Talk:John Banville

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material of any kind that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard.

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. [FAQ] (If you rated the article, please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)

Contents 1 J's Openion 2 Style 3 Overhaul 4 Residence

[edit] J's Openion

John Banville is a bit of a clown; if that's the word I'm looking for. Misty sonambulism; clouds. j —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 155.137.0.9 (talk • contribs) 10:19, 12 August 2005.

[edit] Style

Is this article in an appropriate style for an encyclopedia? The "reputation" and "according to his friends" sections are surely typical of the things frowned upon by any unbiased source of info. {Jiggers 22:13, 17 January 2006 (UTC)}?

Yeah, it is. Bit odd to have it. Skinnyweed 15:24, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Totally inappropriate...but kind of entertaining...--Staple 09:33, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

But seriously, the "Reputation" and "According to his Friends" sections are trivial. "Typical descriptions of his style", while well-written, seems to be based entirely on a reading of The Sea and is riddled with POVesque statements. His style is painterly (I read somewhere that he tried his hand early on as a painter, is that in the article?) but the tone of the section seems somewhat distainful--"this sort of writting might win Booker Prizes"...ect. I would add that in much of his fiction, the descriptions tend toward the grotesque or macabre. I personally don't have a problem with the quotations, although they're unusual. I feel like a killjoy complaining about such a playful article, but as we all know, humorlessness always triumphs on Wikipedia.--Staple 06:21, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree totally. "reputation" & "according to his friends" do not belong in this article - unless in reference to his work or importance as an author; or perhaps if attributable to a notable source.

re: the "descriptions of style" ... this is POV criticism, and not encyclopaedic, so I think that should either be toned down significantly; or excised completely. Mackinaw 05:05, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Overhaul

I removed the two offending sections. If someone would like to reintroduce some of that material in a more appropriate form, by all means do. I pasted them below so that they'd be easily accesible. I'd love some help on the "style" section--I don't know quite where to begin... Reputation

Mysterious; Compelling; Disdainful; Fastidious; Serious; Aloof; Intellectual snob; Magisterial; Arrogant; Professorial; Withering; Surly; Lugubrious; Solemn; Vain; Awkward; Other-worldly; Cold fish; Pompous boffin; Austere; Godlike.

According to his friends

Funny; Dry; Sardonic; Barbed wit; A high opinion of his own talents; Warm friendships; Calm presence; Kindly; Droll; A raconteur; Self-deprecating sense of humour; Very pleasant to work with and a stickler for grammar and punctuation but he didn't read newspapers or watch television, so he never knew what was going on in the real world; Stayed to drink tea and read Henry James in his Irish Press office while his colleagues went next door to Mulligan's pub. Thanks, --Staple 06:20, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I'll take a bash at style, see what I can come up with. Mackinaw 15:00, 5 April 2006 (UTC)Ι

OK I cleaned the Style section out; it's a bit bare now, but encyclopaedic. It should be filled in, and perhaps the original editor can revisit. I'll post the removed section here. There was some good stuff in there before, but it needs to be referenced to critics - wikipedia can't do original research, or be a repository of editor criticsm of art. Mackinaw 17:25, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

And here is the removed section:

Banville's style has been described as perfectly crafted and beautiful; stunning, lyrical prose; dazzling writing. But if there is a weakness in the style of the 2005 Man Booker prizewinning novel, The Sea, it may be that it is excessively miniaturist and painterly, even if that is precisely the effect this mordant writer is seeking through his narrator, Max Morden. The style is the man, certainly, but the stylistic patina that Banville adopts requires a particularly difficult dance of appearances, language that is at once narcissistic and a mirror held up to nature.

Perhaps the stylistic affectations are deliberate, but the personifications can seem overwrought and sentimental: "...the car's sashaying back-end scooting around a bend in the road with a spurt of exhaust smoke. Tall grasses in the ditch, blond like a woman's hair, shivered briefly and returned to their former dreaming stillness." And yet the stylist may simply be pulling his reader's leg.

If the picturesque pretentiousness is deliberately contrived, it helps to create a "tableau" in which a character "stands in the very pose of Vermeer's maid with the milk jug." But like Vermeer's use of the camera obscura, such pictorialism can seem strangely studied and anachronistic in an Irish writer, swimming in the post-modern wake of Joyce and Beckett. The first-person narrator, if not the author himself, reveals some of this sense of displaced style in a reference to his character Rose, looking like "one of those fiddly Picasso portraits"; and later, she resembles "a Duccio madonna". The jaundiced art historian narrator, having apparently dismissed Picasso, seems to prefer to think in terms of neo-romantic, Turner-esque references - a "salt-bleached triptych...on the wall of my memory."

This is the kind of writing that may win Booker prizes, but it has more than a whiff of the nineteenth-century Dickensian fashion for overly descriptive, pathetic prose: "The steel kettle shone, a slow furl of steam at its spout, vaguely suggestive of genie and lamp." In a sense, Banville's style could almost be described as pre-modern, but perhaps it is simply more Proustian than Joycean in its attempt to create a remembrance of a time past; and in the author/narrator's mind's eye, "memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still."

On that point, Joyce and Banville could agree: the teenage Joyce, in a preternaturally intelligent discussion of aesthetics, called for art to be static, not kinetic. But Banville's stylistic stasis, however witty its artifice, is akin to a studio still-life, a nature morte, in which a character is depicted "in the very pose of Whistler's mother", or "a nocturnal study by Gericault, or de la Tour."

Mackinaw 17:27, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Residence

as far as I am aware Banville lives in Howth, Co. Dublin rather than central Dublin. found this bio to corroborate http://www.dublintheatrefestival.com/artist/John_Banville/11.htm

No, that biography dates from 2000, and doesn't mention any of his books since "The Untouchable". He lives on Bachelor's Walk on the quays of the Liffey in central Dublin. (He has said that it is a very inappropriately named place for him to live.) The only proof I have is that one sees him in the Jervis Street shopping centre which is 5 minutes away. Rory.