I guess I have several strange habits. Like enjoying beans in tomato sauce straight from the tin at any hour of the day, or the need to pace around and talk to myself whenever I need to think really hard about something. Another one which continues to surprise people (and hopefully is not a sign of my culinary cruelty or imminent insanity), is this: every year I re-read a book.
The fact that I already know what’s going to happen, doesn’t bother me one bit. On the contrary, I find there’s a kind of quiet solace in the safety of such an enterprise. Besides, I happen to particularly like books without a real story. I really do. Preferably bulky novels that speak about … well, nothing much at all, actually. Like Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which takes 607 pages to tell how an unemployed man discovers a strange well in his garden. I’m sure that to many people this might seem an exquisite form of torture, but not to me. Truth be told: I’ve always liked words better than stories. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never really managed to write one myself?
This year I re-read a book that can be considered the epitome of a book without a story: John Banville’s Eclipse. Two hundred and twenty four pages about a man going back to live in the house he grew up in and reflecting on his life. Nothing of real importance happens in the meanwhile, but to quote Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian: ‘With prose like this, who needs a plot?’.
Indeed, Eclipse is an exercise in language and style. Which doesn’t mean if feels artificial. Banville writes a thick, rich and silky smooth English. Sweet to the tongue and velvety on the palate. Like dark chocolate sauce. But beware, like chocolate sauce Banville can be a bit bitter too, for his pages abound in an almost unspeakable melancholy. Indeed, Eclipse has a tragic beauty that will crush your soul. But then again, I think we need to get our soul crushed once in a while. Don’t you think?
The fact that I already know what’s going to happen, doesn’t bother me one bit. On the contrary, I find there’s a kind of quiet solace in the safety of such an enterprise. Besides, I happen to particularly like books without a real story. I really do. Preferably bulky novels that speak about … well, nothing much at all, actually. Like Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which takes 607 pages to tell how an unemployed man discovers a strange well in his garden. I’m sure that to many people this might seem an exquisite form of torture, but not to me. Truth be told: I’ve always liked words better than stories. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never really managed to write one myself?
This year I re-read a book that can be considered the epitome of a book without a story: John Banville’s Eclipse. Two hundred and twenty four pages about a man going back to live in the house he grew up in and reflecting on his life. Nothing of real importance happens in the meanwhile, but to quote Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian: ‘With prose like this, who needs a plot?’.
Indeed, Eclipse is an exercise in language and style. Which doesn’t mean if feels artificial. Banville writes a thick, rich and silky smooth English. Sweet to the tongue and velvety on the palate. Like dark chocolate sauce. But beware, like chocolate sauce Banville can be a bit bitter too, for his pages abound in an almost unspeakable melancholy. Indeed, Eclipse has a tragic beauty that will crush your soul. But then again, I think we need to get our soul crushed once in a while. Don’t you think?
It is late, the light is going. My mind aches from so much futile remembering. What is it I hope to retrieve? What is it I am trying to avoid? I see what was my life adrift behind me, going smaller and smaller with distance, like a city on an ice floe caught in a current, its twinkling lights, its palaces and spires and slums, all miraculously intact, all hopelessly beyond reach. Was it I who took an axe to the ice? What can I do now but stand on this crumbling promontory and watch the past as it dwindles? When I look ahead, I see nothing except empty morning, and no day, only dusk thickening into night, and, far off, something that is not to be made out, something vague, patient, biding. Is that the future, trying to speak to me here, among these shadows of the past? I do not want to hear what it might have to say.
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