Le style de John Banville m’a aidée à aller jusqu’au bout de ce roman qui est intentionnellement confus. Le personnage principal n’étant en plus pas très sympathique mais « malsain » j’ai été malgré tout happée par cette atmosphère mystérieuse et glauque.

I reckon there’s a lot more to this book than Old Bloke gets saucy with young wan as is Banville’s wont. It’ll take some time to digest everything I read on these pages - and not just the velvet prose. What is for certain is that he seems to have absolutely owned both the privileged old white man character and the “whose life are we living” question.

I don't get it. I don't even understand why this book was titled Shroud. Maybe I'm just not a deep enough person to enjoy reading 'an intense moral parable'.

I found the writing TOO descriptive. I find I connect with a story through the characters and their relationships, not based on how the street they crossed sounded, looked and smelled. I needed more dialogue earlier in the book. We were in his head way too much.

Then, when we finally did get some dialogue and human interaction, it just didn't make sense. Cass was not a strong enough character, in my opinion. I just found I did not care one bit what happened to these people.

I only finished this book because I don't give up...the ending of a story can make or break it for me, so I always give it a chance to redeem itself. This novel did not. It was boring and convoluted throughout its entirety.

Right up there with Banville's best work. Exquisitely written, with some paragraphs at a level of virtuosity that make you want to book the book down and applaud. Fascinating, psychologically and historically (all the more so after discovering post-reading that this is based on a real character who adopted a similarly fabricated identity in the US after the Second World War). And as so often with Banville, the seemingly big thing (taking on somebody else's name and going on to live a prominent life in full public view) fades almost imperceptibly into the background, with the main focus drawn to the characters' more banal, relatable flaws and failings.

I love Irish fiction and John Banville is not only one of Ireland’s best prose stylists, he’s one of the best prose stylists writing today. He’s not a well-known author, and unfortunately, I doubt that he’ll ever be on the top of the bestseller list (unless as Benjamin Black), though he certainly deserves to be. His books are masterpieces of style; they are highly introspective, character driven stories of men who have attempted to build lives on the basis of fraud and deceit, only to see those lives eventually come tumbling down around them like the flimsiest house of cards. In The Untouchable, Banville introduced us to the art critic and Soviet agent, Anthony Blunt. In Eclipse, it was the embittered actor, Alex Cleave. In Shroud, it’s Axel Vander, virtuoso of the lie, who takes center stage, for Banville lets us know almost immediately, Axel Vander is not really Axel Vander, although Vander, himself says he is at the beginning of his tale:

My name is Axel Vander, on that much I insist. That much, if no more.

We first encounter Axel Vander in his home in quaint Arcady, California (a very thinly disguised Berkeley). Vander’s a Belgian born intellectual, a professor and internationally known literary scholar. But, as in all of Banville’s works, nothing is at it really seems, and we soon find out that Vander has much he’s been hiding. As Vander says:

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie.

It’s quite clear that Banville, who likes to base his novels on the lives of historical persons, has based the character of Axel Vander on Paul de Man, a Belgian born Yale scholar and founder of deconstrutivism. Although de Man was revered when he died in 1983, in 1987 it was discovered that as a young man in Belgium, he’d written several very anti-Semitic articles for the Flemish newspaper, Le Soir. Vander’s dead wife, Magda, even shares her name with de Man’s wife. Vander also seems to have been drawn, to a lesser degree, from French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, a man who, like de Man, was revered as a cult figure, and a man who, like Vander, murdered his own wife.

Although Vander seems proud of his lies, and proud that he’s gotten away with them, this decidedly misanthropic, elderly widower doesn’t like himself any more than he likes others. He’ll chase people away from him with his walking stick, he’s almost always drunk and he describes himself as a man with:

that gnarled leg, that crazily skewed dead eye, and all that sagging flesh, the pot belly and the shrunken acorn below and its bag suspended by an attenuated string of yellowed skin like the head of garlic on its stalk.

Axel Vander doesn’t spare others, but to his credit, he doesn’t spare himself, either.

The day we meet Axel, he’s just received a letter from a woman in Belgium, a researcher who's stumbled upon the truth of Axel’s past quite by accident and now, for reasons unknown, is threatening to unmask him. Axel is determined not to put up with any such thing, especially not so late in his life, when he has but little life left. He arranges to meet his nemesis in Turin, that northern Italian city whose claim to fame is that it is the home of the once revered Shroud of Turin, a shroud that has been shown to be as fake as is Axel Vander, himself.

Vander, a Nietzsche scholar, with "a passionate and all-consuming belief in nothing" plans on attending a seminar on Nietzsche at the university in Turin (the city where Nietzsche had his final breakdown), and he also plans on doing away with his would-be unmasker.

