Eclipse

Zusatztext “Like Nabokov! Banville captures the vivid aesthetic pleasures of quotidian reality in the most satisfying ways.” –The New York Times Book Review “An impressive! effective novel! bracing as a nightmare.”– Chicago Tribune “Mr. Banville is that rare writer who can pack all five senses into a declarative sentence.”– The Wall Street Journal “[ Eclipse ] captures in its pages a felt life so dense! so swift in its paranoid momentum! that the whole idea of the novel as a window to the self seems viable again…. This is as true as things ever get.”–Sven Birkerts! Esquire “[Banville] has an uncanny ability to pinpoint and record sensations rarely brought to consciousness. . . . Eclipse wakes us up to things we should have noticed.” – San Francisco Chronicle Informationen zum Autor John Banville lives in Ireland. Klappentext In this deeply moving and original book, John Banville alloys mystery, fable, and ghost story with poignant psychological acuity to forge the riveting story of a man wary of the future, plagued by the past, and so uncertain in the present that he cannot discern the spectral from the real. When renowned actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he's fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a nervous breakdown on stage, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, at the presence of two new lodgers who have covertly settled into his old roost. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter destined for doom. At first it was a form. Or not even that. A weight, an extra weight; a ballast. I felt it that first day out in the fields. It was as if someone had fallen silently into step beside me, or inside me, rather, someone who was else, another, and yet familiar. I was accustomed to putting on personae but this, this was different. I stopped, struck, stricken by that infernal cold I have come to know so well, that paradisal cold. Then a slight thickening in the air, a momentary occlusion of the light, as if something had plummeted past the sun, a winged boy, perhaps, or falling angel. It was April: bird and bush, silver glint of coming rain, vast sky, the glacial clouds in monumental progress. See me there, the haunted one, in my fiftieth year, assailed suddenly, in the midst of the world. I was frightened, as well I might be. I imagined such sorrows; such exaltations. I turned and looked back at the house and saw what I took to be my wife standing at the window of what was once my mother's room. The figure was motionless, gazing steadily in my direction but not directly at me. What did she see? What was it she was seeing? I felt diminished briefly, an incidental in that gaze, dealt, as it were, a glancing blow or blown a derisive kiss. Day reflecting on the glass made the image in the window shimmer and slip; was it she or just a shadow, woman-shaped? I set off over the uneven ground, retracing my steps, with this other, my invader, walking steadily inside me, like a knight in his armour. The going was treacherous. The grass clutched at my ankles and there were holes in the clay, under the grass, made by the hoofs of immemorial cattle when this edge of town was still open country, that would trip me up, perhaps break one of the myriad delicate bones it is said are in the foot. A gush of panic rose in me like gorge. How, I asked myself, how could I stay here? How could I have thought I could stay here, all alone? Well, too late now; I would have to go through with it. This is what I told myself, I murmured it ...

Product details

• Authors: John Banville
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 05.02.2002
• EAN: 9780375725296
• ISBN: 978-0-375-72529-6
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 12 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature