Shroud (Paperback)

First, I want to point out that I dislike a book that requires a lot of reading efforts, but gets very little story at the end. SHROUD is such a book.

And nevertheless, SHROUD is quite an IMPRESSIVE book to read. It takes me more than three weeks of hard working (I mean slow reading time) to finish it. The last book took me this much efforts was Salman Rushdie¡¯s ¡°THE SANTONIC VERSES¡± -a book after a strenuous start, I had to put it down for more than six months, and only returned to it recently from Chapter 2.

SHROUD is John Banville¡¯s second book I have read after 'GHOST', and like many readers before me, any book from Banville is a treat for regardless the story and content, readers are given the chance to sample possibly the finest written literature from one of the world¡¯s most stylistically elaborate writers in writing today.

This book is about deception, deceit, false identity, fraud and cruelty. In my opinion, One reads SHROUD for the quality of writing instead of story (same may also apply to other books of Banville¡¯s), for John Banville writes metafiction, which in form, concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality... of verbosity and elements may serve to hinder a story¡¯s natural-flow. You don¡¯t suppose get a straight story as you may get from reading books written by different authors.

Reading SHROUD, you read page after page monologues, thoughts-process and long-wind sentences. And such trying exertion (verbosity) is fully expected from a philosophical novelist like Banville, while his writing flirts with both postmodernism and magic-realism. SHROUD is saved from becoming abstruse by its sheer virtuosity of narrative and elegance of style, and in retrospect, understand the thinking process and motives (through maze and picking fragments) helped in building the pensive storylines - an outstanding sustainable quality, I assume (from reading 2 books of his), must be assembled in all of John Banville¡¯s books.

Books from John Banville are meant to allure and dazzle readers through long and dense sentences-rich with lyrics and self indulgence -one tends to pay less heed to the story.

Coming to rating this book from 1 to 5 - a most daunting job for anyone who is dare to evaluate Banville¡¯s impressiveness and panache. I adopt a Point of Average System I specifically designed for Banville:

Quality of Writing: 5;
Story and Content: 3;
Character Development: 4;
Suspense and Tension Building: 3.5;
Depth of Story: 4.

All in all, an average score of (5+3+4+3.5+4)/5 = 3.9 does seam to be a reasonable score to settle for this book.
For all its merits and imperfections, language aficionados will find this book ¡®a labor of love¡¯ -as compare in my case of much exertion on the ¡®LABOR¡¯ but left ¡®NO LOVE¡± to spare in the end.

No doubt I will return to John Banville again for ¡°BOOK OF EVIDENCE¡± and/or ¡°The UNTOUCHABLE¡±, regardless whatever being said, John Banville is such an exceptional prose writer and he is certainly in a class of his own. While he is often being criticized for wearing his heart on his sleeves, but alternatively, one can always go for James Joyce on account of substance and greatness, but it will be an ultimate challenge for anyone who wishes to take on such a formidable task.

As for me, I feel much safer to stay on with Banville for my past experience in reading ¡°A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man¡±(many consider it the lightest piece among Joyce¡¯s works) was already proven way beyond my grasp.

Axel Vander is an eminent literary theorist...maybe...for Axel Vander, we learn at the beginning of the book, is not the protagonist's "real" name.

Axel Vander has been "Axel Vander" for many years, however. Little by little, piece by piece, Banville lets us know that Vander is a Jew who escaped the Holocaust only by assuming the name of a murdered Aryan friend. And Vander, himself, is strongly anti-Semitic, but to tell you why would be giving away
too much of the plot of this wonderful book.

Alex Vander is a particularly unsympathetic protagonist. Although of European origin, he's been living and teaching literature in the pretty California town of Arcady (fictional) for many years. He's brilliant, but that brilliance seems to be Vander's one "good" quality. He's also pompous, arrgant, a habitual liar and an unlikely womanizer. Banville has even made Vander physically repulsive as well. He's blind in one eye and has a bad leg that makes it difficult, though not impossible, for him to walk. A blind eye and a bad leg aren't reasons enough to find someone physically repulsive, but Vander's descriptions of himself are. Banville goes to great lengths to make sure we despise Vander and everything he represents.

SHROUD opens with the arrival of a letter, a literary device that, in the hands of an author less skilled than Banville, would have been trite and cliched. Banville, however, makes it seem natural, in part, because, at the time the letter arrives, we're so focused on the character of Vander and wanting to know
his real identity as well as his "secrets."

