Category: John Banville ~

John Banville (born December 1945) is an Irish novelist and screenwriter. His novel The Book of Evidence (1989) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He sometimes writes under the open pseudonym Benjamin Black.

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

(Bio from Wikipedia)

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things – new experiences, new emotions – and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.