Author: John Banville
Release date: February 27, 2018
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Pages: 224
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“Certain moments in certain places, apparently
insignificant, imprint themselves on the memory with improbable vividness and
clarity…so vivid are they, the suspicion arises that one’s fancy must have made
them up: that one must, in a word, have imagined the.”
Born and bred in Wexford, a train ride away from Dublin, John
Banville as a child saw the city as a place of enchantment. It was first a
birthday treat, the world his beloved, eccentric aunt inhabited. When he came
of age and took up residence there, the city was a frequent backdrop for his
dissatisfactions as a young writer. When he lived outside Ireland, the city
remained alive and indelible in his memory. In a once grand but now dilapidated
flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped. Returning to live
in Ireland, he found Dublin to be as fascinating – albeit for different reasons
– as it had been to his seven-year-old self.
“Dublin was for me what Moscow was for Irina in Chekhov’s
Three Sisters, a place of magical promise towards which my starved young soul
endlessly yearned. That the city itself, the real Dublin, was in those
poverty-stricken 1950s, mostly a grey and graceless place did not mar my dream
of it…”
Banville is an award winning Irish novelist and
screenwriter. He has penned sixteen novels that include The Book of Evidence (1989) and The
Sea (2005), which won the Man Booker Prize. In Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, he turns introspective and reflects
on his cherished memories of his adopted hometown. In it he alternates between
monologues of his own past, and present-day historical explorations of the
city.
“O time, O tempora, what places we have been to – where
will you take me yet?”
One of the great but elusive metaphysical questions of
history has been the nature and substance of time. In the very first chapter,
Banville writes, “…the past is where we live, while the past is where we dream.
Yet if it is a dream, it is substantial, and sustaining. The past buoys us up,
a tethered and ever-expanding hot-air balloon.” This provides, in many ways,
the rhetorical theme of the book that combines memoir and guidebook, with social
observation. As a result, Banville takes us on a swift journey through his life
and Dublin both, providing just enough detail to make it enlightening, but not
so much that it gets tedious and dull. The writing itself is amusing and entertaining
with plenty of colorful references to other Irish writers and poets: “For good
or ill, as a writer I am and always have been most concerned not with what
people do – that, as Joyce might say, with typical Joycean disdain, can be left
to the journalists – but with what they are.”
Overall, Time
Pieces is a quick and well-written read that pays tribute to a humbler and
more influential place and time for the writer. Fascinating and atmospheric,
the narrative is complimented with beautifully illustrated images by award winning
photographer Paul Joyce. For anyone who loves Dublin, every page of this memoir
will be a delight and for those not acquainted with the city, it will bring
better understanding into what makes it so charming and distinctive.
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of seven nonfiction
books that includes Literary Legends of
the British Isles and America’s
Literary Legends.
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