Unlimited Shroud - by John Banville, Unlimited Shroud - by John Banville, Shroud, John Banville, Shroud Axel Vander is an old man in ill health recently widowed a scholar renowned for both his unquestionable authority and the ferocity and violence that often mark his conduct He is known to be Belgian by birth to have had a privileged upbringing to have made a perilous escape from World War II torn Europe his blind eye and dead leg are indelible reminders of that time Axel Vander is an ol Unlimited Shroud - by John Banville - Shroud, Shroud Axel Vander is an old man in ill health recently widowed a scholar renowned for both his unquestionable authority and the ferocity and violence that often mark his conduct He is known to be Belgian
- Title: Shroud
- Author: John Banville
- ISBN: 9780375725302
- Page: 333
- Format: Paperback
Unlimited Shroud - by John Banville, Unlimited Shroud - by John Banville, Shroud, John Banville, Shroud Axel Vander is an old man in ill health recently widowed a scholar renowned for both his unquestionable authority and the ferocity and violence that often mark his conduct He is known to be Belgian by birth to have had a privileged upbringing to have made a perilous escape from World War II torn Europe his blind eye and dead leg are indelible reminders of that time Axel Vander is an ol. Shroud, Unlimited Shroud - by John Banville - Shroud, Shroud Axel Vander is an old man in ill health recently widowed a scholar renowned for both his unquestionable authority and the ferocity and violence that often mark his conduct He is known to be Belgian
- Unlimited Shroud - by John Banville333John Banville
Banville likes to write about people with identity issues I recently read his The Untouchable about a British spy in the Cold War who is secretly gay.In this book we have an academic scholar, a specialist on Nietzsche He s an old man, recently widowed He s in ill health and he has secrets This late in life, a young woman has discovered some all of his secrets and threatens to expose him He agrees to fly from California to Turin to meet with her He wonders does it even matter at this point if his [...]
Banville keeps playing with words and intention He teases and probes, mocks and beguiles, baffles and enlightens with his darkly pleasant wordplay A pattern of recurrent symbols drenched with double entendres, the deliberate use of anagrams, of menacing coincidences, of literary connections What is fiction and what is reality Nietzsche affirms that there exists neither spirit , nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth all are fictions What is hallucination and w [...]
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 Banvil [...]
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 h [...]
Senility, the sickness of old age that most have yet to worry about, and yet those who do need to worry, avoid it like the plague it is I can t relate to Axel Vander s age and celebrity, nor can I relate to his place of childhood, and yet I was lured by this exquisite story that seemingly drags along in lengthy paragraphs and conscious thought, with Proustian references to Swann s Way and memory I don t even like Vander, still he manages to keep me intrigued in fact at some point, I even find bo [...]
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 nigh [...]
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 [...]
Proper NamesThe 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 forceful and impulsive A story of the complex, long term eff [...]
While I think I enjoyed this book than the only other Banville I ve read, 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 like I surely missed a lot, especially after reading the acknowledgments at the end of the book to Althusser and Paul de Man, write [...]
History is a hotchpotch of anecdotes, neither true nor false, and what does it matter where it is supposed to have taken place Shroud is a tale about identity and mentality Do we ourselves know who we are The voices in her head started up then, as she had known they would, as they always did when she was uncertain or nervous, seizing their chance It was as if a motley and curious crowd had fallen into step behind her, hard on her heels, and were discussing her and her plight among themselves in [...]
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 th [...]
I had no idea while reading this book that it was part of a trilogy, together with Ancient Light and Eclipse I read Ancient Light a while ago and although the characters names from Shroud seemed somehow familiar, I thought that it was just my memory playing tricks on me I was amazed to find out that Cass Cleave here is the daughter of the main character from Ancient Light and that Axel Vander is the Axel Vander from Ancient Light However, it does not matter much the story there doesn t influence [...]
Quando um nobre pensamento conduz um cora o jovem para al m da morada mortal e a vida e o amor lutam para assim decidirqual era o seu destino terrestre, ali, vivem os mortos e, nas noites tempestuosas, chegam como ventos de luz Percy ShelleyTHE CLEAVE TRILOGY Livro IIO Impostor Francisco Goya, The Madness Of Fear Personagens principaisAxel Vander Catherine Cleave filha de Alex e Lydia Magda mulher de Axel Pequeno resumoAxel Vander o narrador um conceituado professor e escritor, com um passado ob [...]
