John Banville

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John Banville
Born 8 December 1945 (1945-12-08) (age 66)
Wexford, Ireland
Pen name Benjamin Black
Occupation Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Nationality Irish
Notable work(s) The Book of Evidence
The Untouchable
The Sea
The Infinities
Eclipse

John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter.[4] He has won many prestigious awards: his novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011 and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[5][6] He also writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

Banville is known for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators.[7] His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".[8]

Contents

[edit] Biography

He was born William John Banville in Wexford, Ireland to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Anne Veronica "Vonnie" Banville-Evans[9] has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence[10] of growing up in Wexford.

Banville was educated at a Christian Brothers school and at St Peter's College, Wexford. Despite having intended to be a painter and an architect he did not attend university.[11] Banville has described this as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free."[12] Alternately he has stated that college would have had little benefit for him - "I don’t think I would have learned much more, and I don’t think I would have had the nerve to tackle some of the things I tackled as a young writer if I had been to university—I would have been beaten into 
submission by my lecturers."[13] After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply discounted rates. He took advantage of this to travel in Greece and Italy. He lived in the United States during 1968 and 1969. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970.

After the Irish Press collapsed in 1995,[14] he became a sub-editor at The Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left. Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990. In 1984, he was elected to the Irish arts association, Aosdána, but resigned in 2001[15] so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas (annuity). He described himself in an interview with Argentine paper La Nacíón, as a West Brit.[16] Banville also writes crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black, beginning with Christine Falls (2006). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.[17]

When The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, Banville said a friend whom he described as "a gentleman of the turf", instructed him "to bet on the other five shortlistees, saying it was a sure thing, since if I won the prize I would have the prize-money, and if I lost one of the others would win . . .But the thing baffled me and I never placed the bets. I doubt I'll be visiting Ladbrokes any time soon".[5]

In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize.[18] Marcel Reich-Ranicki and John Calder featured on the jury.[19] The award was worth $10,000.[19] According to The Guardian, Banville described the award "one of the ones one really wants to get. It's an old style prize and as an old codger it's perfect for me ... I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent" and said his bronze statuette trophy "will glare at me from the mantelpiece". Wondering while receiving congratulations from Roddy Doyle what sort of prize Kafka would have given had he been alive, Doyle said "It wouldn't have stayed still on the mantelpiece."[3]

[edit] Private life

Banville has two adult sons with his wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Dunham described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing".[20] Banville has two daughters from his relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Banville has a strong interest in animal rights, and is often featured in Irish media speaking out against vivisection in Irish university research.[citation needed]

In 2011, he offered to donate his brain to The Little Museum of Dublin "so visitors could marvel at how small it was".[21]

[edit] Style

Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of English, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, dazzling.[22] David Mehegan of the Boston Globe calls him "one of the great stylists writing in English today"; Don DeLillo described his work "dangerous and clear-running prose"; Val Nolan in The Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious";[23] The Observer described The Book of Evidence as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." Banville himself has admitted that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form".[12] He is known for his dark humour, and sharp, wintery wit.[1]

He has written two trilogies; The first, The Revolutions Trilogy, focused on great men of science and consisted of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter. The second unnamed trilogy consisted of The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena, and focused on the power of works of art.

He is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment."[11] Instead of dwelling on the past he is continually looking forward; "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how you can compensate for that by doing better today."[12] He writes his Benjamin Black crime fiction much more quickly than he composes his literary novels,[24] and he appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist, though he does consider crime writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".

“ Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon if I'm feeling a little bit sleepy, Black will sort of lean in over Banville's shoulder and start writing. Or Banville will lean over Black’s shoulder and say "Oh that's an interesting sentence, let's play with that." I can see sometimes, revising the work, the points at which one crept in or the two sides seeped into each other.[25] ”


[edit] Influences

Banville said in an interview with The Paris Review that he liked Vladimir Nabokov's style, however he went on, "But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf."[13] He is highly influenced by Heinrich von Kleist,[citation needed] having written adaptations of three of his plays (including Amphitrion) and having again used Amphitrion as a basis for his novel The Infinities.[citation needed] Banville has reported that he imitated James Joyce as a boy: "After I'd read the Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of the Dubliners."[12] However, The Guardian reports that the early Joycean influence may not have persisted, quoting the writer again: "Banville himself has acknowledged that all Irish writers are followers of either Joyce or Beckett - and he places himself in the Beckett camp."[1] During an interview on The Charlie Rose Show in 2011, Rose asked him, "The guiding light has always been Henry James?" and Banville replied, "I think so, I mean people say, you know, I've been influenced by Beckett or Nabokov but it's always been Henry James [...] so I would follow him, I would be a Jamesian."[2]

