The Elegant Variation: HIGHLIGHTS - JOHN BANVILLE AT LAPL

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March 22, 2007

HIGHLIGHTS - JOHN BANVILLE AT LAPL

About 100 people turned out last night to meet John Banville as part of LAPL's ALOUD series. Banville - and his "dark brother" Benjamin Black - were ably interviewed for an all-too-brief hour by novelist Tara Ison. The program followed the usual pattern - a brief reading, in which Banville read two short sections from the opening of Christine Falls; a discussion with moderator Ison; and a handful of questions from the audience, followed by a signing. We scribbled furiously in an attempt to keep up as well as we could, and offer some highlights of the evening here. UPDATE: Callie Miller was also in the audience and has her impressions posted this morning. Sorry we didn't get to say hello ...

* After an introduction by "two elegant ladies," Banville professed to feeling like "Krusty the Clown," continuing the Simpsons metaphor begun in our own interview.

* On his alter ego: "It's me on holiday ... from being myself."

* Banville began writing Christine Falls in Spring 2005 and finished in September 2005. "John Banville would have taken three to five years to write a book."

* On the transitional nature of Christine Falls: "I shook myself out of the rut I was in" focusing on first person narrators, men in trouble. "I thought The Sea was the transition to the next series of things" but then Max Morden began speaking in that first person voice and he thought "Oh God, here I am stuck with another man in trouble." In retrospect, "This was the real transition book for me," even if it began as a "jeu d'esprit."

* On his opinions of contemporary literature, he told a story about Nabokov who, when asked about his view of contemporary literature, responded "Very nice from up here, thank you."

* On Irish writing: "Irish writers, for the moment, have given up the struggle with style. It's been done so well." He went on to add, deprecatingly, that "The struggle with language is idiotic." He quoted Flaubert's mother, who said "My son threw away his life for a mania with sentences."

* On character: He resisted an temptation to consider characters as real, calling them "marionettes made of words."

* On "redemption": "Redemption is a big word - we shouldn't use it."

*On the overlooked humor in his novels: "I think they're very funny. I'm very glad to hear you say that ... Life is such a comic predicament ... Life is hideously funny, even at its darkest."

* On London reviewers and the Irish Novel: "London reviewers regard Irish novels as failed attempts to write English novels." An English writer, he said, strives "to be clear, precise." The Irish are the opposite: "We love ambiguity. We glory in the richness of language and that's always dangerous."

*On his previous novels: "Terrible sins, clouding up the past ... (beat) ... They're better than everyone else's." But he professed embarrassment at the fact that they always fall short of his intentions.

*On his Booker nomination for The Sea: "My wife said, 'They must have misread it.' The idea being that if you're nominated for a prize, you've done something wrong. Ultimately, though, "The only judgment will be the judgment of time."

*On sentimentality: "If you write honestly, you will not be sentimental." "Anyone falling in love is beginning to write a novel ... the drama of the other ... which is really of the drama of itself." Asked if he wrote from the head over the heart, he finally, reluctantly, chose the head: "I distrust the heart."

*On John Banville books v. Benjamin Black books. The Banville novels are "The question of Being turned inward," whereas the Black books (he's nearly finished with the second) are "The question of Acting in the world."

* On the background of Christine Falls: It began as a television script which was reworked into the novel. Banville discovered he has a "hideous, vulgar talent for telling stories, which I never knew I had." He said he most struggled with the main character of Quirke, that the scenes focused on him were the hardest to write. "I can't udnerstand him. I haven't got a graso on him .... I keep mixing up Benjamin Black with Quirke, the two seem to be interchangeable."

*On the next Quirke book: It takes place two years later. "People have died, people have changed. Phoebe in the second book is very dark and problematic." Banville thinks the third book may concentrate on her.

*On having switched genre: "I should have done this kind of thing in my 20s. One shouldn't be having this much fun in his 60s. I'm having fun and as an Irish Catholic, that's deeply worrying."

*On the next "John Banville" book: He has 6000 words of a novel based on Heinrich von Kleist's play Amphitryon. "Another crowd pleaser," his publisher is said to have remarked. He finds it "10% easier to write" which he believes is a result of his work on Christine Falls easing some of his intense focus.

*During the questions, we asked him to discuss the Simenon influence: He called Simenon's romans durs - hard novels - "masterpieces .. far better than anything by Camus or Sartre." He found the books "absolutely honest ... I was fascinated by the effects he could achieve with such a seemingly simple narrative and vocabulary ... Of course, it's not simple or straightforward at all. ... Simenon opened my etes to a different direction in writing."

*On which contemporary novelists he likes: "I've never liked fiction. I don't think the novel is a very interesting form," which he also called "clunky." "I'm so old I just re-read." He still reads "the Americans. The American novel is very strong. It's still strong because the great wave of modernism never washed across America. They are still writing in the 19th century mode" and have "the great theme of the making of a country." By comparison, he felt that "The Great Project of European civilization is at an end and we [writers] are in a summing up position."

*On the status of the second Christine Falls novel: He's written 75,000 words, with 10-15,000 to go and "I'm still not sure how I'm going to finish it."

The signing followed during which, ever gracious, he asked after our own novel and then signed his book - "BBlack," of course.

(The promised reading video clip turns out to be an unwieldy 12MB so we're going to see if we can convert it to a more svelte format before trying to upload.)

UPDATE: Thanks to a technical assist from Ed, we offer up the brief reading clip. Please forgive our crummy photographic skills. Clearly, we forgot to hit the "zoom" key ...

Posted at 08:59 AM in Events, Obsessions | Permalink

Comments

Mark: If you're not adverse, you may want to try YouTubing the clip. YouTube renders large files down for mass consumption for you.

Posted by: ed | March 22, 2007 at 09:54 AM

Excellent idea, Ed - thanks! I'm on my way over there now.

Posted by: TEV | March 22, 2007 at 10:03 AM

Mark: I must say that I SO admire your video-taking moxy. I take those "no videotaping or audio of any kind" signs very seriously and my blog suffers as a result. Bravo - and can't wait to see it.

Posted by: callie | March 22, 2007 at 10:04 AM

Yeah, I'm a bit of an anarchist - but please don't expect much; I didn't zoom so he looks like a little Irish speck. It's more about hearing him. I'm wrestling with YouTUBE but will get it up asap.

Posted by: TEV | March 22, 2007 at 10:15 AM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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*Now in Paperback*

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
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March 22, 2007

HIGHLIGHTS - JOHN BANVILLE AT LAPL

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 22, 2007

HIGHLIGHTS - JOHN BANVILLE AT LAPL

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism