Customer Reviews

Shroud

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially his ironically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, questioning his own identity and asking to meet with him. As the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the "real" Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the emotionally disturbed Cass Cleave.

Like Banville's narrators in other novels, the elderly Axel Vander of Shroud is unreliable and often dishonest, self-concerned but not self-aware. Consummately venal (though beautifully realized), he is a character who blithely takes advantage of whatever circumstances arise, with no concern for the consequences, except to himself. Cass Cleave, the daughter of Alexander Cleave, the narrator of Banville's previous novel, Eclipse, has visions and seizures, and Vander regards her as mad, but she and Vander develop a relationship of almost religious significance. He is a depraved and amoral old man living a life of personal un-truth, while she is a sick, avenging angel, striving to connect the disjunctions in her life so that she can become an integrated, whole person.

In Turin, where she joins Axel, Cass sees religious symbolism in common events, finding an ordinary breakfast a form of communion. Artworks, especially crucifixion scenes by artists from the various settings in which the novel takes place (Cranach, Bosch, Memling, and Van Eyck in the Low Countries; and Tintoretto, Mantegna, and Bellini in Italy) further develop the symbolism. Always present in the background, of course, is the Shroud of Turin, which may be the real burial cloth of Jesus--or may not be. Parallels and contrasts between Vander and Jesus abound.

Banville's novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. Every plot detail expands his themes of identity and selfhood, the relationships we create with the outside world, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Banville's prose is exquisite, creating mystery by introducing details at a snail's pace, conveying attitude, and acutely observing sensuous details and physical reactions. He juxtaposes unlikely events from different times to convey information, providing voluptuous descriptions which contain both an idea and its antithesis simultaneously. Major surprises occur in the final five pages, not inserted as literary tricks, but generated naturally out of the action and interactions. This is a challenging and fascinating novel, beautifully crafted and rewarding on every level. Mary Whipple

"Shroud" is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read and, unlike some authors, Banville doesn't sacrifice plot or character for the sake of style.

"Shroud" is the story of Axel Vander, "master of the lie." For many years Axel has posed as someone he is not but, at long last, his past is catching up with him in the form of the emotionally scarred and damaged Cass Cleve, who Vander arranges to meet in Turin, Italy, home of the famous "Shroud of Turin." It seems fitting to me that Cass and Axel meet in Turin since the shroud is one of the biggest frauds ever perpetuated on mankind.

I didn't care for either Cass or Axel. Both are quite unlikable, however, that wasn't the problem for me. I found some of the happenings in this book too much of a stretch; too unbelievable. The relationship that develops between Cass and Axel is just one such point. I can see Cass desiring that relationship, but I can't, for the life of me, see Axel letting it happen. It was simply "out of character" for him.

That said, "Shroud" is a beautiful book that will certainly appeal to lovers of literary and very serious fiction far more than to those who like a strongly plotted book. The reader should also be warned that this is a very melancholic and tragic book. I liked this aspect of "Shroud" but I feel that many readers will feel depressed at the book's end.

If you can tolerate reading about characters you can't like, if you don't need a strong plotline and if you are really willing to suspend your disbelief, then I recommend "Shroud" highly.

Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially on the nature of identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, questioning his own identity and asking to meet with him. As the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the "real" Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the emotionally disturbed Cass Cleave.

Like Banville's narrators in other novels, the elderly Axel Vander of Shroud is unreliable and often dishonest, self-concerned but not self-aware. Consummately venal, he blithely takes advantage of whatever circumstances arise. Cass Cleave, the daughter of Alexander Cleave, the narrator of Banville's previous novel, Eclipse, has visions and seizures, and Vander regards her as mad, but she and Vander develop a relationship of almost religious significance. He is depraved and amoral, and she is a sick, avenging angel.

In Turin, where she joins Axel, Cass sees religious symbolism in common events, finding an ordinary breakfast a form of communion. Artworks, especially crucifixion scenes by artists from the various settings in which the novel takes place (Cranach, Bosch, Memling, and Van Eyck in the Low Countries; and Tintoretto, Mantegna, and Bellini in Italy) further develop the symbolism. Always present in the background, of course, is the Shroud of Turin, which may be the real burial cloth of Jesus--or may not be. Parallels and contrasts between Vander and Jesus abound.

