Ирландиялық жазушы Джон Банвилдің өмір жолы

Irish writer, also writes as Benjamin Black (born 1945)

Banville was educated at CBS Primary, Wexford, a Christian Brothers school, and at St Peter's College, Wexford. Despite having intended to be a painter and an architect, he did not attend university. Banville has described this as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free." Alternately he has stated that college would have had little benefit for him: "I don't think I would have learned much more, and I don't think I would have had the nerve to tackle some of the things I tackled as a young writer if I had been to university – I would have been beaten into submission by my lecturers." After school, Banville worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus, which allowed him to travel at deeply discounted rates. He took advantage of these rates to travel to Greece and Italy. On his return to Ireland, he became a sub editor at The Irish Press, eventually becoming chief sub editor. before The Irish Press collapsed in 1995, Banville became a sub editor at The Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, endured financial troubles, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub editor. He left. Banville has two sons from a marriage to the American textile artist Janet Dunham, whom he met in the United States during the 1960s. Asked in 2012 about the breakdown of that marriage, Banville's immediate thoughts focused on the effect it had on his children; "It was hard on them", he said. As an unknown writer in the 1980s, he toured Dublin's bookshops — "and we had a lot of bookshops back then" — around the time of the publication of his novel Kepler "and there wasn't a single one of any of my books anywhere". But, he noted in 2012, "I didn't feel badly about it because I was writing the kinds of books I wanted to write. And I had no one but myself to blame if I wasn't making money, that wasn't anybody's fault. Nobody was obliged to buy my books". He realised that, like him, scientists were trying to impose order in their work. He wrote fondly of John McGahern, who lost his job amid condemnation by his workplace and the Catholic Church for becoming intimately involved with a foreign woman. While on a book tour of the United States in March 2006, Banville received a telephone call: "I have bad news, I'm afraid. John Banville is dead". However, Banville was aware that McGahern had been unwell and, having performed the necessary checks to ensure that he was still alive, concluded that it was McGahern who was dead instead. And it was. He wrote an account of Caravaggio's 1602 painting The Taking of Christ for the book Lines of Vision, released in 2014 to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland. He contributed to Sons+Fathers, a book published in 2015 to provide funds for the Irish Hospice Foundation's efforts to give care to terminally ill patients within their own homes.

Beginning with Christine Falls, published in 2006, Banville has written crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black. He writes his Benjamin Black crime fiction much more quickly than he composes his literary novels. He appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist. He considers crime writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction". The main character in Banville's Quirke series is a Dublin pathologist. The first three novels, Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), and Elegy for April (2011) were made into a crime drama television series, Quirke. Other novels in the Quirke series written under the pen name, Benjamin Black, are A Death in Summer (2011), Vengeance (2012), Holy Orders (2013) and Even the Dead (2016). Two more Quirke novels written under his name were published: April in Spain (2021) and The Lock Up (2023). Related books: Snow (2020), featuring Inspector Detective St. John Strafford, who also appears in April In Spain, was also published under his name, as is Drowned (2024). Other crime novels written under the pen name, Benjamin Black, are The Lemur (2008), The Black Eyed Blonde (2014), Prague Nights (2017), and The Secret Guests (2020).

Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books: "I hate them all I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment." "Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon if I'm feeling a little bit sleepy, Black will sort of lean in over Banville's shoulder and start writing. Or Banville will lean over Black's shoulder and say, "Oh that's an interesting sentence, let's play with that." I can see sometimes, revising the work, the points at which one crept in or the two sides seeped into each other". His typical writing day begins with a drive from his home in Dublin to his office by the river. He writes from 9 a. m. until lunch. He then dines on bread, cheese and tea and resumes working until 6 p. m., at which time he returns home. He is known for his dark humour, and sharp, wintery wit. He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov". Don DeLillo describes Banville's work as "dangerous and clear running prose", David Mehegan of The Boston Globe calls him "one of the great stylists writing in English today", Val Nolan in The Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious"; The Observer described The Book of Evidence as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." Gerry Dukes, reviewing The Sea in the Irish Independent, hailed Banville as a "lord of language". Michael Ross has stated that Banville is "perhaps the only living writer capable of advancing fiction beyond the point reached by Beckett". Banville has said that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form". Banville has said that he imitated James Joyce as a boy: "After I'd read The Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of The Dubliners." Meanwhile, in a 2012 interview with Noah Charney, Banville cited W. B. Yeats and Henry James as the two real influences on his work. Responding to the suggestion that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus were worthy comparisons, Banville said: "Dostoyevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously Ditto Camus". Banville contributed the introduction to the fifty year retrospective of Edna O'Brien's work, The Love Object: Selected Stories, praising her as "one of the most sophisticated writers now at work" and noting how it was "hard to think of any contemporary writer who could match [O'Brien's] combination of immediacy and sympathetic recall". He noted how "striking" is the figuring of O'Brien's characters and acknowledged that all her characters "are in some way damaged by the world, and specifically by the world of men". Banville concluded by describing O'Brien as "simply one of the finest writers of our time". Banville dedicated himself to the task of writing the screenplay for an adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Last September. Banville later wrote the introduction for her Collected Stories. Close to the literary editor Caroline Walsh, Banville spoke of his devastation upon learning of her death. He dedicated Ancient Light to her. Likewise, Banville was close to Eileen Battersby, at whose funeral he was moved to tears whilst reciting a poem in her memory.

