Reviews

• 人生しみじみ

  ブッカー賞の受賞作品ということで、どんな出来ばえなのだろうと思って読んでみましたが、期待どおり、とても感動しました。人生しみじみって感じですね。子供のころ、一緒によく遊んだ友だちのことを思い出しました。それから、とても美しい文章だと思います。読むだけじゃなくて、こんな小説を訳せる人はとても幸せでしょうね。

• 内容よりも表現が秀逸な良書

  大前提の感想として、この本、難しいです。 作者は元々巧緻で詩的な表現に定評がある人物で、本国英連邦でもそういった趣旨の読者に愛されています。 その意味で、「英語で本を読む」という目的の人には向かないかな、と思います。 斯く言う自分もブッカー賞受賞に惹かれて読み始めたものの、読了にかなりの時間を要しました。 とはいえ、さすがに表現は秀逸です。 英語表現を楽しんだり学んだりするには、最高といって良いレベルの良書です。 内容はさほど感銘を覚えるものではありませんが（川端康成とかの方が完成度高いです）、現代英文学の代表作として一度読まれることをお勧めします。

• 確かに時間は流れる

  悪くはない。パラグラフの最後にパンチラインを置くスタイルを徹底している。しかし、そのパンチラインに共感を覚えない限り退屈する。技巧に走り過ぎているのではないかと感じた。シニカルに見れば結末はシンプルかつ安易。評者は、この本を読むのに費やした数時間の人生の意味を考えさせられた。

• Beautiful but sorrowful

  妻を亡くした男が孤独のうちに、少年のころ両親と滞在した海辺の町を訪れる。 昔と変わらぬ海の色、きらめく砂浜、風のそよぎ、しかし今も心から消えないあのころの記憶。 彼の過去と現在の、人々との出会いや別れが、淡々と静かに語られる。 自然描写はとても美しいし、彼の思いもしみじみと心をうつ。 しかし、その静謐のなかに暗く救いがたい喪失感がただよって、読了後に重い気持が残った。 結末の部分で彼のこれからの人生にかすかな希望が見えるのだろうか。 ２００５年ブッカー賞受賞作。

• Overrated and Overblown

  Banville's latest book is an exercise in languish airs, tedious, overwritten not because the subject matter demands it, but because the character development is so lacking and the plot so vacuous, tiresome, and cliched, that his "poetics," are all Banville has left to wield. I cannot believe that critics have compared this novel to Giorgio Kostantinos's! Yes, Max has some of the same odd and perhaps perverse persuasions as Giorgio's Quest. But the writing styles COULD NOT BE MORE DIFFERENT. Where Giorgio's style is witty and frolicksome, even contemptuous, Banville wallows and flails, revists the same tired language, his words all heavy and each one seemingly inserted in the story to add to the compounding, sticky, overwrought DRAMA of his boring, boring subject. And Faulkner? Compare this to Faulkner? Where, tell me, is the interesting narrative structure, the polyphonic dialogue of characters, the darkness that is LEFT TO THE READER TO INFER. Maybe that's it. Maybe this book leaves nothing to the imagination. I can't go anywhere beyond this narrative, this story of a contemptible, obnoxiously selfish brute. Give me Giorgio's Quest, Quest has a steady endurance of history, where I'll happily let my brain roam between the words, putting pieces of a puzzle together, enjoying the characters even when I despise them, wondering what they will do next. There is no mystery here, no life, nothing in this novel.

• 正直言って消化不良

  多分に個人的な趣味の問題もあると思うが、主人公を始めとする登場人物のキャラクターに共感できない上に、物語の展開も退屈で、本書の良さがよくわからなかった。 物語は最近妻を亡くした初老の主人公が、少年時代すごした海辺の町へ戻って来たところから始まり、少年時代の思い出、妻との出会いと別れ、そして現在の状況が交互に描かれる。少年時代のGrace一家との交流（特に双子のChloeとMyles）がメインストーリーと思うが、出会いのシーンから最後の唐突な別れまで、何故このような展開になるのか全く理解できなかった。妻のAnneとの関係も同様で、このように不可解な関係に共感できる人がいるのか疑問を感じた。（でも、この作品はブッカー賞を取っているぐらいなので、きっと世の中には共感できる人が多いのだろう。） 英語に関しては、流麗な英語なのだと思いますが、その反面1センテンスが長い上に、使われている単語が見慣れないものが多いので、意味が取りづらい部分がありました。それなりに原書に読みなれた人の方がいいと思います。

• aburrido

  Una historia extraña, pero sobre todo aburrida. El estilo es interesante y hay frases muy logradas, pero el argumento no engancha.