Banville's novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. Every plot detail expands his themes of identity and selfhood, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Banville's prose is exquisite, creating mystery by introducing details at a snail's pace, conveying attitude, and acutely observing sensuous details and physical reactions. He juxtaposes unlikely events from different times to convey information, providing voluptuous descriptions which contain both an idea and its antithesis simultaneously. This is a challenging and fascinating novel, beautifully crafted and rewarding on every level. Mary Whipple

The masterful ending of John Banville's "Shroud" reminded me of that of Gogol's superb "The Overcoat." In the wild chaos he creates in the final pages, Gogol manages to literally hide the ironic ending of his story from all but the very careful reader. By contrast, Banville's final pages seemingly very peacefully and sedately tapering off, hide a bombshell, a totally unexpected surprise ending.

The style of this novel is truly mesmerizing, as objects, streets, buildings, rooms and people flow by the reader in a slow and dark river of words. A sizable fraction of the novel deals with porters, cooks, maids and other incidental characters. Weather, or the lack of it, is constantly on the author's mind. Yet, even in this thick --- too thick? --- medium, a gripping human story unfolds in its own vague manner. Were it to be told precisely, factually by Axel Vander, the main character, this story would lose all its interest, because Vander is known to us as an inveterate liar, thief, dissimulator and worse. Flooded with detail by Vander, we are forced to read between the lines and there, even a man as intelligent and as deceitful as Vander, loses control and inadvertently reveals some of the truth.

One of the main themes of the book is whether a human being has a "self" at all, and if so, whether this self is unique. Banville also tries to make sense of Vander, an extremely talented literary scholar, so thoroughly immoral and amoral as to qualify without exaggeration as a criminal, yet sufficiently intelligent to fully appreciate the extent of his own infamy.

Banville has Vander describe his own dishonesty, "There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice .... from material filched from others." Very funny did I find the theft of one of most famous words coined by James Joyce, in Vander's, "the green of the glass took on a snotlike hue." There are many other such instances. On the whole, there is something outright Nabokovian about Banville's style. Here and there this gets out of hand, as in the reference to "undulant waves," but this is no more than a minor quibble. Even the character Vander has more than a passing resemblance to Nabokov himself and to that disgraced literary scholar, the late Paul de Man (could Cassy Cleave owe something to Cynthia Chase???)

The novel offers some intriguing insights (e.g. "If it could think, the heart would stop beating") and also some that float gracefully near the surface (e.g. "How could there be so many people in the world, she wondered, so many lives? Not to mention the countless dead.").

Banville visits horrible fates on his three female characters, one is mercy-killed by her husband, another jumps to her death not far from where the poet Shelley met his tragic end, and the third is not spared any of the agonies as she slowly dies of cancer under our very eyes. Misogyny? Perish the thought! Keep in mind that the surviving males are far from getting the proverbial last laugh in this bleak yet beautiful novel.

John Banville's most recent novel "Shroud" was longlisted for the Booker Prize but it got no further, which is a shame because it is one of the most literate and immaculately crafted novels to have been published this year. Fans of Banville will recognise their favourite author's trademark writing style. Packed from cover to cover with long flowing sentences and beautifully eloquent prose that recalls the flair of the great classical novelists, "Shroud" is also a psychological thriller that speaks of lies, deceit and the charisma of identity to those desperate to escape their own past and reality.

Alex Vander, a celebrated expatriate professor of literature in America, is forced to flee to Europe to confront an enemy figure who threatens to reveal his true identity, expose his long buried past to the world and blow his distinguished career apart. His nemesis is Cassie Cleave, a tormented and slightly crazed lady with demons of her own. From their first meeting in a hotel, there isn't a modicum of doubt that their liaison - surprising in some ways - would lead to tragedy and tears.

