I may have to revisit this book another time. The prose was so dense that on many pages my focus skimmed down the page, sliding on top of this crust of almost impenetrable content, grabbing little bits of meaning here and there. So, I'm pretty sure I know in general terms what happened in the p...
I am having trouble getting Goodreads to save this review. So here goes again!!!John Banville writes the most beautiful, lyrical prose. (Must be the Irish gift of the gab!!) his writing just carries you along and you want to read more and more of his story.This one focuses on an older man's memo...
After a promising start, for me this book feel apart. It felt disjointed and confusing. The narrator, a funny, comically unreliable one, suddenly switched a few times but without, to me, seeming to add much but a sense of disjointedness. And what happens to these characters became more and more u...
This is the third Quirke book. In this story, a friend of Phoebe's goes missing. Her name is April Latimer. She is a junior doctor at Quirke's hospital and her family is quite well known in Dublin. Quirke has gone in to rehab to try to get off alcohol and when Phoebe visits him, she tells him of ...
This is my second try with John Banville. Once again, he impresses me with his ability to write nearly perfect prose and characters who are as flesh and blood and flawed as any who ever breathed, while completely boring me. That's strike two, Mr. Banville, and two is all most authors get from me....
This felt like an Irish John Updike. Freddie Montgomery is arguably worse than Rabbit; but the time period is the same and the language use and description was similar. Also reminded me a bit of McEwan's despicable main character in Solar.Unfortunately, it was a bit repetitive; I am starting to...
The Sea really bugged me. I've never read another John Banville novel, so I don't know whether this one is typical of his writing in general, but nothing irritates me more these days than a writer who has considerable gifts at his command who writes novels that function as elegant window displays...
A fascinating fictional biography of the man who "came to reveal to a world wallowing in a stew of ignorance the secret music of the universe": Niclas Koppernigk, known to the world as Copernicus.Copernicus was more than just an astronomer: as mathematician, physician, polyglot, classical scholar...
Judging by the cover of the book, the title should be "Thursday Nights at the Hefner Household". I hate to disappoint people who rely on their book covers to give them an accurate reflection of the contents, there is no rich people's blind grope-a-thon party taking place here. If that should sour...
John Banville is one of my favorite writers, a leaning reinforced by his historical novel Kepler, about the 17th century mathematician & astronomer Johannes Kepler. Math and astronomy are not among my usual haunts, but Banville writes so well and so precisely, he can infuse anything with interest...
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 certainl...
Just wonderful. Inspired me to visit, which I did a couple of months ago. The book is atmospheric and surprising - there's a remarkable tale of Banville smuggling some of Josef Sudek's photographs out of the country. It's also funny (which I didn't expect from Banville, actually). This passage on...
Benjamin Black is the pseudonym for Booker-prize winning author John Banville, and this novel reads very much like a practitioner of high literary fiction swapped his tweed blazer for a trench coat. And yet Banville does not seem able to match the concomitant gait and attitude of the trench-coat ...
Fawlty Towers meets The Shadow of a GunmanRecently I mentioned to a bibliophile friend that I liked books that trouble me. So you would think that anything entitled Troubles would be made to measure, the perfect fit. But what I meant was trouble in the sense of disquiet, something that sets up a ...
Birchwood by John Banville is a lovely book that gets off to a ponderous, pretentious start. First line? “I am, therefore I think.” The second paragraph starts with “The name is Godkin, Gabriel.” The book came out in 1973 when Banville was under twenty so I’ll forgive him such pretensions, but th...
The review over at my blog: http://readingaroundtheglobe.tumblr.c... To be utterly honest, I hadn’t heard of John Banville till I came across a tome of his books at a local bookstore that happened to be clearing out their stock at half-price. I grabbed an armful of books that day and picked two b...
There are eight short stories in The Love Object Stories by Edna O’Brien. The first short story is titled The Love Object. In this story, a divorced woman falls in love with a married man. Their short affair leaves her empty and confused. She wonders if he ever loved her or if she was just a woma...