Top 3 John Banville Books

John Banville or Benjamin Black, depending on the occasion. I remember that on some occasion, when I was about to publish my first book, I proposed to my publisher to release that first work under a pseudonym. He looked at me strangely and assured me that pseudonyms are used by exiled writers or those who were so famous and wrote so much that they needed to raise this formula of false competition.

The case of John Banville is logically the second. When you are so prolific or you have an overflowing creative era and your sales are also top, it is better to diversify so as not to saturate people, offering an idea of ​​diversification ... If those are really the reasons. It may all come down to the fact that Banville wanted to write under a pseudonym and they let him do it. At the end of the day Benjamin Black is a suggestive name that remains easy.

For John himself, his alter ego helps him to be more productive, it is like a disguise. A kind of complete concession to creative debauchery under another name that can eat all kinds of prejudices to end up writing more freely and fluently.

John is a writer with an almost mathematical vocation. He has always wanted to write. When he was already an adult he thought that the best thing to carry out his plan was to travel. He managed to find work in an airline company and thus see the world. A true wandering Irishman who, however, always had his homeland very present, as is attested in many of his novels. In 2014 he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters, all recognition for a good writer, fine prose but not closed to the commercial.

3 Recommended Novels by John Banville

scientific tetralogy

It is not the same to dress up as an intellectual to appear as a true pedant with pretensions than to be John Banville and dare with each of the stories that contain this volume. Elegant sophistication at the service of the frames. An incomparable taste for the historical covered in overwhelming plots full of tension. A volume that enhances the writer and that satisfies any reader in search of historical and cultural references of the first order without forgetting those who only delve into the narrative as entertainment...

In an age of closed minds, chaos and a centuries-old misconception of the universe, a few men dared to challenge that view, determined to discover and reveal how the world worked.

In Copernicus, a novel that won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Banville evokes the life of a timid man, bewildered by the conspiracies unleashed around him and in search of a truth that shattered the medieval vision of the universe.

In Kepler, winner of The Guardian Fiction Award, he follows in the footsteps of one of the greatest mathematicians and astronomers, whose quest to chart the stars and planets would revolutionize the view of the cosmos that governed Renaissance Europe.

In The Newton Letter, a contemporary historian retires to the countryside to finish his biography of Isaac Newton, but his book goes into a loop when he becomes obsessed with the nervous breakdown the great British physicist and mathematician suffered in the summer of 1693 and with the family that rents him the summer cottage.

Finally, with Mefisto Banville he gives a twist to the myth of Doctor Faust and the price that the scientist and the artist must pay for their vocation. Four inescapable works from the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters brought together for the first time in a single volume.

Return to Birchwood

In Return to Birchwood, John Banville is busy introducing us to an Ireland invaded by that homeland typical of this great island. Gabriel Godkin is its protagonist, a kind of alter ego of the author who returns to that invented Birchwood that represents the cosmos of Irish stereotypes. Gabriel discovers that the old house in which he grew up is hardly holding up, sheltering characters that inhabit it who seem to be splattered by the same deterioration of a merciless passage of time.

In a way, you can detect that kind of metaphor between the reality found and the memory of a happy past when you return to spaces of other times. The emotional shock can be likened to that material disorder that the author draws. However, the tragic touch of the story also moves with a touch of humor, acid without a doubt, but humor at the end of the day, which one uses to overcome the tragedy of losses and nostalgia.

Given the disastrous state of that space of his childhood, Gabriel ends up embarking on a circus, hoping to find his twin sister, whom he inexplicably lost track of. And it is then when the author takes the opportunity to portray the deep Ireland, punished by misery in its rural part. And it is also then that we discover the greatness of the characters who occupy those punished places.

Grotesque figures with strange behaviors that, endowed with John Banville's magical descriptive ability, leave their mark, between the most brutal eccentricity and an undeniable vitalism that pushes them to survive in the face of a world that denies everything.

In this novel, Ireland is a sum of memories of happiness that slide like currents between all the scenarios proposed, leaving in their wake a patina that homogenizes faces and houses, belongings and souls in sepia.

back to birchwood

Quirke's Shadows

Quirke was a character who passed from the novels of John Banville to television across the UK. An overwhelming triumph whose secret is respect for the unique setting that this author, under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black, has been offering its readers for years.