I'm not giving anything away but just don't imagine Alex to be a replica of that now famous Ripley character from Patricia Highsmith's novel. Alex may be a cantankerous old semi-invalid. He may be selfish, deceitful and lacking in redeeming qualities - his callous treatment of Magda, his long suffering deceased wife is vividly alluded to in flashbacks - but he is no murderer. So, there are far less high points of drama in the revelation than the blurbs at the back of the book would suggest. What Alex, Magda, Cassie and the other characters share in common is an old world heritage of pain, loss and deprivation. That's the real enemy that haunts their past.

The story is narrated from Alex's perspective, though Cassie's tale alternates with Alex's for centrestage. Banville is obviously less concerned with plot than with unrevelling the mysteries of the human heart. The love story that develops between Alex and Cassie is surprising and by no means a cliche. It is both touching and heartbreaking, so when the tragedy unfolds, the understated emotional impact is almost unbearable.

Banville for me can do no wrong. His "The Untouchables" is a modern masterpiece. "Shroud" comes close and should have made it to the Booker shortlist. Read it. You won't be disappointed.

In Eclipse, Banville's previous novel, we met the actor Alex Cleave, coming to terms with might conventionally be termed a mid-life crisis. Informing his woes was his fraught relationship with his deranged daughter Cass, who remained offscreen but permeated the story. Now Banville moves Cass to the center stage, where she has crossed paths with the mendacious Axel Vander, patterned loosely after Paul de Man and Louis Althusser (note the anagram of Alex -- these are different sides of the same essential personality), and the story moves into a darker key. Banville is difficult in the best possible way, demanding attention and involvement from his readers. But the rewards are great and his prose glitters and his characters resonate long after the book is set down. Axel is his darkest monster yet, beside whom Freddie Montgomery (The Book of Evidence) is a boy scout. But he's afforded something resembling redemption -- albeit Banville-style, and this work will echo in your mind for a long time. The only downside is it's another 3 or 4 long years until his next -- he promises something light but don't count on it!

Well, following other reviewers on Amazon who have proven the thoughtful equals of Banville's own intelligent fiction makes my own comments rather anti-climactic. I'm glad I hadn't read the summary or the comments before I opened Shroud--warning: major plot spoilers abound! Suffice it to say that David Lehman's "Signs of the Times" on the late 1980s Paul deMan revelations, while not receiving explicit credit in the author's notes, can shed light on the inspiration for Banville, much as the Blount spy episode does for The Untouchable, which pairs neatly with this novel as two portraits of unlikeable but captivating men that Banville sketches not with a righteous incrimination but a humanist compassion as he seems to report rather than construct their tales. No other comments have appeared on the triptych-like structure of the novel, so about this I will add a few words.

The first part, the left-hand side of Banville's objet d'art, presents a smug, self-satisfied roue. I was thrown off, I admit, by the cleverly planted aside about the "Hebrew" neighbor who watches the scholar as he leaves Arcady, California--itself conveyed sharply and concisely in its summery smells and languid allure. It reminded me of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades in exile from the Nazis. Cass, at her entrance, appears annoyingly at his side, as if to whisper calumnies in his ear; at his other side I imagine the older Kristina Kovacs recriminating him with upraised finger and brow before an academic crowd--the whole rarified and curiously solipsistic atmosphere of a lit-crit conference amusingly captured, again by Banville, in only a couple of pages (it took David Lodge, no slouch himself, many novels to do the same--which I also highly recommend!). The scene of the woman run over in the street, which may appear on the margin of this segment, disturbed me greatly; it can be seen only more clearly in retrospect as foreshadowing, I suppose. This section's characteristic passage shows Banville's prose at its customary best: "Flakes of ash from his cigarette fell on her breast, tiny, warm, weightless kisses." (76)

In the central frame, the protagonist turns victim. Here, the Graham Greene-landish nature of Querell in The Untouchable seems to color the prose; "I would like to be the protagonist of one of those third-rate, so-called philosophical novles that were so popular in the haunted postwar years, the man who takes on the identity of a sinner all unaware that the one he is impersonating was a saint all along." (150) While Banville avoids such a neat juxtaposition to his credit, this echo seems to issue from Greene's own fiction. This can best be seen in the miniature depictions: a mysterious train ride to and from Brussels, and the apparition of an ambiguous savior from the ruins of the protagonist's family home. The pace of this central action rouses itself from the torpor of the left-frame, part one.

For the right-hand section, the action fades and after what for me was the climactic revelation around page 150, the remaining section is prepared for by: "The year and I are both declining; there is a chill in the air." (177) With part three, the last sixty pages present more of a diminishing presence of all of the main characters. This last section, however, in its deliberately blurred and less substantially rendered details, involved me less than it could have. Death in Turin rather than Venice, yes, but again this morbidity shrouds the last segment in shadows more than sun. I see here the momento mori, the aging and contorted figures, the skulls and the devils awaiting below the ledge. If the opening of the book recalls Beckett, the end summons up the aftermath of another revelation--Greta to Gabriel, from Joyce's "The Dead." For the protagonist of Banville's study, he is doomed to live on in a world of increasing gloom, descending while still alive into the Hades of his own making, and of what he has been made into by the ghosts of the last century.

Axel Vander, the narrator of John Banville's "Shroud," is the latest and, according to Banville, will be the last of his "self-hating, murderous" central characters, the kind that careen drunkenly through polite society. Vander is an anti-hero with nothing going for him. He is a liar, a thief, a charlatan, an academic in-fighter, an exploiter of women. He is even a critic. "Professor Vander," mocks his Italian host, "holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic's task to nose out. Is that not so, Axel?" (222-23)

The reviewer who seeks to parse "Shroud," to expose the secret of its architecture, thus risks sounding painfully, ironically silly. Here goes anyway. Set in Turin, where Nietzsche became mad, and the Ligurian coast, where Shelley drowned, "Shroud" is a character study of Vander, a Jewish refugee who assumes the identity of a dead partisan in pre-War Belgium, rises to fame on the faculty of an American university, and at the end of his life confronts, and is confronted by, a dreamy young woman who threatens to unmask him. Told mostly in first-person from Vander's point of view and in third-person from his accuser's, "Shroud" is a meditation on death, truth, identity and self, good and evil, social covenants, and spirit, in which Nietsche's Zoroaster, Christ's resurrection, commedia dell'arte, and a rejection of rationalism are all somehow conflated. (Am I sounding silly yet?)

As a character, Vander lacks the comedic, self-deprecating charm of, say, Freddie Montgomery, the anti-hero of Banville's "The Book of Evidence," so there is little lightness in his voyage of discovery ending in death. (On the other hand, I suppose, neither is there much lightness in "Moby Dick" or "Crime and Punishment," to which "Shroud" self-consciously refers.) Vander is not the sort of character Graham Greene would invite to dinner. However, his voice is always full and multi-layered, in a nineteenth-century prose style, and the novel's minor characters - an Italian academic and his family, a former lover dying of cancer, hotel employees, and caffè patrons - are quirky and memorable.

Words, even words that no one else has ever heard of or used, seem to spill out of Banville's brain effortlessly, and like Faulkner or Proust he has a master's ability to connect the dots in long rolling rhythms. I recommend this book. Robert E. Olsen

Here the luminous Irish prose stylist essays a broken-down retired humanities professor agonizing over his having assumed the identity of another in the chaos of war in Belgium. His distinguished persona is threatened by an ethereal though schizophrenic young woman who possibly had learnt of his lifelong fraud. Somehow, a la Roth's fantasies of the past decade, the decrepit academic beds the nymph immediately. One lives; one dies.

That said, for Banville aficianodos, every line, every page is riveting. What weather condition, what smell, what light obtains?

Shroud, like other novels by John Banville, is beautifully written against a vividly limned background. The main character, Axel Vander, is conceited, obnoxious, and goes out of his way to offend the readers. He identifies himself as a masterly liar who lies about almost everything, even when there is no need and even when the plain truth will be so much more effective in maintaining the pretence. I will not be surprised at his unreliable narration, shameless boasting and impudent lies as he spatters out the tale of his life.

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