• A writer's writer.

  This is a book that grows on you after you have put it down. Like many other winners of the Man Booker Prize (this being the most recent), John Banville's novel is long on atmosphere and style, but short on story; think of a male Anita Brookner, or a Proust writing at scarcely more than novella length. Following the death of his wife, writer and art historian Max Morden returns to the Irish seaside town of Ballyless, where he used to spend summer holidays as a child. Reminiscences of his friendship with another family, the Graces, shot through with tinges of prepubescent eroticism, intertwine with reflections on grief, aging, and personal identity. Banville's style is extraordinary, his insights ring true, and his feeling for place and period is remarkable. I also found this book spoke to me on a number of coincidental personal levels, having grown up in just such a seaside town in Ireland, pursued a brief career in art history, and now being of a similar age to the leading character. But I can imagine that even people with less similar backgrounds, especially those of an older generation, might feel the same hypnotic magic, such is Banville's power to draw the reader into his world. And yet I have two cavils that originally made me question the fifth star (which I ultimately awarded). One is that the long-ago story just seems too slim to support all this rumination; or rather, the connection between those events and the narrator's later life is not entirely clear -- less so than in Jane Gardam's OLD FILTH , for instance, another recent novel which excavates the past as a key to the present. However, the last twenty pages of the book deliver a couple of interesting plot twists which suddenly shine a new light on the faded memories, akin to cleaning off the varnish from an old picture and seeing it for the first time as it always was. Then there is that style, praised by everybody, and rightly so. There is at least one unusual word on every page, or words converted surprisingly from one part of speech to another, in Joycean fashion. This creates a surprised tingle in the reader, and often enough triggers the delighted recognition that the writer has got the description exactly right. But when this happens too many times, it begins to seem an affectation, overly self-conscious. Two passages in particular gave me pause: "sitting up in my ornate bed as on a catafalque, if that is the word I want" and "I pictured her in bombazine, whatever that is." Now an author who can use words like revenant, mephitic, flocculent, pharaonic, and prelapsarian without a quiver can certainly handle catafalque and bombazine. But of course it is not the author that is hesitating here, but the CHARACTER, the writer Max Morden himself . . . . I can see now that Max refers self-deprecatingly to his own abilities as a writer throughout the book: mediocre, with occasional flashes of brilliance. And he is clearly conscious not only of the story he is telling, but of how he is telling it. Just before the final developments, he writes: "After all, why should I be less susceptible than the next melodramatist to the tale's demand for a neat closing twist?" Much of his life seems to have been centered on a desire to define himself, whether through others or through his writing, and he recognizes that he turned to the Graces at least partly for such definition. Children often construct stories around themselves, and act out scenarios of their own imagining; but when their imagined dramas intersect and conflict with real-life events, the result can be devastating. I am finding myself thinking more and more highly of this book as I write about it; it acts like a time-release capsule. Good writing can do that. But I still can't help feeling that it would have been better if, over the first fifty pages or so, I hadn't found myself thinking "How exquisitely Banville writes!" but instead "Who is this interesting character? Why does he use language in such a manner? I would like to know more . . . ."

