Product Description

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Book of Evidence and Ghosts comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. "A strange and dreamlike book . . . Banville has a breathtaking style."--Boston Globe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141904 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-28
• Released on: 1996-05-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Irish novelist Banville offers a literary thriller in which his guilt-plagued narrator is drawn into both an art theft and a passionate affair with a mysterious woman.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Art historian Morrow is hired by small-time crook Morden to authenticate and catalog a cache of eight paintings stored in a decrepit house. As Morden and his seedy assistant, Francie, lead Morrow through the house, a delicious sense of impending menace is evoked by simple things: the rising staircase; a door standing ajar; an intense, bright light; and a watching dog. Morrow's brief glimpse through a crumbling wall of a woman's leg in stockings and black high heels is the beginning of his increasingly destructive sexual obsession with the woman, identified only as A. Irish writer Banville has created such a fantastic feeling of suspense and foreboding in his slightly surreal world?with hints that Morrow may be the same ex-convict narrator of his earlier novels, The Book of Evidence (LJ 3/1/90) and Ghosts (LJ 9/15/93)?that the somewhat anticlimactic ending is a letdown. But Banville's sure way with language, style, and character development make this essential for literary collections. Highly recommended.?Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Banville has a most distinctive and prodigious way with metaphor. His latest novel is narrated by a man for whom everything is like something else. Each of this narrator's sharply attuned sensory perceptions recalls earlier childhood memories, a whisper from his lover, or a vague piece of the past. He recollects his fateful story with strenuous precision, beginning by addressing his lost love in a sonorous, compelling voice: "If words can reach whatever world you may be suffering in, then listen, I have things to tell you." Memory can be unreliable, and he questions the relative truth of the fragmented, fateful events he presents. As an art expert with a criminal history, he is lured into authenticating ill-gotten paintings for a gang of underworld characters. His appraisals of these classically themed pictures echo, with critical detachment, a wild, doomed, duplicitous love affair he conducts in the house where he does his secret work. Only pieces of the picture are offered, and the story ends with its beginning. Loveless and duped by the criminals he was too apathetic to resist, the narrator continues his vague, existential drifting. His exacting recollections, oblique insights, and piercing hindsight result only in tragedy, not redemption. Deanna Larson

Customer Reviews

Language that sings
One common adage in books about writing is to "kill the babies," in other words, get rid of those eloquent and delicious similes or turns of phrase that are will arrest the reader and pull him or her out of the story. Well, Banville violates this principle left and right, much to the delight of at least this particular reader. There is hardly paragraph, much less a page, that does not stop you cold you with image or simile or metaphor or simply brilliant construction, and you gladly forgive him each and every time.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves the English language. It is written by someone who probably loves it even more.

Snail-Trail
Yet another book by John Banville that one can only characterise as a work of art - Why this is so is hard to explain to the uninitiate. Banville's prose is both subtle and oceanic. Above all, it is seductive. Things always seem to begin simply enough in his works. But, somewhere along the way, one is taken suddenly by the realisation that s/he is under the spell of a virtuoso, a master craftsman, nay, a magician of sorts who turns every subject that falls under his pen into a work of high literary art.

The plot, such as it is, has been covered by the other reviewers. I have just a couple addenda: I'm not so sure that this book and Ghosts are sequels, as such, to The Book of Evidence or if it's particularly important if they are. Banville's narrator, especially in Ghosts, is much-taken with the notion of multiple or parallel universes. That seems to me the best way to read these works, as following Mr. Montgomery into entirely different worlds. ----Also, a bit of a personal peeve, one wishes one could get through a Banville work without his using the term "flocculent" to describe everything from clouds to pubic hair (herein). But this is a quibble.

Below a couple citations of Banvillian prose here:

The light in the room, the colour of tarnished tin, was the light of childhood. I would see again afternoons like this in the far past and myself as a child at a window watching the day fail and the rooks settling in the high, bare trees and the rain like time itself drifting down. p.151

But this is how I want it to be, all smeary with tears and lymph and squirming spawn and glass-green mucus: my snail-trail. P.220

And so it is, a lulling, seductive, dark snail-trail of poetic prose to the narrator's beloved. Follow it!

Captivating language.
Banville writes exquisitely. Athena should be read slowly, like a fine meal. Interested readers might be advised to read his Book of Evidence, then Ghosts, before turning to this one.