Banville’s ‘Birchwood’

by in_earth

Posted to What Are You Reading? on 2003-09-24 09:59:00

an archetypical post-modern novel of temporal splices, the ideas of memory and fiction, and the intersection of the two – self-reflexive novel (work), narrator (author), and language (text). what more could a post-modernist ask for? Well, perhaps a bit of a break.

HA!

So what do I think of the novel? Well, it’s okay but to be honest I don’t like the way it kind of panders to post-modernism by using these “break-away”, rather out-of-place statements about the metaphysics of the novel, about the novel’s unifying concept. I mean, Banville could have easily left it out but the po-mo way to go is to explicate the idea, at least for Banville anyway. THat being said, though it’s annoying, Banville has an extraordinary way of altering perception as you read: one minute realism, the next cubism/impressionism etc. He massages the visions he gives and re-moulds them as he goes. Quite a turn of descriptivity. hehe. Anyway, I havn’t read much of it as yet, so i withhold final judgement.

Later,

John