“When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.”
In the prologue to this book, Alasdair Gray, a celebrated author who describes himself as “an elderly Glasgow pedestrian,” writes:
I am the descendant of a race whose stolid unimaginative decency has, at all times, rendered them the dependable tools of others; yet from my earliest infancy I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, a prey to the most ungovernable passions until bound and weary I thought best to sulk upon my mother’s breast. Too romantic.
His most famous books are “Lanark” (1981) and “Poor Things” (1992). The jacket for this book, published in New York by Harcourt Brace in 1993, includes only two blurbs:
One from Newsweek describes Gray as “a glorious one-man band.” The other, from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says he “may be the most interesting and extraordinary author writing in English today.”
I leave you with only one other quotation from Gray in this book:
“Whatever the future of the human race it is not likely to dispense with dentists.”
Having gone to the dentist yesterday and now facing a return visit on Monday, I have to believe that Alasdair Gray is a very wise, even prescient, man.
[Novelist Bob] Atkinson said it was not difficult to be moved by the landscape of the west Highlands. He said: “The Last Sunset was conceived amongst the empty glens and ruined townships of Lochaber. “The events of the 18th and 19th centuries still scar this land, and indeed continue to scar the psyche of many of the older inhabitants. “There are glens within 10 miles of Fort William where you can walk all day without seeing another living soul. Once heavily populated, these places have long been left to the wind and heather.” He added: “The past hangs heavy here, and occasionally - just occasionally - you can sense moments from those days.”
Verlyn Klinkenborg writes:
Think of [Philip] Marlowe, and his film avatars may come to mind — Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum or Elliott Gould. But [Raymond] Chandler matters as much for his prose as for his private detective, and in that [John] Banville (or [his pseudonym Benjamin] Black) is Chandler’s equal. Reading the opening pages of Mr. Banville’s “Book of Evidence” alongside Marlowe’s description of the “felony tank” in “The Long Goodbye” is enough to banish any doubt. And if Banville/Black can do for vintage Los Angeles what he does for vintage Dublin, his Marlowe will be worth waiting for.
Janet Maslin writes:
When [Irish author] John Banville inaugurated his pseudonymous series of Benjamin Black books in 2007 with “Christine Falls,” this esteemed author seemed to have taken an iffy turn. The Banville name would be reserved for literary fiction (like “The Sea,” winner of the Man Booker Prize); Benjamin Black would swim in the supposedly shallower waters of the whodunit. The Black books were said to be much more casually and quickly written than the serious ones. Mr. Banville would have no trouble keeping his august reputation and his day job. But things have not worked out exactly as planned. The Black books have been lovely and luminous, to the point of almost eclipsing Mr. Banville’s primary oeuvre. And the two careers have run closely parallel at times. Benjamin Black’s current “Vengeance” will be followed in only two months by the latest Banville work, “Ancient Light.”
I agree: The Benjamin Black books are great.
Philip Marlowe is making another comeback. Henry Holt & Company said on Tuesday that Raymond Chandler’s creation, one of the world’s most famous private eyes, will star in a novel written by [Irish novelist] John Banville to be published in 2013.
Mr. Banville, 66, is a Booker Prize-winning author who has also written several mysteries under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. The new Marlowe novel, which was authorized by Chandler’s estate, will be billed as a work by Mr. Black.
(Source: bohemiansouth)
James Joyce’s Ulysses has topped poll after poll to be named the greatest novel of the 20th century, but according to Paulo Coelho, the book is “a twit”. Speaking to Brazilian newspaper Folha de S Paulo, Coelho said the reason for his own popularity was that he is “a modern writer, despite what the critics say”. This doesn’t mean his books are experimental, he added – rather, “I’m modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate with the whole world.” Writers go wrong, according to Coelho, when they focus on form, not content. “Today writers want to impress other writers,” he told the paper. “One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.”
Best-selling Irish author Maeve Binchy has died aged 72 after a short illness. Binchy, born in Dalkey, Co Dublin, has sold more than 40 million books. Her works were often set in Ireland and have been translated into 37 languages. They include The Lilac Bus as well as Tara Road and Circle of Friends, which were both adapted for screen. Binchy trained as a teacher before moving into journalism and writing, publishing her first novel - Light a Penny Candle - in 1982. She had written the novel in her spare time from her day job as a journalist at The Irish Times.
In a review, Liesl Schillinger writes:
In his latest novel, “The Dream of the Celt,” the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa unearths the achievements of [Roger Casement] this complicated man of conscience, reasserting his credentials as “one of the great anticolonial fighters and defenders of human rights and indigenous cultures of his time, and a sacrificed combatant for the emancipation of Ireland.” Although Casement was an Irishman (born in 1864 to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother, and orphaned in childhood), he spent most of the first decade of the 20th century as a British consul, investigating working conditions on rubber plantations in Congo and Peru. His reports, which stirred public outrage, earned him a knighthood in 1911. This honor notwithstanding, Casement’s loathing of colonialism gradually led him to see England as an enemy occupier and turned him into a fervent Irish nationalist. In 1914, in the early months of World War I, Casement traveled to Germany with his perfidious Norwegian lover (a man named Eivind Adler Christensen) to seek the kaiser’s help in arming the Irish against Britain. Upon his return to Ireland, in April 1916, he was captured, imprisoned, stripped of his knighthood and hanged as a traitor in Pentonville Prison in London.
