Ian Sansom
Portrait of the City
Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
By John Banville
Hachette Books Ireland 224pp £24.99
‘Dublin was never my Dublin,’ explains John Banville at the beginning of Time Pieces, which he calls a ‘quasi-memoir’. Born in Wexford, just a couple of hours south of the capital, he explains that ‘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.’
Banville, though now in his seventies and an almost lifelong resident of the city, yearns for it still. The book reads like a young man’s love letter, full of wistful asides and coy remarks on the meaning not just of the city but also of life and art. ‘Art is a constant effort to strike past the mere daily doings of humankind in order to arrive at, or at least to approach as closely as possible to, the essence of what it is, simply, to be.’ ‘When does the past become the past? How much time must elapse before what merely happened begins to give off the mysterious, numinous glow that is the mark of true pastness?’
During the course of this thoroughly pleasing personal tour of the city, Banville explores the many marks of true pastness. There are memories of long-vanished ice-cream parlours and picture houses, ‘neon-signed, plush-seated’ palaces where ‘slick-haired commissionaires … would brook no nonsense from gurriers or their girls’. He regrets that O’Connell
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk