Shroud by John Banville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Proper Names

The smoothest prose in the business. One does not so much read Banville as float luxuriously in his velvet sentences. And he shows himself in Shroud as a master at the slow reveal. It's like hearing Bolero or Nina Simone in Little Girl Blue, ever so gradually approaching a climax that you do and don't want to arrive. Every detail and slight reversal coming at just the right moment so the beat is never missed even as it becomes more forceful and impulsive. A story of the complex, long-term effects of survivor-guilt. A man tries to escape his identity and finds it in a woman who has no knowable identity at all, but is merely a collection of historical anecdotes. With the usual handful of handy new theological, medical and culinary additions to one’s vocabulary: estaminet, crepitant, pococurantish, blastula, and gallimaufry among them. Banville at his best.

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