Sandwiched between Eclipse and Ancient Light this masterfully crafted tale that tells the story of Axel Vander, the pivotal character of the trilogy Vander is a real cad boozer, womanizer and vain beyond belief but he has a secret Yet under Banville s skillful words, my disgust for Vander turns as the tale unravels But so are his characters, all who are flawed but so very interesting as well.All three books operate like separate stories but are very much intertwined Having said this, once you re [...]
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 live [...]
I have a hard time assigning stars to this review Whereas I was mesmerized by Banville s writing, I found this story and the characters dismal Axel Vander evoked by pity and revulsion and had not one redeeming quality that I can recall Miss Nemesis was pathetic and cruel Even the gracious setting of Turin thus, the most obvious reference in the title Shroud couldn t lift the oppressive cloud of lethargy and depression that permeated this novel But there is a twist that kept me turning the pages [...]
Description Axel Vander, celebrated academic and man of culture, is spending his twilight years on the west coast of America For decades he has lived with the knowledge of a tragedy of which he was both perpetrator and victim.Opening WHO speaks It is her voice, in my head I fear it will not stop until I stop It talks to me as I haul myself along theses cobbled streets, telling me things I do not want to hear,4 The SeaTR ShroudTR THe Book of Evidence2 Ancient Light3 Prague Pictures
John Banville raya a gran altura en este libro Con una escritura hipn tica y sofisticada, en Imposturas , nos ofrece una historia inteligente, ingeniosa, con momentos crudos y de desesperaci n, en la que disecciona dos mentes, las de los dos protagonistas, Alex Vander y Cass Cleave De manera muy habilidosa, Banville crea una nueva novela d ndonos a conocer a Cass Cleave, la hija de Alex Cleave, el protagonista de su anterior novela, Eclipse pero esto no supone que se tenga que leer necesariament [...]
Exquisitely well written, like anything by Banville, layered with thought provoking and sometimes nearly metafictional musings on identity, performance and authenticity However, a lesser Banville for its rather self indulgent portrayal of a sudden, or less inexplicable passion between an old academic lion and a young deer in the headlights who has unearthed a secret from his past Poor Cass, she feels less like a believable character than a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy, like the one Eco indu [...]
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 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 hingesa 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 [...]
I read Shroud because I finished Ancient Light late last year and I was missing John Banville Shroud features one of the most unpleasant protagonists I have ever encountered, Axel Vander Ugh During Part 1 of this three part novel, I was propelled by Banville s gorgeous prose, but in Part 2, I realized that like Victor Maskell in The Untouchable, there is to Axel than the face he shows the world Cold, miserable, hateful That s Axel in Part 1 But then we see the other Axel All is revealed through [...]
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 titl [...]
I don t know what to make of this book It has one of the most unpleasant narrators I ve ever come across, and his preoccupations are mostly nauseating Added to that, I can t work out the significance of the title and its allusion to the Shroud of Turin, and I m still not clear about what actually happened at the end Alex Vander seems to be an academic who assumed the identity of the real Vander just after Kristallnacht when he returned home to find his parents gone and his own life at risk Is th [...]
For all those who love the use of great language in a book, Shroud and John Banville in general, is a must recommendation It s just my second book by the author but I guess his style will be about the same in all his books I already have another one to read in my home library and will look for Banville is a truly excellent writer, his prose is simply elegant and wonderful He is often compared to Nabokov and I can see why Sometimes he may seem eccentric or ironic either but there is no doubt tha [...]
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, [...]
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 c [...]
Shroud John Banville Shroud is a story of unreliable narrators and hidden pasts Axel Vander having survived the Nazis has made a life for himself as a famous author living in American, yet Axel is not who he claims to be and one day the letter he has been half expecting his whole life arrives The letter is from a young woman Cass Cleave who in true horror movie style claims to know what he didCass uses her knowledge of his past to summon Axel to Turin a town where he has several old colleagues w [...]
A masterfully written novel Duplicity, broken bodies and souls, not much happiness beyond this I am not the first to have exclaimed upon the pleasures of life in wartime London I do not mean the great, new, warm sense of communality everyone is supposed to have felt, the keeping up of peckers keep your chin up in Britain and home fires burning and all the rest of that twaddle no, what I am thinking of is the licence, voluptuous and languid, with just a whiff of brimstone to it, that was granted [...]
This is not an easy book to read and certainly not for entertainment But it is brilliant.The character narrating the story is despicable Seen through the eyes of the narrator, other characters are also extraordinarily unattractive.So, why read this book My response is that it is a privilege to read such a writer I think the work has the similar attraction and fascination that one might have for a beautiful but deadly spider.The writing is in a craft of its own, the author having complete control [...]