Word: novelness
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John Banville is a calculating craftsman. The Irish novelist’s 1998 “The Book of Evidence” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and his 2005 novel “The Sea” won it. Critics have compared his dreamy, playful writing to that of Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf; Don DeLillo praised his work as “dangerous and clear-running...
...Infinities,” his twentieth novel, is somewhat disappointing, it should come as no surprise that Banville still chose the perfect title to describe his work. In this book, 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...
Banville has said that he wishes to give prose, “the kind of denseness and thickness poetry has.” Practically, this wish causes him to write in long, flowery sentences. He opens his novel with ornate description: “Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally.” His soft rhythm and languid flow serve...
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this very modern novel has a fraught relationship with its ancient source material. On the one hand, the text of the story is rife with biblical allusions. Some are direct citations made by characters, some inform the book’s conversations in paraphrase, and still others are simply biblical phrases woven directly into the fabric of Steinberg’s narrative. The somewhat stilted wording of the Bible in English translation assimilates easily into Steinberg’s high register prose style, and in this manner, the milieu of the story pervades the storytelling...
...rare today that a novel grapples with the several thousand years of Jewish history and heritage that preceded America, rather than only addressing the issues surrounding modern Jewish life. Mainstream Jewish authors such as Philip Roth or Jonathan Safran Foer are writing about Jews, but not so much about Judaism. Less common is the Chaim Potok or the Milton Steinberg who attempts to bring the vast Jewish past into dialogue with the Jewish present...