Every crime novel needs a tightrope walker character who walks in anxiety between good and evil. Quirke knows the most sordid side of society, but he knows that it is nothing more than a reflection of the highest instances, where famous and glorious citizens descend from time to time to hell to spread at their pleasure all the evil that governs their souls. .

In the case of book Quirke's Shadows, all part of an apparent suicide behind the wheel of a car. An official jaded with life seems to have decided to get out of the way. But there is always something wrongly closed in every homicide, as if God intervened at every moment to avenge the affront of the man who kills another man, surpassing the power of the Creator to give and take life.

Perhaps it has made me too bombastic ... but it is that also religion, or those who govern it, has its star role here between the amoral and the macabre.

Quirke believes he is moving towards the truth, until that truth begins to splash around him, to the depths of his being. That is when everything explodes, and the resolution of the case can become the gravest discovery.

quirke's shadows

Other recommended books by John Banville…

The alchemy of time

It may be optimistic to say that time causes, discovers or results in some kind of alchemy. Because wrinkles, ailments and melancholies attack bones and soul like regular aftershocks. But hey, thinking about it, the change is as undeniable as it is unapproachable. So it is best to see it as an alchemy where the best last opportunities can be synthesized. And no one better than a great narrator like Banville to season everything between memories and that epic fiction of everyday life to which he can give the best form and output.

This work, close to autobiography (about his life in the city and about a living city), is as layered and emotionally rich, as witty and as surprising as any of his best novels. For Banville, born and raised in a small town near Dublin, the city was at first an exciting place, a gift and also the place where his beloved and eccentric aunt lived. And yet, when he came of age and settled there, it became the usual backdrop for his dissatisfactions, and in fact did not have a proper role in his work until Quirke's series, written as Benjamin Black .

That childhood fascination remained hidden somewhere in his memory. But here, as he guides us through the city, delighting in its cultural, architectural, political and social history, Banville brings to light the memories that are tied to more important places and formative moments. The result is a wonderful tour of Dublin, a tender and powerful eulogy to a time and place that shaped "a teenage artist."

The alchemy of time. Banville

The untouchable

What could a spy willing to tell everything tell? No matter which country we talk about, after diplomacy and its appearances the underworld has the real gear with which things move ...

Summary: Victor Maskell, homosexual and esthete, is an eminent art historian, Pussin expert and curator of the Queen of England's collection of paintings, and between the XNUMXs and XNUMXs he was also a Russian mole infiltrating the heart of the British establishment itself.

Now he has just been publicly exposed as a traitor in the House of Commons by Mrs Thatcher is the fourth man in the mythical Cambridge spy group and is about to face public humiliation or simply to endure it, like the stoic who has always been. said being, forever turned into an outcast, an "untouchable."

But he is already an old man, perhaps on the verge of death, and in a last act of revelation, or perhaps of supreme revenge, he decides to write his memoirs. This will be a process similar to the restoration of one of the paintings that he loved so much, and page after page will strip the canvas of its life of the infinite layers of dirt, varnish and paintings that hide other paintings, until finally the authentic figure, or at least the one that most closely resembles the truth.

the untouchable banville

Quirke in San Sebastián

When Benjamin black let know John Banville that the next installment of Quirke would take place in the already illustrious cinematographic Donosti, I could not imagine how successful the matter would be. Because nothing better than the tune of the development of a plot full of contrasts like San Sebastián itself, as soon sprinkled with its luminous white on good days as suddenly plunged into the shadows that end up revolting its sea.

Dragged by his vital wife Evelyn to a holiday in San Sebastian, pathologist Quirke soon stops missing gloomy and gloomy Dublin to start enjoying the walks, the good weather, the sea and the txakoli. 

However, all this calm and hedonism is disturbed when a somewhat ridiculous accident takes him to a city hospital. In it he meets an Irish woman who is strangely familiar to him, until he finally thinks he recognizes in her an unfortunate young woman, a friend of his daughter Phoebe.

If memory, or alcohol abuse, do not play a trick on him, it would be April Latimer, allegedly murdered - although her body was never found - by her disturbed brother in the course of a sordid investigation in which Quirke himself he was involved years ago. Convinced that he has not seen a ghost, he insists that Phoebe visit the Basque Country to clear up any doubts.

What Quirke ignores is that she will be accompanied by Inspector Strafford, for whom she has a sharp dislike, and that, furthermore, a very peculiar hitman will undertake the same journey.

Quirke in San Sebastián
5/5 - (9 votes)

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