JOHN BANVILLE

'John Banville' (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist and journalist. His novel, ''The Book of Evidence'' (1989), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award. His eighteenth novel, ''The Sea'', won the Man Booker Prize in 2005.
Banville is known for his precise—some would say cold—prose style, Nabokovian in inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. Banville's stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".^[1]

Contents

Biography

Awards

Style

Banville quotations

Works

Further reading

Notes

External links

Biography

Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when John was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. Banville is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own.
Educated at a Christian Brothers' school and at St Peter's College in Wexford, he did not attend university. After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates. He lived in the United States in 1968-9. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the ''Irish Press'', rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. His first book, ''Long Lankin'', appeared in 1970.
After the ''Irish Press'' collapsed in 1995, he became a sub-editor at the ''Irish Times''. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The ''Irish Times'', too, suffered severe financial problems, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left. Banville has been a regular contributor to ''The New York Review of Books'' since 1990. In 1984, he was elected to Aosdána, but resigned in 2001, so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the ''cnuas''. He also writes under the pen name Benjamin Black. His first novel under this pen name was ''Christine Falls'', which is rumored to be the first in a series.
He has two adult sons by his wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. His wife described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing."
Banville has two daughters aged 10 and 17 from a relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland. He lives in central Dublin.

Awards

'Year     '	'Prize'	'For'
1976	James Tait Black Memorial Prize	''Doctor Copernicus''
1981	Guardian Fiction Prize	''Kepler''
	Allied Irish Bank Fiction Prize
	American-Irish Foundation Award	''Birchwood''
1989	Guinness Peat Aviation Award	''The Book of Evidence''
1989	Booker Prize (shortlisted)	''The Book of Evidence''
2005	Booker Prize	''The Sea''
2006	Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year	''The Sea''

Style

John Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of the English language, and his writing has been described as perfectly-crafted, beautiful, dazzling. David Mehegan of the ''Boston Globe'' calls Banville "one of the great stylists writing in English today;" Don DeLillo calls his work "dangerous and clear-running prose;" and the UK ''Observer'' described his 1989 work, ''The Book of Evidence'', as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of ''Lolita''."
He is also known for his dark humour, and sharp wit.

Banville quotations

• [My parents were] small people, small, good, decent people, who lived very circumscribed lives. Leaving the nest so early was hard for them and, when I look back now, I realise how cruel I was.
  
• (About his father's death) Someone said the best gift a man can give his son is to die young. When you think about it, it's true. I was in my early 30s and I did feel freed by it, awful as it is to confess.
  
• ...those who regard me as effete, arrogant, distanced. [Interviewer: All of which is true, of course.] [Banville:] Of course!
  
• I regard Nietzsche as the greatest philosopher in our time
  
• I don’t like fiction as a form. I think it’s childish. It’s too coarse. Which is why I’m trying to change it. My modest ambition in life is to change the novel entirely!
  
• This book has come out which says that people who know me say I’m ‘prickly and arrogant’. Okay, I am!
  
• (His books) ...they're all cold, or so I'm told anyway. I don't find them cold. I find them embarrassingly emotional, throbbing with anguish and aches.
  
• I don't understand politics, how it works...I don't understand the intricacies. Power. I don't understand power.
  
• All works of art are scar tissue.
  
• I couldn't live on my own...I have to have people around me. Outside the door. I have to know they are outside that door.
  
• ...that is a large part of sex. The sense of mutual, joyful damage.
  
• (Describing sex in ''The Book of Evidence'') He inflicted his tender damage on her.
  
• I find women very strange. I don't understand them at all...I don't much like the company of men.
  
• I now belong to a small band of big Bs - Botticelli, Banville and Beethoven. But not necessarily in that order.
  
• (On being reprimanded for a minor factual error in an article, one he dismissed as a technicality) Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia.
  
• (On the Booker Prize) There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for real books.
  
• (On winning the Booker Prize) It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize.
  
• I have been, at last, Bookered.
  
• (On publicity) We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us. I'm afraid I'm not very demonstrative.
  
• (Reviewing Ian McEwan's ''Saturday'') In a note of acknowledgment at the end of the book McEwan names the various doctors who shared their expertise with him, including...the Nabokovianly named Frank T. Vertosick Jr., to whom he is indebted for an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy—yes, there are many big words in this book.
  
• (Adjectives used by Banville in his book, ''The Sea'') Flocculent...cinereal...crepitant...velutinous.
  
• (On bitchy reaction to his Booker win among London's literati) If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?
  

Works

• ''Long Lankin'' (1970; revised ed.1984)


• ''Nightspawn'' (1971)


• ''Birchwood'' (1973)


• ''Doctor Copernicus: A Novel'' (1976)


• ''Kepler, a Novel'' (1981)


• ''The Newton Letter: An Interlude'' (1982)


• ''Mefisto'' (1986)


• ''The Book of Evidence'' (1989)


• ''Ghosts'' (1993)


• ''The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist'' (1994) - a play


• ''Seachange'' (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished)


• ''Athena: A Novel'' (1995)


• ''The Ark'' (1996) (only 260 copies published)


• ''The Untouchable'' (1997)


• ''God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist'' (2000)


• ''Eclipse'' (2000)


• ''Shroud'' (2002)


• ''Dublin 1742'' (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9-14 year olds; unpublished)


• ''Prague Pictures: Portrait Of A City'' (2003)


• ''The Sea'' (2005)


• ''Love In The Wars'' (adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, 2005)
  
• ''Christine Falls'' (crime novel published as Benjamin Black, 2006)


• ''The Silver Swan'' (as Benjamin Black, 2007)
  

Further reading

• ''John Banville, a critical study'' by Joseph McMinn; Gill and MacMillan; ISBN 0-7171-1803-7
  
• ''The Supreme Fictions of John Banville'' by Joseph McMinn; (October 1999); Manchester University Press; ISBN 0-7190-5397-8
  
• ''John Banville: A Critical Introduction'' by Rüdiger Imhoff (October 1998) Irish American Book Co; ISBN 0-86327-582-6
  
• ''John Banville: Exploring Fictions'' by Derek Hand; (June 2002); Liffey Press; ISBN 1-904148-04-2
  
• ''Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue John Banville'' Edited by Derek Hand; (June 2006)
  

Notes

1. Steinberg, Sybil. "Who Is John Banville?". Publishers Weekly, July, 1995. Retrieved on 21 January, 2007.

External links

★ Aosdána biographical note

★ 1990 audio interview of John Banville, 35 min 31 s, RealAudio

★ As clear as mirror glass. John Banville in interview with Three Monkeys Online Magazine

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