Shroud

I finished Eclipse, struggling on without much plot or significant events to follow. At first Shroud seemed to be going somewhere, people in taxis, hotels, cafes, a character with some character, but as all the taxis had mirrors, the hotels and cafes shiny windows in which the "self" could be contemplated if not "truly" seen, it soon became repetitive. Where was it all going other than into more and more introspective reflections ? Masks, reflections, identity, performances, performers, as ifs, our self (if it exists) reflected by whether or not we carry a shopping basket, the flowers in a hotel plastic or "suspiciously genuine" (what does that mean?) how many times the use of "like", "ironic" or "irony" in presumably their etymological sense. Sartre said something related to this in his image of the peeper through the key-hole suddenly becoming aware that he himself was the object of someone's watching him. I like John Banville's novels because it is nowadays more and more refreshing to read an intelligent and imaginative vocabulary in complex sentences, but, oh dear, what is it all about that it takes so many times to say it? Some of it, quite a lot I think, is in Yeats's "only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair".

Not his best, but still very good.

Beautiful prose at times but a slow read

Axel Vander, berühmter Literaturwissenschaftler, berüchtigter Kritiker und egomanischer Kotzbrocken, ist nicht der Mann, der er zu sein vorgibt: Um seinerzeit aus dem besetzten Antwerpen zu entkommen, war der junge Jude in die Identität seines verstorbenen Freundes geschlüpft. In dieser fühlte er sich dann bald so heimisch, dass er sie Zeit seines Lebens nicht mehr ablegte.Fast ein halbes Jahrhundert später droht der Schleier (shroud #1) dieses Geheimnisses zu reißen: Cass Cleave, eine junge Irin, die sich den berühmten Mann zum Forschungsobjekt erkoren hat, schreibt ihm einen Brief, dass sie in Antwerpen auf desavouierende Details seiner Vergangenheit gestoßen sei, allerdings ohne zu verraten, worauf genau. Das bringt Vander so aus der Fassung, dass er sich aus Kalifornien nach Turin aufmacht, um dort die mysteriöse Briefschreiberin zu treffen und die Angelegenheit, auf welche Art auch immer, ins Reine zu bringen. (Das berühmte Grabtuch (shroud #2) spielt später auch eine gewisse Rolle).Es ist ein Roman, in dem die Handlung erst zum Ende hin Dynamik entwickelt. Man sollte auch darauf gefasst sein, dass vieles nur angedeutet wird; vor allem die Beweggründe und Verhaltensweisen der psychisch kranken Cass bleiben weitestgehend unerklärt, obwohl die Geschichte teilweise aus ihrem Blickwinkel erzählt wird (wenn man in ihrem besonderen Fall überhaupt von nur einem Blickwinkel sprechen kann). Was den Axel Vander umtreibt, erfahren wir dafür umso genauer - hier hat Banville einen beinahe unheimlichen Misanthropen geschaffen, dem wir alle unappetitlichen Flüche des Alterns gönnen, mit denen er belegt wird, und der uns mit seinen monomanen Eskapaden immer wieder überrascht (und dass er damit meist durchkommt). All dies beschreibt Banville in seiner für ihn typischen, enorm bildhaften, schönen und anspruchsvollen Weise, die selbst Muttersprachler gelegentlich zum Lexikon greifen lässt."Shroud" ist der mittlere dreier Romane um Axel Vander, Cass Cleave und ihren Vater Alex, der in "Eclipse" und "Ancient Light" die Hauptrolle übernimmt. Ich hatte die Trilogie hinten begonnen, wusste also, wie dramatisch "Shroud" enden würde. Das hat dem Genuss aber keinen Abbruch getan.

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 illusive 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.