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Parallels between Nabokov and John Banville (sardonic tone,
mischievousness, confessional narrative, unreliable narrators etc.)
have been noted before, but I am currently reading Banville's _Shroud_,
whose protagonist (Axel Vander) is quite a dissimulator/unreliable
narrator. From my reading so far, he seems to have been some kind of
academic or critic and he offers up this summation. I thought Banville
could just as easily have had not just himself but Nabokov in mind when
he wrote the following (notwithstanding the unflattering tail-end of
this passage?):
all were united in acclaiming my mastery of the language, the tone
and pitch of my singular voice; even my critics, and there were more
than a few of them, could only stand back and watch in frustration as
their best barbs skidded off the high gloss of my prose style. This
surprised as much as it pleased me; how they could not see, in hiding
behind the brashness and bravado of what I wrote, the trembling
autodidact hunched over his Websters, his Chicago Manual, his Grammar
for Foreign Students? Perhaps it was the very bizarreries of usage
which
I unavoidably fell into that they took for the willed eccentricities in
which they imagined only a lord of language would dare to indulge.
(pp.
62-63, U.K. Picador edition).
What is more, Axel Vander is almost an anagram (if that's possible) of
the name of the narrator of the first part of what I believe is a
trilogy in his previous novel, Eclipse - Alexander Cleave. Indeed, the
two narrators might be the same person, as Vander infers that he has
adopted a new identity. And I wonder if that Vander refers to the Van of
_Ada_?
Brian Howell
----- End forwarded message -----
mischievousness, confessional narrative, unreliable narrators etc.)
have been noted before, but I am currently reading Banville's _Shroud_,
whose protagonist (Axel Vander) is quite a dissimulator/unreliable
narrator. From my reading so far, he seems to have been some kind of
academic or critic and he offers up this summation. I thought Banville
could just as easily have had not just himself but Nabokov in mind when
he wrote the following (notwithstanding the unflattering tail-end of
this passage?):
all were united in acclaiming my mastery of the language, the tone
and pitch of my singular voice; even my critics, and there were more
than a few of them, could only stand back and watch in frustration as
their best barbs skidded off the high gloss of my prose style. This
surprised as much as it pleased me; how they could not see, in hiding
behind the brashness and bravado of what I wrote, the trembling
autodidact hunched over his Websters, his Chicago Manual, his Grammar
for Foreign Students? Perhaps it was the very bizarreries of usage
which
I unavoidably fell into that they took for the willed eccentricities in
which they imagined only a lord of language would dare to indulge.
(pp.
62-63, U.K. Picador edition).
What is more, Axel Vander is almost an anagram (if that's possible) of
the name of the narrator of the first part of what I believe is a
trilogy in his previous novel, Eclipse - Alexander Cleave. Indeed, the
two narrators might be the same person, as Vander infers that he has
adopted a new identity. And I wonder if that Vander refers to the Van of
_Ada_?
Brian Howell
----- End forwarded message -----