Speaking to Niamh Horan in 2012, Banville related his thoughts on hurt and responsibility: "To hurt other people is the worst thing you can do. To be hurt oneself is bad enough, but hurting other people is unforgivable Unforgivable. Literally unforgivable. I think that one has to take responsibility for one's life and one has to take responsibility for one's bad deeds as well as one's good deeds. One has to, as I say, be responsible Failure in art, or failure in making a living, or a success — none of them compares, everything pales beside hurting other people, because, you know, we are here for such a short time and basic life itself is so hard one has a duty to try to be decent to other people". On 21 August 2017, the RTÉ Radio 1 weekday afternoon show Liveline was discussing a report on Trinity College Dublin's use of 100,000 animals to conduct scientific research over the previous four years when a listener pointed out that Banville had previously raised the matter but been ignored. Banville personally telephoned Liveline to call the practice "absolutely disgraceful" and told the tale of how he had come upon some women protesting: Asked if he received any other support for his stance in the letter he sent to The Irish Times, he replied: "No I became entirely dispirited and I thought, 'Just shut up, John. Stay out of it because I'm not going to do any good'. If I had done any good I would have kept it on. I mean, I got John Coetzee, you know, the famous novelist, J. M. Coetzee, I got him to write a letter to The Irish Times. I asked a lot of people. Oddly, I asked uh, uh, well I won't say who it was, but I asked an international anti vivisection person, well no, an international animal rights person, to contribute, but he said that he wasn't actually against vivisection, which seems to me a very peculiar stance to take". This for Banville was a rare intervention of its kind, revealing to the public a different side — as he acknowledged when the presenter asked him if he had a history of objecting to activities such as blood sport: "I don't use my public voice to make protests. It was just on this one occasion it seemed that something could be done. The only effect it has had, as far as I can see, is that the following year there were about twice as many experiments. So much for the intellectual raising his voice in protest". When the subject of eating meat was raised, Banville responded: "I don't".

Banville wrote a letter in 1981 to The Guardian suggesting that the Booker Prize, for which he was "runner up to the shortlist of contenders", be given to him so that he could use the money to buy every copy of the longlisted books in Ireland and donate them to libraries, "thus ensuring that the books not only are bought but also read – surely a unique occurrence". When his novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, Banville said a friend — whom he described as "a gentleman of the turf" — instructed him "to bet on the other five shortlistees, saying it was a sure thing, since if I won the prize I would have the prize money, and if I lost one of the others would win But the thing baffled me and I never placed the bets. I doubt I'll be visiting Ladbrokes any time soon". Anne Haverty later described Banville's critique of Saturday as "devastatingly effective". Sutherland sent a letter (signed with the title "Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus") in response to Banville's review, a letter in which he took Banville to task over his misreading of a game of squash in the novel. Banville issued a written reply with the opening line: "Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia", before begging Sutherland's pardon for his "sluggish comprehension" after managing to make his way through "all seventeen pages" of the game. Banville later admitted that, upon reading Sutherland's letter, he had thought: "[W]ell, I can kiss the Booker goodbye". Banville, Barry and Ali Smith were dismissed outright and much of the discussion focused on Barnes, Ishiguro and Zadie Smith. When the prize rules later changed to allow entries by American writers, Banville welcomed the idea. However, he later expressed regret over the decision: "The prize was unique in its original form, but has lost that uniqueness. It is now just another prize among prizes. I am convinced the administrators should take the bold step of conceding the change was wrong, and revert".

In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Marcel Reich Ranicki and John Calder featured on the jury. Banville described the award as "one of the ones one really wants to get. It's an old style prize and as an old codger it's perfect for me I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent" and said his bronze statuette trophy "will glare at me from the mantelpiece".

On the day that the 2019 and 2018 prizes were to be announced, the Swedish Academy's number appeared on Banville's telephone. He informed his daughter; she called her father back while watching the live announcement at midday to tell him his name had not been mentioned. Fellow Academy member Per Wästberg also thought it sounded like a "joke". Banville provided the recording to the Swedish Academy to assist its investigation. and told The Observer: "There is some comedy in it and potential material: 'The man who nearly won the Nobel prize'". while media in neighbouring England described it as "deceitful". He received numerous sympathetic emails and telephone calls and support from fellow writers.