Word: banvilleã
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...work less well. Banville frequently expresses emotion through repetition and rhetorical questions, and the forcefulness soon gets tiresome. “But I ask—am I haughty? Do I bridle? A little, I suppose. A little,” reads one of Hermes’ interior monologues. Banville??s moves are well-considered—minds, after all, are noisy places—but it seems unlikely that his characters would really end all their thoughts with vigorous punctuation...
...Banville smoothly brings together unbounded ideas and weaves them in mind-bending ways, much like a mathematician might with grand mathematical concepts. He opens new worlds and twists truths (if infinity encompasses everything, there can’t be more than one), but painted with such a broad brush, Banville??s novel comes across more theoretical than credible—an illusory exploration of reality and family too lofty to be moving...
...within the Godley household. Women, it seems, didn’t have much place in Adam’s math-filled mind. “One I drove to drown herself, the other I drove to drink,” Adam recalls of his wives. But even as such, Banville??s portrayals of his female characters feel flimsy, and almost lazy...
Such unconvincing renderings of human life permeate the book, and they ultimately thwart Banville??s loftier ideas. Where Banville??s concept of parallel universes is enticing, his portrayal of more-grounded daily actions are unsubstantial to the point where one wonders if one should trust him at all. Banville paints the heavenly realm with ease, but he describes sex as “a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point...
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