“Though he has been described as “the heir to Proust, via Nabokov,” Banville himself maintains that W.B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.”
Oh my sweet Christ. That Wikipedia page is truly something else. I started to dig, and found that it had been almost entirely written by one user ("Scheibfeder") whose contributions are entirely, you guessed it, either on the John Banville page, or his books' pages, or adding trivia to pages of people who have interacted with John Banville.
The absolute most heinous edits are those for books which Banville did not win the Booker prize. The actual winners are described, not named. Arundhati Roy's win for The God of Small Things is described as thus: "the award went instead to the debut effort of an Indian political activist." A 2002 loss to the Life of Pi is: "it was not even shortlisted and the award went instead to a Spanish-born Canadian man's yarn about a spotted hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger (named Richard Parker), all of whom are cast adrift with an Indian Tamil boy in the Pacific Ocean." And, drumroll for the most explicitly racist, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is summed up as "the award went instead to a book by an Oriental man who had obtained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing."
Either this is John Banville, or John Banville should sleep with one eye open.
Banville is a clown of whom I have never heard. Nabokov is gross and thinking about him leaves a slime trail in my brain. Proust is boring. You are a national treasure.
And here I was thinking he was the guy who married Iris Murdoch.
Oh my sweet Christ. That Wikipedia page is truly something else. I started to dig, and found that it had been almost entirely written by one user ("Scheibfeder") whose contributions are entirely, you guessed it, either on the John Banville page, or his books' pages, or adding trivia to pages of people who have interacted with John Banville.
The absolute most heinous edits are those for books which Banville did not win the Booker prize. The actual winners are described, not named. Arundhati Roy's win for The God of Small Things is described as thus: "the award went instead to the debut effort of an Indian political activist." A 2002 loss to the Life of Pi is: "it was not even shortlisted and the award went instead to a Spanish-born Canadian man's yarn about a spotted hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger (named Richard Parker), all of whom are cast adrift with an Indian Tamil boy in the Pacific Ocean." And, drumroll for the most explicitly racist, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is summed up as "the award went instead to a book by an Oriental man who had obtained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing."
Either this is John Banville, or John Banville should sleep with one eye open.
Banville is a clown of whom I have never heard. Nabokov is gross and thinking about him leaves a slime trail in my brain. Proust is boring. You are a national treasure.