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Title details for The Blue Guitar by John Banville - Available

The Blue Guitar

by John Banville
Gerry O'Brien
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
TARGET CONSUMER: For readers of Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, Roddy Doyle From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel—at once trenchant, witty, and shattering—about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught. But he's pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well lately. Having recognized the "man-killing crevasse" that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it—any attempt to make what he sees his own—he's stopped painting. And his last purloined possession—the last time he felt the "secret sliver of bliss" in thievery—has been discovered. The fact that it was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend, has compelled him to run away: from his mistress, his home, his wife, from whatever remains of his impulse to paint and from the tragedy that haunts him, and to sequester himself in the house where he was born, trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have. Excavating memories of family, of places he's called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him ("no matter what else is going on, one of my eyes is always swiveling toward the world beyond") Ollie reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself. A MODERN MASTER: A former Man Booker Prize winner (among a host of other awards), critically acclaimed and commercially adored, John Banville is essential reading for any fan of contemporary Irish and English literature. A HOUSE AUTHOR: Banville's backlist has netted Vintage more than 300,000 copies in trade paperback. UK PUBLICATION: Penguin UK will publish their edition on the fall list, also. THE BOOK ITSELF: This is classic John Banville; a tense, fraught, and frequently comic mediation on the intricacies of human relations, on art, and especially, on the corrosive nature of jealousy. Praise for John Banville: "Banville is, without question, one of the great living masters of English-language prose." —Los Angeles Times "A ray of hope for the future of fiction." —The New Statesman (London) "With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov ... His prose is sublime." —The Sunday Telegraph (London) "Magnificent.... Treacherously smart and haunting." —The Boston Globe "An extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory.... Undeniably brilliant." —USA Today "The Book of Evidence is a major new work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within." —Don DeLillo "Banville is the heir to Proust, via Nabokov.... Beautiful." —The Daily Beast Author Bio: John Banville, the author of sixteen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin. Residence: Dublin, Ireland Hometown: Dublin, Ireland Author Site: http://www.john-banville.com/ Social: https://www.facebook.com/JohnBanvilleAuthor

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 1, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781490694290
      • File size: 272855 KB
      • Duration: 09:28:26

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 24, 2015
      Readers will hang on to every word written by Man Booker Prize winner Banville (Ancient Light), because he knows their thoughts before they do. Narrating this tale is the curmudgeonly, melancholy, and hapless Olly Orme, who, "pushing fifty and a hundred," is back in the English village of his birth and suffering through a mid-life crisis. A modestly successful "paintster" who gives up painting for existential reasons ("What's the difference between a blimp and a guitar? Any old object serves..."), and a rather philosophical thief for whom the thrill of stealing eventually wanes, Olly stumbles through an affair with Polly, his friend Marcus's companion. When the lovers are found out, Olly runs away to the house where he was born, but is set upon by Polly and dragged to her own family home. A mad-hatter couple of days ensues in which Olly is tortured with cups of tea and English dampâand for the first and last time is caught stealing, in this case a little volume of poetry bound in crimson cloth. When he finally escapes and encounters his sensible wife again, she reveals a secret of her own. Olly muses on each escapade, hilarious until such sadness sets in that no one inside or out of the story seems likely to survive it. And yet, Banville is such a fine architect of sentencesâinfusing them with wit and yearningâthat the plot hardly matters. For what a brilliant navel-gazer Banville is: he creates loop-de-loops of self-absorbed prose that resonate so deeply about the human condition that they never become tiresome. Bon mots fill these pages, every one essential. "What we were sorrowing for was all that would not be, and that kind of vacuum, believe me, will suck in as many tears as you have to shed." If in the end readers believe they know Olly Orme, they will know themselves as well. "Make some lesson out of that, if you will; I haven't the heart."

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Author Banville's title comes from the Wallace Stevens poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar," and we understand immediately that in this work of fiction, reality may be slightly askew. Our reality comes from the ponderings of the story's main character, Oliver Otway Orme. "O. O. O. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop." Narrator Gerry O'Brien makes our time with Oliver absolutely engrossing. Oliver is a painter and a thief who steals for pleasure. O'Brien delivers Oliver's wit and personal charm in a way that makes us like him, even when he does bad things. And O'Brien's delivery of Oliver's justification for thieving is hilarious. As narrator, he also offers moments when Oliver's self-involvement and self-deprecation feel completely real. An excellent audiobook for those who love language well used. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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