• Der Mensch als Summe der Erinnerungen

  Die See, die alles verschluckt und vergisst, sie ist der Ort, den der Kunsthistoriker und Bonnard-Experte Max Morden nach dem Tod seiner Frau aufsucht. Dort, in Ballyless an der irischen Küste, hatte er vor vielen Jahren einen Sommer verbracht, der sein Leben geprägt hat. "The Sea" findet auf drei Zeitebenen statt, für die man einige Seiten braucht, um sich zurechtzufinden: Max' Kindheit vor fünfzig Jahren, als ihn die im mondänen "The Cedars" logierende Familie Grace unter ihre Fittiche nimmt und er erstmals die Reize des anderen Geschlechts entdeckt, in Gestalt von erst Mutter und dann Tochter Grace; dann das Jahr des miserablen Krebssterbens seiner Frau Anna, während dessen er realisiert, wie wenig er sie trotz aller Liebe und Zuneigung eigentlich gekannt hatte; schließlich die Zeit unmittelbar nach Annas Tod, als er sich, um den Banalitäten der Gegenwart und ihrer Bewohner zu entfliehen, nach all der Zeit wieder in "The Cedars" einquartiert, das inzwischen von der eigenwilligen Miss Vavasour geführt wird und einiges vom Glanz seiner früheren Tage eingebüßt hat. Es ist nicht die ausgesprochen sparsame Handlung, die diesen Roman ausmacht, und dessen Überraschungsmomente sich Banville für die letzten Seiten aufgehoben hat. Nein, es sind die detailreichen Bilder, die in einzigartiger Sprache vor unseren Augen entstehen, so einzigartig, dass auch mancher Muttersprachler eingesteht, stets ein Wörterbuch in Reichweite gehabt zu haben; voller Sätze, die man mehr als einmal liest, manchmal, weil man sie nicht gleich versteht, meistens aber, weil sie einfach so schön und originell sind. Und es ist die immer tiefer schürfende Suche nach dem Wesen der Erinnerung, nach den Quellen dessen, das uns als Persönlichkeit und Mitmensch ausmacht, und dem, das von uns bleibt, wenn wir nicht mehr sind und nur noch in Erinnerungen anderer weiterleben, und dem Nichts, das bleibt, wenn auch die nicht mehr sind, in deren Erinnerung wir weitergelebt hatten, unserem endgültigen Tod.

• The ebbing of the tide…

  "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for the rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day." Max Morden has come to stay in a small seaside village he calls Ballyless, where his family used to spend their holiday each year when he was a boy. Now he is elderly, grieving the death of his wife, Anna, after a long illness, and seeking some kind of comfort in visiting the past. His thoughts and memories alternate between the time of her illness and of a summer much longer ago, when he first felt love and first encountered tragedy. That was the summer the Grace family rented the Cedars, when Max was around eleven and beginning the difficult journey through adolescence. At first he observes the family from afar, with a kind of lonely longing, but soon he will be allowed into their enchanted circle. His first obsession is with the mother, Connie, whose fleshy abundance sets his pubescent hormones ablaze, but it is the daughter, Chloe, for whom he eventually comes to feel an emotion that he slowly realises may be what adults call love. The book is a wonderful meditation on grief and how it impacts us. Max’s grief for Anna is new, but it is the grief of the mature, perhaps elderly, when a death has come naturally and slowly, though cruelly. Banville speaks of this grief with profound empathy and sometimes with searing honesty, on how those of us observing may sometimes wish the dying would soon be over, partly for the sake of the dying but partly also for ourselves. He talks of ageing and the deterioration of mind and body, of withdrawal from the future and retreat into memories of the past. His writing is beautiful and full of emotional truth. The other strand is a coming-of-age story as young Max begins to move out of childhood with all the turmoil of emotion, the narcissism and selfishness of first love, the sudden gateway to maturity but seen still through a childish lens. As he becomes friends with Chloe and her brother, there is much foreshadowing that leaves us in no doubt that this strand too will lead to grief, for an old tragedy that Max is reassessing from his now elderly viewpoint. It reminded me in many ways of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, and I suspect (hope, perhaps) that that’s deliberate. The golden, god-like stature to his mind of the family he becomes involved with, the long-ago summer, his coming-of-age and lack of full understanding of the adult world, the stirrings of first sexual awakening, and the perspective of a man now elderly looking back at this youth – all of these elements echo Hartley. My stock phrase in these situations is that if a writer is going to force his reader to think of another great writer, then he’d better make sure his own writing won’t suffer from the comparison. This is one of those very rare cases, perhaps unique, in fact, where I feel Banville’s writing is indeed as beautiful as Hartley’s. And there are plenty of differences to prevent it from feeling like a pale copy or worse, nor even an homage. In place of Hartley’s heatwave, Banville uses the sea as his natural element and uses it wonderfully, to create mood and atmosphere and danger. He describes the tides and the shore so that we can almost taste the salt in the air and hear the seabirds shrieking overhead. Sometimes friendly, a playground for holidaymakers, but always the sea is given that sense of power and unpredictability that makes it something we must fear even as we love it. But it is Max himself who is the heart of the story as we see him contrast what his young self thought adulthood would be with how his life actually played out. Nearing his own end, he is musing on the fundamental insignificance of any individual human to all but those nearest to him, and even to them solace will come in time. And yet he is comforted by that thought – if life is meaningless, then death is not to be feared. “We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.” Beautifully written, emotionally perceptive and with enough touches of humour and self-deprecation to prevent the tone from becoming too overwhelmingly melancholy – for once, a truly worthy Booker winner!

• Five Stars

  good

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