When Vander, who could hardly be a less sympathetic character, arrives in Turin, however, his nemesis is not who and what he thought she would be. When Vander meets Cass Cleave, a fair, fragile, red-haired Irish beauty, rather than feeling the murderous rage he was prepared to feel he felt:

…as if I had come face-to-face on a forest path with a rare and high-strung creature of the wild that had paused a second in quivering curiosity and would in another second be gone with a crash of leaves. I knew the type. They always sat at the highest tier of the lecture hall, fixed on me hungrily, never speaking a word unbidden.

Cass Cleave, it would seem, is certainly no match for Axel Vander. In addition to being frail and fragile, she suffers from Mandelbaum’s Syndrome, a syndrome that causes her to have seizures and aural hallucinations despite the fact that she’s tried several different kinds of medication, all with very allusive sounding names: Oread, Empusa, various Lemures and Lamia.

Shockingly, Vander and Cass embark upon an affair, and Vander says:

I loved her. I have allowed I hope a decent interval for the laughter, the jeers and the catcalls to subside.

In fact, Vander and Cass spend three months in Turin, making love, visiting castles and cemeteries and trying, in vain, to view the notorious shroud. As this unlikely duo makes its way around Turin, we are told most of the story in the first person, from Axel’s point of view, though at times, Banville switches to the third person and gives us Cass’s thoughts as well. Cass, we learn, is a woman fighting demons of her own, but just what those demons are, other than the syndrome to which she’s subject, is never made completely clear. Like Axel’s identity Cass’s demons, as well as her motives in contacting Axel Vander, are quite opaque and misty.

Axel Vander seems to be searching for "one last chance" in the person of Cass Cleave. He seems to see her as his redemption, and for that reason, his desire for her knows no bounds.

Cass doesn’t have quite the same passion for Axel, though she does feel much for him. She does, however, have a passion for death and she wishes to be:

Gone like that without a sound, like slipping out of a room and turning and quietly closing the door; in her mind she saw a hand, it was hers, slowly relinquish the polished knob and her miniature, curved reflection on it shrink to a dot of darkness and disappear.

Vander and Cass are, of course, both headed for tragedy on a grand scale. That’s not a spoiler; that’s something that’s obvious from page one.

As in all of John Banville’s books, ghosts and specters flit through Shroud. In particular, is a red-haired man who is always following Axel Vander. Whether this man is real or is simply a product of Vander’s fevered imagination is never made known, but one thing that is clear is that he is based on the red-haired man who shadowed von Aschenbach through much of Thomas Mann’s gorgeous novella, Death in Venice. And Vander and Cass eventually come to be seen as something of a King Lear and a Cordelia, though on a much less grand scale. Banville loves allusions and so do I, but Shroud, I think, may suffer from a few too many. The problem is, that while Banville’s languidly exquisite prose is still very much in evidence, the story, itself simply can’t support all the allusions Banville heaps upon it. And Axel Vander and Cass Cleave eventually come to be seen, not as Lear and Cordelia, but as Harlequin and Columbine.

I think it goes without saying that Axel Vander is a very unsympathetic figure, but Cass Cleave, despite her many problems...perhaps because of her many problems…is not a sympathetic figure, either. She’s barely more than a shadow, a wisp of a human being. While it’s difficult to understand what would entice her to enter into a sexual relationship with someone as unsavory as Vander, it’s even more of a mystery how someone so frail and fragile could endure Vander’s sexual predilections. It was also not believable to me that someone like Axel Vander, who had spent his entire adult life building and maintaining a lie, would see, in the very thinly drawn Cass Cleave, a chance for redemption. Indeed, it strains credibility to even think that Axel Vander would even consider redemption to be something he should seek.

The book begins wonderfully and I could see that Banville was going to explore one of his favorite themes: the uncertainty of identity and the fragility of the self, but about halfway through the book, at the point where Axel and Cass begin their love affair, all verisimilitude, for me, at least, was lost. Axel Vander committed his crimes so he could come to the United States because there he says he would not be required to be or do anything. He could be pure existence, itself. And now he is risking throwing it all away.

Cass Cleave just wasn’t a strong enough character to cause this kind of change in anyone, although Vander says:

I seized on her to be my authenticity….She was my last chance to be me.

Okay, fine. But Axel Vander has spent the last sixty years obliterating "me. I just couldn’t buy his sudden turn around simply because Cass Cleave discovered his real identity. And that brings me to yet another problem with this book.

Shroud is an extremely atmospheric book, drenched in death and decay. Some of the descriptions of rain-soaked Turin are gorgeous in the extreme and the book is almost worth reading for those descriptions alone. But, Banville has filled Shroud with mystery. He’s set his readers up for a huge revelation that never comes. And what little does come is pretty inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things. Certainly nothing worthy of the demons both Vander and Cass are attempting to elude.

I’m not sorry I read Shroud. I did thoroughly enjoy it, more than some better written books, and I am an admitted "Banville junkie." I want to read everything he writes, if not for the story, then simply for the gorgeous prose. Perhaps Edna O’Brien, a fellow countryman of Banville’s is the only author writing today who can string words together as beautifully as does Banville.

