el pasado oculto de Vander mientras la insólita pareja se pasea por Italia y frecuenta las "amistades" del venerado gurú de la literatura.
Es el canto del cisne de Alex Vander, que por un momento vive la ilusión gracias a Cass. Pero ésta siente la llamada de Percy Shelley desde las profundidades.

Muuuuuuito bem escrito, mas com um péssimo ritmo na trama. Não tem escrita boa q segure uma história arrastada.