The letter is from Cass Cleave, a woman in Belgium, who lets Vander know she's unearthed a series of anti-Semitic articles he authored many years ago and she threatens to expose him. (Of course, it was the real Axel Vander who wrote the articles, not the protagonist of the book.)

Vander, though, isn't about to see his web of lies and deceit untangle at this late date, so he arranges to meet Cass in Turin, a city that, fittingly, houses one of the biggest "lies" of all...the shroud. Turin is also a fitting setting for SHROUD since it is the city where Nietzsche died, old and mad, and Nietzsche just happens to be Vander's idol since Vander considers himself the ultimate "self-made man" (which, of course, he is not). We don't know how, but Vander plans on silencing Cass and preventing her from exposing him for the fraud he is.

When Vander does meet Cass in Turin, she's nothing like he expected. He was prepared to meet, in his words, "a harpy," but Cass is young, rather attractive, extremely fragile, and, most importantly, she is harboring secrets of her own, secrets that have nothing to do with Vander but will certainly impact
his life.

Once Vander meets Cass in Turin, SHROUD takes a rather bizarre turn. Events happen that, to put it mildly, aren't entirely believable. Many times I had to ask myself if an event was "real" or simply the product of Vander's lifelong paranoia and self-delusion, a paranoia and self-delusion that now, near the end of Vander's life, were threatening to run out of control. I won't tell you the conclusion I came to because I think it would detract from your enjoyment of the book
and the unfolding plot.

I'm sure we're meant to despise Vander, but I'm not so sure about the character of Cass Cleave (who, by the way, appears briefly in an earlier novel of Banville's). I despised her for several reasons. I despised both her physical and emotional weakness (which, of course, she couldn't help) and I also despised her idiocy in thinking she could possibly confront Vander and come out the winner.

SHROUD is, as another reviewer has already stated, the epitome of "literary fiction." Banville's prose is gorgeous and lyrical, probably the most beautiful I've ever read. On one page, Banville writes, "Outside, the wind blew and a cherry tree shook its head...." Phrases like this abound in SHROUD, making the book a joy to read even if, like me, you find the characters thoroughly despicable.

I loved the metaphor the shroud plays in the book. Cass wants to see it and Vander, who isn't really interested, agrees, but it never happens. The closest Cass comes to the "real" thing is a poster of the shroud. When she looks at the image imprinted on it she observes that it looks just like Vander, himself (though, of course, it doesn't). Just as Cass only manages to see a representation of the shroud, she only manages to penetrate a part of Vander's secretive past.

When I began writing this review, I intended on awarding SHROUD only four stars (possibly only three), because, while it's extraordinarily beautiful and extremely impressive, it is, like many highly literary novels, totally lacking in emotional engagement. At least that's what I thought when I began writing. However, it's been months since I've read the book and it still haunts me, almost daily, so there is definitely a strong emotional component there, even if I can't readily identify it and SHROUD is far from being, as many literary novels are, "style over substance." There is plenty of substance in SHROUD, but whether you're going to like it or not is simply a matter of taste.

Like it or not, SHROUD is a novel that should be read by all lovers of literary fiction and certainly by anyone who aspires to write literary fiction. It's a book for people "in love with words," but there is a marvelous and engaging plot within its pages as well.

The shocking secret is that Axel Vander is not the real Axel Vander but has ineluctably appropriated the identity of an actor. He has impudently maintained the deception for over half a century since the time of danger during World War II. He must have thought he had shaken off his far past and wiped out all vestige of his old identity until the letter of Cass Cleave confronts him with irrefutable proof of his imposture. Banville devotes almost the whole novel chronicling Axel Vander's life, his delirious reflections, his reminiscence of his wife, the disturbing details of his impregnable alibi - all the minute heart-pricking details that permits Cass Cleave to privy the impostor's secret. Banville has written a beautifully crafted thriller, with meticulous prose, that prepares readers for the dreadful moment - the meeting of Axel Vander and his nemesis from whom he is so overwrought to buy silence for fear of being exposed.

The prose is incredulously lyrical, rich, and refined - so much more compressed and yet detailed any prose in most contemporary fiction. Banville is one of the few living author who can maintain the flow of a novel with a taut sense while flourishing different themes as well as exploring and exposing, delineating the intricacies of human emotions. The book leaves us in awe of the marvelous silence with which human tolerate lies. Once again Banville has epitomized literary fiction with a twisting intrigue, which is unfortunately exiguous in the market now.

2004 (12) © MY