Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir Details
About the Author John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1976), the Guardian Fiction Prize (1981), the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award (1989), and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1997). He has been both shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1989) and awarded the Man Booker Prize (2005) as well as nominated for the Man Booker International Prize (2007). Other awards include the Franz Kafka Prize (2011), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2013), and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2014). He lives in Dublin. Read more
Reviews
One of the great philosophical questions through the ages has been the nature and substance of time. In the very first chapter, “About Time”, Banville poses the question, “When does the past become the past?” It provides, in many ways, the rhetorical theme that unifies what is otherwise part memoir, part guidebook, part picture book, and part social and geo-political commentary.As a result, there is a lot of timely reflection: “The process of growing up is, sadly, a process of turning the mysterious into the mundane.” It even infiltrates the description, as in, “…cups of tea the colour of tree trunks sunk for centuries in swamp-water.”Banville takes us on a magical journey through his life and Dublin both, providing just enough detail to make it informative, but not so much that it ever bogs down. Throughout the journey, moreover, you are sure to have a smile on your face. At one point, he asks, “Do I imagine it, or am I right in thinking that the English can never quite take the Irish seriously? When I am over there I have the impression that everyone I speak to is just about managing to keep a straight face.” I am not English, but I know I read the whole book on the brink of a good chuckle.The writing itself is very witty and very accessible. When comparing the statues of Paris and Ireland, for example, he notes, “In Ireland we tend to erect tremendous plinths and set upon them tiny figurines, our aspirations to gloire seeming to falter at an ascending rate. In Paris, however, those vast stone figures confront us imperiously, overwhelming in their scale, their grandeur, their vividness.”There are plenty of colorful references to other Irish writers and poets. He refers, for example, to Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, as a “crusty old codger,” but without a trace of disrespect. And he notes about Joyce: “For me, as a writer in the making, the fact was that Joyce had seized upon the city [Dublin] for his own literary purposes and in doing so had used it up, as surely as Kafka did with the letter K, and consequently the place was of no use to me as a backdrop for my fiction.”And while there’s a whiff of adolescent naughty here and there, although it hardly qualifies as even that by today’s standards, there’s not a single expletive in the whole book. The prose is crisp and sharp but never in your face.All told, it’s a delightful stroll through both time and Dublin, although I suspect the author would dislike the “delightful” part. His prose is more creative but straight on. Not quite bare knuckle, if you will, but definitely written with a mischievous twinkle in the eye that i can't hope to match.It’s a quick read and you won’t find a better way to spend an afternoon. So while it’s not transformative in the way we normally use that word, it will transform your day and that deserves a 5 in my book.
