Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
The Singularities
The Singularities: A novel | John Banville
2 posts | 1 read | 1 to read
From the revered Booker Prize-winning author comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory, which opens with the return of one of his most celebrated characters as he is released from prison. A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports caralso borrowedonto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request. With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his careers most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
quote
ImperfectCJ
post image

"...seeming to know him, or at least to recognise his face, from where or from when they would surely recall if only they could concentrate hard enough. But they couldn't. No one can, in this world that Godley wrought. Something keeps getting in the way, keeps turning their thoughts aside, keeps blunting them, or absorbing them altogether, and soon something else comes along to engage their ever-waning attention."

AnnCrystal Love your bookmark ✨🐉🔖💝. 2mo
35 likes1 comment
review
ImperfectCJ
post image
Pickpick

I read this too late for the book club meeting for which it was selected, and although I can't claim to understand it, I did enjoy it. I think Banville is saying something about the nature of truth, creation of reality, the author/story relationship, and perhaps the short attention spans and anti-intellectualism of our times. A lot of it is over my head, but I like how he portrays the characters.

ImperfectCJ The tone reminds me of the movie Melancholia, and Banville even mentions Dürer's Melencolia, so perhaps it's intentional. (And I should say there's also a lot here about divinity.) 2mo
50 likes1 comment