[edit] Awards

Year Prize Work
1973 Allied Irish Banks' Prize Birchwood[26]
1973 Arts Council Macaulay Fellowship Birchwood[26]
1975 American Ireland Fund Literary Award Doctor Copernicus[26]
1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Doctor Copernicus[26]
1981 Guardian Fiction Prize Kepler[26]
Allied Irish Bank Fiction Prize Kepler
American-Irish Foundation Award Birchwood
1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award The Book of Evidence[26]
Booker Prize, shortlist The Book of Evidence[26]
1991 Premio Ennio Flaiano The Book of Evidence[27]
1997 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction The Untouchable[26][28]
2003 Premio Nonino[27]
2005 Booker Prize The Sea[26]
2006 Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year The Sea
2006 British Book Awards Author of the Year, shortlist The Sea[26]
2007 Royal Society of Literature Fellowship
Prix Madeleine Zepter
2009 Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society at TCD
2010 Irish Book of the Decade (Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards), shortlist The Sea[26]
2011 Franz Kafka Prize

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Short story collection

  • Long Lankin (1970; revised ed.1984)

[edit] Novels

Bookbits - 2007-03-04 John Banville-The Infinities.vorb.oga
John Banville talks about The Infinities on Bookbits radio.
  • Nightspawn (1971)
  • Birchwood (1973)
  • The Revolutions Trilogy :
    • Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976)
    • Kepler, a Novel (1981)
    • The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982)
  • Mefisto (1986)
  • The Book of Evidence (1989)
  • Ghosts (1993)
  • Athena: A Novel (1995)
  • The Ark (1996) (only 260 copies published)
  • The Untouchable (1997)
  • Eclipse (2000)
  • Shroud (2002)
  • Prague Pictures: Portrait Of A City (2003)
  • The Sea (2005)
  • The Infinities (2009)

[edit] Plays

  • The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (1994)
  • Seachange (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished)
  • Dublin 1742 (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9–14 year olds; unpublished)
  • God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist (2000)
  • Love In The Wars (adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, 2005)
  • Conversation In The Mountains (radio play, forthcoming 2008)

[edit] As "Benjamin Black"

  • Christine Falls (2006)
  • The Silver Swan (2007)
  • The Lemur (2008, previously serialised in The New York Times)
  • Elegy for April (2010)
  • A Death In Summer (2011)[29]

