There are times where I can lose myself in Banville's prose, but other times it requires a great amount of concentration, given this novel's meta-art conceits and its strange, minimalist plot. ( )

QUOTES:

"Non sono mai stato il tipo che venera la natura, eppure riconosco un certo valore terapeutico alla contemplazione dei fenomeni naturali; credo che abbia a che fare con l'indifferenza del mondo, voglio dire con il modo in cui il mondo non si interessa a noi, alla nostra felicita' o a come soffriamo, con il modo in cui si limita ad aspettare guardando in alto, borbottando tra se' in una lingua che noi non capiamo mai." (page 71)

"Quello che la interessava era la stessa cosa, che interessava me, ovvero ... ovvero che cosa? Come il presente nutra il passato, o versioni del passato. Come parti del tempo perduto riaffiorino repentinamente nel mare appannato della memoria, luminose e chiare e incredibilmente dettagliate, piccole isole compiute dove sembra sarebbe possibile vivere, seppure solo per un attimo." (page 151)

"... la teoria dei molti mondi e' la mia preferita. L'universo, dice, in ogni punto e in ogni istante si divide in miriadi di versioni di se stesso. ... Ciascuna direzione possibile, dice la teoria dei molti mondi, produrra' il suo universo, con all'interno le sue stelle, il suo sistema solare, il suo Plutone, il suo te e me ... In questa versione multiforme della realta' il caso e' una legge ferrea." (page 176-7)

"Ecco dove vorrei vivere, su qualche dimenticata striscia di spiaggia sabbiosa, con la schiena alla terra, la faccia rivolta all'oceano sconfinato. Quella sarebbe liberta', guardare in solitudine i giorni passare, segnare le stagioni, osservare le maree di primavera e le aurore autunnali, superare il sole estivo e le bufere dell'inverno. Pura esistenza, pura esistenza e nient'altro." (page 206)

"Con quanta timidezza si dispongono porzioni casuali del mondo - un pezzo di cortile spiato dal vano di una porta di sera, nuvole che si accalcano in un angolo di finestra - come a dire: Guardaci! Noi significhiamo qualcosa!" (page 220) ( )

A very, very strange book. It’s obvious that the protagonist knows more than he is telling and he well could be just out and out, lying. None of the character are particularly likable, and they all have a past they would rather not talk about or have known. Frankly I couldn’t make heads or tails of the plot or the characters. The entire thing was mind numbing... but I read through to the last word. I’m sure that Mr. Banville’s book will absolutely over joy some other reader...just not me. He also is very fond of his own voice since he uses fifty or more words where five or less would do just fine... in every paragraph. No wonder the lady checking out the books at the library looked at me like I had finally lost my mind. ( )

There are books you get because they tell a story and there are books you get because they are the embodiment of the art of writing. This book is one of the latter, which is probably why I floundered with it so much, because at the time I picked it up I was in the mood for story over art. There was no plot here, which doesn't bother me at all, because I enjoyed the way everything was written, but for some reason I just struggled to become involved in the book until the very end. Like some who have written reviews in the past, I found myself longing for a little bit more of a resolution at the end, but I didn't feel the book was lacking in any way.

If you can not enjoy a book for the written art, this is not the book for you, because it will leave you wanting in so many levels. However, if you can sit back and reflect on what is written, take the time to indulge in the art of the written word, then you will probably love what this book has to offer for you. Personally, I will want to read it again, when I am in the mood for this style, so that I can properly enjoy it. ( )

I just sprinted through Ghosts by John Banville, the second in a trilogy starring Freddie our reluctant murderer. Reluctant...well sorta, kinda. Smile Our Freddie is a tortured soul for a certainty and this entry is a bit of a halfway house for him and perhaps his kind. Doppelgangers, art forgeries, references to other Banville characters flit through the pages bringing a smile of recognition to Banville readers, and bear us along on a grand ride.

Pick it up, but if so, buy all three. I can guarantee you won't be sorry.

The Book of Evidence
Ghosts
Athena ( )

Little do people know that Ghosts (1993) is the second installment of John Banville's Freddie Montgomery trilogy. The Book of Evidence (1989) begins the sequence, which consists of Freddie's grim and gruesome confession of the brutal murder of a maidservant who interrupted his escapade of stealing a painting. Serving ten years in jail, the ex-con came to a secluded island to accommodate life and live in solitude. Professor Kreutzner, an eminent historian, was the world's most prestigious authority on the painter Vaublin, whose works were abound with strange and eerily pleasing asymmetry of misplaced figures. The paintings generated inevitably over and above it an air of mystery of what it was that happened. Along with the sulky butler and assistant Licht, who cooked and typed up manuscripts, Freddie assisted the professor in his manuscripts. The work represented for Freddie the last outpost at the border of his life.
Readers who haven't read The Book of Evidence will find the narrator and the narrative ambiguous, surreptitious, and turbid. Not only did Freddie incessantly recount on events that led to his imprisonment, he delved on philosophical issues like the redemption and the accommodation of self and the conscience. Out of guilt for his crime, the narrator professed this many-world theory that a multiplicity of worlds existed in a mirrored regression in which the dead were not dead. The notion of dreams recurred throughout the narrative and thrusted the main plot. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he was recalling some riotous tumble of events in his dreams or simply telling the truth. Until the narrator officially identified him as the man who stole the painting he was fatally obsessed with, I had an idea that he, the narrator, was a ghost hovering over the professor's house and spying on its inhabitants as well as the unexpected castaways.

The plot is simple-it is nothing short of an account of a day in the island when a group of strangers boarded on a chartered boat stuck fast on the sandbank and ran ashore. The story slowly and mysteriously unraveled when the professor, taciturn and somewhat disgruntled by the intrusion, took the seven castaways in while they rested and waited for the skipper. Three of the castaways were kids (Pound, Hatch, and Alice). The adults were their sulky caretaker Sophie who was a photographer, dapper old Cooke, elegant Flora, and the leering Felix who claimed to know the professor.

The ominous and vaguely menacing mood persisted though the castaways found comfort and solitude in their transient stay on the island. Something about Flora and the room where stayed in (previously occupied by the narrator who hid from the castaways at their first arrival) always haunted me and tucked my mind. Flora threw herself in dreams and she woke from which feeling shivery and damp. What did she have to do with the Pierrot figures that gracefully drifted in ambiguous landscapes?

By the time I was a little less than halfway through the book, I realized nothing much would happen (as far as what would happen to the castaways) except for more haunting, lyrical, and imaginary prose that required readers to practice patience of a connoisseur. What the narrator said might be real or illusions, but the inclusion of a single chapter on Vaublin the painter toward the end drove the book to a tantalizing climax-and I will leave that that pleasure to the readers, of course. The painting (and Freddie's scholarly interest in it) would seamlessly sew all the threads together and the realization that it brought would only haunt the readers even more.

Ghosts is so much more engrossing than its predecessor in the series. While The Book of Evidence portrayed Freddie like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita-the morbid sensation and the insouciance, in Ghosts Banville tells a tale through Freddie and some of his allusions that actually might have become real. His presence in the house, though hidden from the castaways, were nothing short of immanent. It is through his perspective just so we know about the professor's secret scheme of painting and his not liking Felix for the same reason. ( )