Book Club Blues

Good morning!

Yes, dear readers, a month has passed since I was wrestling with the onerous duties of hostessing, making a rich dessert, and finding a place for fourteen people to sit in an eight-person living room.

Now it is time for me to go to someone else's house tonight, where I shall as the "presenter" be parading mostly my ignorance, I fear, before the same fearsome gathering.  The book chosen was The Book of Evidence by John Banville.  Last year I presented The Sea, by the same writer.  The Sea was published some twenty years later than The Book of Evidence, but has the same protagonist:  a bumbling, selfish fellow who is now coming to grips with the picture of himself that is rapidly impinging  upon his consciousness as he works toward becoming (at last) self-aware.

Banville is a wonderful writer, with a near-mastery of his craft.  His command of words is truly awesome, his vocabulary astounding.  Christopher Derrick, in his book, The Writing of Novels, describes the novel as both a thing TOLD, (the story), and a thing MADE (how it is done.)  You can see in The Book of Evidence the hand of a newer, clumsier craftsman. His potter's wheel is a little more erratic and less under control, the clay slapped on a bit more crudely. That book was Banville's "breakout" novel, but it is still unmistakeably the same hand forming it.

When I am reading a book to talk about, I read it through and then I read again looking for what I might have to say about it.  "Wonderfully descriptive passages about scenery," or "startlingly brusque descriptions of human physical existence" won't cut it.

I found what I was looking for when I found the dialogue from Powell's books on the web.  You can see it on Youtube.com if you wish.  But since I have about thirty to forty five actual minutes to be onstage, it's best for me if I pick one little thing that leads me to some insight I might not have inferred for myself.  Here is the gist of the thing that Banville had to say.  He seeks to "make the familiar unfamiliar, showing us how the ordinary is in turn extraordinary."  He mentions Freud's essay on the uncanny.  Bringing back the familiar in unfamiliar shapes and thus showing things to us in a "terrifying" way.  Banville is aiming at clarifying the simplest, most routine aspects and attitudes of our lives into a truly terrifying intensity. Of course, nobody will have liked the book, probably.  How intense does vomiting have to be, or masturbation, or mites strolling on our skins have to be?  For his art, the view must be very intense.  And from this intense scrutiny may arise "delight." Art.

Then Banville speaks about  looking at a thing until it "blushes."  As you concentrate on something it begins to glow with the same light that illuminates the loved one...well, he said all this off the top of his head but he means it.  The protagonist, Freddie, is very taken with an old Dutch painting of a woman.  His stealing of this painting begins the series of events which this book is dealing with.  He stares at the painting, but the painting stares at him.  He blushes.  The artist's way. Freddie imagines the old painter who did the portrait (Franz Hals? Steen? Even Vermeer?) whose gaze at the subject is uncannily invasive.  The whole portrait is gazing back at Freddie in the same way.  Freddy blushes. Art has transcended reality and made art of the viewer.

Intermingled with all that are wonderful descriptive passages...."the muslin light of evening," and "girls with faces as frail and blank as flowers,"  the achingly true and sad sex scene with Foxy in an empty room at Charlie's house when Freddie is truly at the end of his rope....wonderful reading. Delight.

And as for the tale, the author wraps it up in a couple of tossed-off sentences toward the very end of the book: "Oh, by the way, the plot--," for those who have to have one.  I thought it was a good book.  I don't know, by reading this little posting I have just written, that I'll do justice to it in my critique this evening. YAZZYBEL