[edit] Book Reviews

[edit] Screenwriter

Year Title Reference
1984 Reflections (Adaptation of The Newton Letter for TV) [30]
1994 Seascapes (TV Film) [31]
1999 The Last September [1]
2011 Albert Nobbs [32]
Forthcoming The Sea [33]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e "John Banville" The Guardian, 2008-07-22.
  2. ^ a b John Banville Full Interview on Charlie Rose Public Broadcasting Service, 2011-07-14. Quote: Rose: "The guiding light has always been Henry James?" Banville: "I think so, I mean people say, you know, I've been influenced by Beckett or Nabokov but it's always been Henry James. I think that James was the great Modernist. You know there were two directions for Modernism to go – there was a Jamesian way or there was the way of the avante garde, with Joyce and so forth. Joyce was far more exciting than Henry James – and, in a way, easier to read. "Ulysses" is easier to read than Henry James's late novels but James was catching something, especially in those last three or four novels. He was catching, actually, what it feels like to be conscious – to be a conscious being in the world. That seemed to be an extraordinary step forward. He took the big Victorian novel – the novel of manners, the novel of ideas, the novel of social awareness – and he turned it into an extraordinarily fine art form, so I would follow him; I would be a Jamesian."
  3. ^ a b Flood, Alison (26 May 2011). "John Banville wins Kafka prize: Irish novelist given honour thought by some to be a Nobel prize augury". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/26/john-banville-kafka-prize. Retrieved 2011-05-26. 
  4. ^ "John Banville." Dictionary of Irish Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. ISBN 0-313-29172-1.
  5. ^ a b Spain, John. "Well-fancied Banville plays down talk of Nobel Prize". Irish Independent. 29 September 2011.
  6. ^ "There is no better man than Banville for Nobel Prize". Irish Independent. 8 October 2011.
  7. ^ He tends to write from a first person perspective.[citation needed]
  8. ^ Steinberg, Sybil."Who Is John Banville?". Publishers Weekly, July, 1995. Retrieved on 21 January 2007.
  9. ^ Vonnie Banville Evans Homepage
  10. ^ Evans, Vonnie Banville (1994). The House in the Faythe. Dublin: Code Green. ISBN 9781907215124. 
  11. ^ a b The Long Awaited, Long-Promised, Just Plain Long John Banville Interview The Elegant Variation, 2005-09-26.
  12. ^ a b c d John Banville. Irish Examiner, 2009-09-05.
  13. ^ a b John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 The Paris Review, No. 188, Spring 2009.
  14. ^ "The day the Press stopped rolling". Western People, 25 May 2005. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
  15. ^ "Former Members of Aosdána". Aosdána. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
  16. ^ "Soy un poeta que escribe en prosa". La Nación, 2008-07-19. (Spanish language article posted at talk forum calamaro.mforos.com.)
  17. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf. Retrieved 17 May 2011. 
  18. ^ "John Banville awarded Franz Kafka Prize". CBS News. 26 May 2011. http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/banville-gets-top-book-award-2658467.html. Retrieved 2011-05-26. 
  19. ^ a b "Irish novelist wins Kafka prize". The Chronicle Herald. 27 May 2011. http://thechronicleherald.ca/ArtsLife/1245465.html. Retrieved 2011-05-27. 
  20. ^ Emma Brockes "14th time lucky". The Guardian, 12 October 2005. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
  21. ^ Stein, Michelle. "'Little Museum of Dublin' to open". The Irish Times. 21 October 2011.
  22. ^ "Shroud". Random House, 2004. Retrieved on 27 October 2007.
  23. ^ ""Banville shines with profound rendering of a parallel universe " by Val Nolan". The Sunday Business Post. 6 September 2009. http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2009/09/06/story44054.asp. 
  24. ^ Is John Banville better than Benjamin Black? Book Brunch, 2009-08-03.
  25. ^ Langan, Sheila. "Banville on Black". Irish America Magazine. 28 September 2011.
  26. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Writers: John Banville Retrieved: 2012-03-01.
  27. ^ a b Benjamin Black is John Banille BenjaminBlack.com. Retrieved: 2012-03-01.
  28. ^ 1997 John Banville: Lannan Literary Award for Fiction Lannon Foundation. Retrieved: 2012-03-01.
  29. ^ A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black – review The Guardian, 2011-07-11.
  30. ^ Reflections (1984) Internet Movie Database. Retrieved: 2012-03-01.
  31. ^ Seascape (TV 1994) Internet Movie Database. Retrieved: 2012-03-01.
  32. ^ Albert Nobbs (2011) Internet Movie Database. Retrieved: 2012-03-01.
  33. ^ The Sea, Based on the novel by John Banville Independent Film Company. Retrieved: 2012-03-01.

[edit] Further reading

  • John Banville by John Kenny; Irish Academic Press (2009); ISBN 0-7165-2909-1
  • John Banville, a critical study by Joseph McMinn; Gill and MacMillan; ISBN 0-7171-1803-7
  • The Supreme Fictions of John Banville by Joseph McMinn; (October 1999); Manchester University Press; ISBN 0-7190-5397-8
  • John Banville: A Critical Introduction by Rüdiger Imhoff (October 1998) Irish American Book Co; ISBN 0-86327-582-6
  • John Banville: Exploring Fictions by Derek Hand; (June 2002); Liffey Press; ISBN 1-904148-04-2
  • Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue John Banville Edited by Derek Hand; (June 2006)
  • Irish Writers on Writing featuring John Banville. Edited by Eavan Boland (Trinity University Press, 2007).

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Banville
Works by John Banville
Short Stories
  • Long Lankin (1970)
Quill-Nuvola.svg
Novels
Plays
  • The Broken Jug (1994)
  • Seachange (1994)
  • Dublin 1742 (2002)
  • God's Gift (2000)
  • Love In The Wars (2005)
  • Conversation In The Mountains (2008)
As "Benjamin Black"
  • Christine Falls (2006)
  • The Silver Swan (2007)
  • The Lemur (2008)
  • Elegy for April (2010)
  • A Death In Summer (2011)
1969–1980
† Awarded in 2010 as the Lost Man Booker Prize, due to a change in the contest rules.
1981–2000
2001–present
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