Athena

by John Banville

Overview

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. • "A strange and dreamlike book ... Banville has a breathtaking style." —The Boston Globe

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307817198
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/14/2012
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

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.

Editorial Reviews

Banville has a most distinctive and prodigious way with metaphor. His latest novel is narrated by a man for whom everything is like something else. Each of this narrator's sharply attuned sensory perceptions recalls earlier childhood memories, a whisper from his lover, or a vague piece of the past. He recollects his fateful story with strenuous precision, beginning by addressing his lost love in a sonorous, compelling voice: "If words can reach whatever world you may be suffering in, then listen, I have things to tell you." Memory can be unreliable, and he questions the relative truth of the fragmented, fateful events he presents. As an art expert with a criminal history, he is lured into authenticating ill-gotten paintings for a gang of underworld characters. His appraisals of these classically themed pictures echo, with critical detachment, a wild, doomed, duplicitous love affair he conducts in the house where he does his secret work. Only pieces of the picture are offered, and the story ends with its beginning. Loveless and duped by the criminals he was too apathetic to resist, the narrator continues his vague, existential drifting. His exacting recollections, oblique insights, and piercing hindsight result only in tragedy, not redemption.

Deanna Larson

"A thriller ... by Ireland's master of the exquisite and uncanny, whose brilliant use of prose narration places him in a league with Joyce and Beckett." —San Francisco Chronicle

"A strange and dreamlike book ... Banville has a breathtaking style." —The Boston Globe

From the Publisher