Although gorgeously written in Banville’s exquisitely voluptuous prose, and to the author’s credit, eschewing all sentimentality, in the end, Shroud just doesn’t pull it together. Still, I would recommend it, as long as the reader knows he won’t be entirely satisfied in the end.

In quanto l’individuo, di fronte ad altri individui, vuole conservarsi, egli utilizza per lo più l’intelletto, in uno stato naturale delle cose, soltanto per la finzione: ma poiché al tempo stesso l’uomo, per bisogno e per noia, vuole esistere socialmente come in un gregge, egli è spinto a concludere la pace, e tende a far scomparire dal suo mondo almeno il più rozzo bellum omnium contra omnes. Questo trattato di pace porta in sé qualcosa che si presenta come il primo passo per raggiungere quell’enigmatico impulso alla verità. A questo punto viene fissato ciò che in seguito dovrà essere la «verità»; in altre parole, viene inventata una designazione delle cose uniformemente valida e vincolante, e la legislazione del linguaggio fornisce altresì le prime leggi della verità. Sorge qui infatti, per la prima volta, il contrasto tra verità e menzogna. Il mentitore adopera le designazioni valide, le parole, per fare apparire come reale ciò che non è reale.
(Nietzsche, Su verità e menzogna in senso extramorale)



La maschera (come sudario, sindone (e ci troviamo proprio a Torino), oppure come il titolo originale: Shroud, velo, eccetera, se indossata ci conduce alla menzogna...



Tutto ciò che è profondo ama la maschera; le cose più profonde hanno per l'immagine e l'allegoria perfino dell'odio. (...) Ogni spirito profondo ha bisogno di una maschera: e più ancora, intorno a ogni spirito profondo cresce continuamente una maschera, grazie alla costantemente falsa, cioè superficiale interpretazione di ogni parola, di ogni passo, di ogni segno di vita che egli dà.

(Nietzsche, Al di là del bene e del male, 40)



Il mio vero punto di partenza e la mia vera destinazione sono sempre altrove, sebbene io non sappia dove possa trovarsi esattamente quell’altrove...

(50)



Può sembrare troppo ovvio se ti dico che si tratta di un altro Io – non sono, come tutti, come te, soprattutto come te, mia mutevole amica frutto dell’assemblaggio di una legione di Io?



(156)

Proper Names

The smoothest prose in the business. One does not so much read Banville as float luxuriously in his velvet sentences. And he shows himself in Shroud as a master at the slow reveal. It's like hearing Bolero or Nina Simone in Little Girl Blue, ever so gradually approaching a climax that you do and don't want to arrive. Every detail and slight reversal coming at just the right moment so the beat is never missed even as it becomes more forceful and impulsive. A story of the complex, long-term effects of survivor-guilt. A man tries to escape his identity and finds it in a woman who has no knowable identity at all, but is merely a collection of historical anecdotes. With the usual handful of handy new theological, medical and culinary additions to one’s vocabulary: estaminet, crepitant, pococurantish, blastula, and gallimaufry among them. Banville at his best.

An old renown writer going by the name of Axel Vander receives an anonymous letter, someone has found his secret, which is, he is not what he purports to be. It is from here, that the unfolding of the protagonist begins.

This being the first book I have read by John Banville, I am impressed by his skill and ability to craft such a brilliant unreliable narrator as his protagonist is. Axel Vander, is a rude, self-absorbed, self-important, selfish individual who for the most part talks and thinks solely of himself, everything and everyone else simply being complementary to his needs, wants, whims and thoughts. His narration going on and on—he truly does not shut up—provides an examination of self, which is the main theme of the story. To sum it up: what is the genuine self and the layers we form to create and mask our identities.

It is a fascinating read, fascinating enough to interest me in the writer and more of his books, Axel however just bored me with the continuous rambling.

Wow! Boy, can John Banville write! He is an absolute master. This is a totally engrossing read. Not quite as amazing as The Infinities (in my opinion), but still brilliant.

Shroud has possibly the most obnoxious narrator I can remember encountering. This alone made it difficult to warm to this novel. The rather pretentious prose irritated me as well. Considering how little happens in the story the writing is unrelentingly melodramatic. Not for me I’m afraid.

I know this author won a Booker and so he is a big deal. But I read 100 pages and this is what I got: Axel is missing an eye and has a bum leg, he was summoned from California to Turin Italy, he is lying about his past, and he is being followed. Also, Banville is in love with lots of words. Why have one word when 10 is more? I'll tell you why. Literary critics love all that overwritten stuff. What I want is plot. Clearly, this novel is not my style.

I picked up this book because I read The Sea and I love the style of writing.

I only gave this three stars because I found d the main character, Axel Vander, completely unlikeable. I found the first part of the book hard to get through.

After part one the book gets better and not such s struggle. I still find the writing beautiful here is my favourite part:

"I knew at last that she was lost to me for good. For good: how the language mocks us."

So I still enjoyed the book because of the great writing.