The often marvelous John Lee makes a regrettable choice in delivering this memoir from the Irish novelist John Banville. Banville is a dryly elegant stylist, but Lee chooses to perform his text as if it were a series of tales being told by a loudmouth in a pub, or a comic Irish character on stage, with dramatically rolled “r”s, and a pacing as if Banville’s memories, reflections, and nuggets of history were stories with punch lines. By chewing the scenery in this way, he sends a message that he thinks the text needs all the dramatic help an actor can give it. It does not. Banville’s memories of his youth in Wessex and his adult life in Dublin have all the interest and charm they need. B.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

…what a topographical map has been drawn by Paul Joyce's evocative photographs and Banville's observant eye. Like Max Morden in his Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, Banville remains willfully and gloriously disorganized. The tour he takes us on, while offering a handful of interesting facts about Dublin, is more about moods and states of mind and how they shape, even create, the so-called real world…Banville's soarings, like a hawk's, are both wild and comprehensive, taking in everything and imagining more. One can't distinguish his descriptions from the things described, the dancer from the dance.

★ 01/01/2018
In this subtle, elegant memoir, Irish novelist and screenwriter Banville (Mrs. Osmond) explores three overlapping Dublins: the contemporary city, the city of history, and the city he remembers. Despite spending centuries as a provincial backwater in the British Empire, Dublin produced a pantheon of great artists, among them Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Jonathan Swift, Orson Welles (who made his stage debut in Dublin’s Gate Theatre), Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats. As a bookish youth in Wexford, Banville viewed Dublin as the locus of all sophistication, excitement, and meaning. In 1964 at age 18, he moved there and found his place in the bohemian milieu he’d admired from afar. In Banville’s survey of 21st-century Dublin, every shift in perspective triggers meditations on the myriad ways the city has shaped his long life. The real unity of the narrative rests in the remarkable interplay between text and image (preceding a two-page photo of the Shelbourne Hotel’s Horseshoe Bar, Banville describes it “as dimly lit and pleasingly louche today as it was then”). For much of the journey, a mysterious friend named Cicero accompanies Banville, a conceit adding yet another layer to a quietly remarkable work. Yet despite this intricate structure, Banville’s wit and humor make this book pass far too quickly. Dublin could not have asked for a more perceptive observer, or a more enchanting portrait. (Feb.)

A delicious memoir … Like the more thoughtful Romantics, Banville sees into the life of things…. [His] soarings, like a hawk’s, are both wild and comprehensive, taking in everything and imagining more.” —The New York Times

The often marvelous John Lee makes a regrettable choice in delivering this memoir from the Irish novelist John Banville. Banville is a dryly elegant stylist, but Lee chooses to perform his text as if it were a series of tales being told by a loudmouth in a pub, or a comic Irish character on stage, with dramatically rolled “r”s, and a pacing as if Banville’s memories, reflections, and nuggets of history were stories with punch lines. By chewing the scenery in this way, he sends a message that he thinks the text needs all the dramatic help an actor can give it. It does not. Banville’s memories of his youth in Wessex and his adult life in Dublin have all the interest and charm they need. B.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

★ 2017-11-12
The celebrated author turns inward with this enchanting memoir about his beloved hometown.Franz Kafka Prize and Booker Award recipient Banville (Mrs. Osmond, 2017, etc.) turns nostalgic in this quietly reflective, personal meditation on Dublin. Like the author's pathologist detective Quirke of his pseudonymous Benjamin Black novels, Banville's 1950s Dublin is where he begins his walking tour, with the "laboratory of the past…shaped and burnished to a finished radiance." He lovingly recounts December birthday trips by train with his mother from their Wexford home to visit his spinster Aunt Nan at her Percy Place flat. Dublin, writes the author "was for me what Moscow was for Irina in Chekhov's Three Sisters, a place of magical promise towards which my starved young soul endlessly yearned." Literary city signposts abound: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, and more. Banville then joins up with his friend Cicero, who "knows a Dublin that few others are aware of or have forgotten ever existed." As a young man, the author shared the "shabby splendours" of an Upper Mount Street flat with his aunt in the "dazzlingly bright lights of Dublin." Yeats' daughter Anne lived below. "What a prissy and purblind young man I was," writes Banville, "a snob with nothing to be snobbish about." Forays into Dublin's streets and pubs and Ireland's history mix with memories and images flickering about like film running in a darkened room, all brought to life with picturesque-perfect details. He visits Iveagh Gardens with his daughter to show her "a place precious to me, where I was once sweetly and unhappily in love." He and Cicero visit one of his "favourite buildings in all the world"—the Great Palm House of the Botanic Gardens. The text is beautifully complemented with Joyce's well-chosen photographs.Told in a conversational style both luscious and luxuriant, this is exquisite work by a master craftsman.