After bailing on Banville’s acclaimed novel Mrs. Osmond, I felt I ought to give him a second chance, so I tried this book. I think that Banville writes better as himself than he does when he’s channeling Henry James.
This book’s subtitle, A Dublin Memoir, is an accurate description. A memoir is not a complete autobiography but selects aspects of one’s life. In this case, the criterion of selection is that the episodes have something to do with Dublin, where Banville has lived his entire adult life. Yet he not only includes incidents from his own life: There are vignettes here from Dublin’s place in literature (Joyce, Yeats and many others), its history and its architecture (some still standing, some now lost).
Banville’s companion on his discovery of those historical remains, his cicerone, so to speak, is his friend, the marvelously named Cicero. They whiz around the city and its outskirts in Cicero’s painstakingly restored 1957 red two-seater MG. One can almost feel the whipping wind as one reads, and the delight Cicero takes in sharing his arcane knowledge is infectious.
Banville writes with carefully-crafted prose, often exquisite. That makes all the more jarring his tendency at times to back awkwardly into his sentences. Here’s an example; taken from a discourse on carefully manicured eighteenth-century gardens: “If Andrew Marvell wrote not only ‘The Garden’ but also ‘The Mower against Gardens,’ Alexander Pope saw the polite cultivation of sward and hedge as fit work for a species bent on achieving its apotheosis by way of control and bounded elegance” (page 141). Banville knows the outcome of this sentence at the outset, the reader doesn’t and expects the “if,” which for all he knows may be hypothetical, to be followed by a “then.”
The text is accompanied by fifty elegiac, evocative photos by Paul Joyce. Some of these seem to illustrate stops on Banville’s discovery expeditions with Cicero, leaving me to wonder how Joyce (and his camera) fit into the two-seater with them. However the photos may have originated, they are a welcome part of the book. ( )

A well illustrated memoir of Dublin starting in the early 1950’s.
When does the past become the past?
Banville is fond of describing his memories, such as those for tea:
“Cups of teak-coloured tea, strong enough, as my mother would say, to trot a mouse on.”
“Cups of tea the colour of tree trunks sunk for centuries in swamp-water.”

Banville’s six word “story” of:
“Should have lived more, written less.”
Along the lines of Hemingway’s:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

The memoir would mean more to someone who has visited Dublin, but is mainly personal reminiscing, beautifully told. ( )

Der Man Booker Preisträger (s. "Die See" ID-A 41/06) Jg. 1945 schaut zurück auf seine Heimat Irland. Aufgewachsen in der Kleinstadt Wexford, aus der übrigens auch Eoin Colfer stammt, fuhr man jedes Jahr am 08.Dezember, dem Geburtstag des Schriftsteller nach Dublin um Weihnachtsgeschenke einzukaufen. John erhielt seine obligatorische Uhr, die spätestens nach zwei Monaten kaputt war. Als 18- Jähriger zog er ganz nach Dublin und lebte im Haus seiner schrulligen Tante. Er begegnete ohne es zu ahnen der Frau von Yeats. Jahre später rezensierte er eine Biografie und da viel ihm diese Begenung wieder ein. Später zog es ihn in die weite Welt. Mit dem Pseudonym "Benjamin Black" (s. "Alchemie einer Mordnacht" ID-A 47/18) kehrte Banville literarisch in seine Heimat zurück. In zahlreichen Anekdoten, eigenen Zitaten sowie Zitaten bekannter irischer Dichter, mit ausgesuchten schwarz-weißen Fotos unterlegt, entsteht ein sehr persönlicher fast wehmütiger Rückblick. Weniger ein Reiseführer aber für Liebhaber irischer Literatur eine lohnende Zugabe. (2-3) ( )