Product Description

A paperback edition of a reworking of the Dr Faustus theme, focusing on the mathematically gifted Gabriel Swan, who attempts to find a numerical solution to his quest for order and meaning in life. From the author of ATHENA and BOOK OF EVIDENCE.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #694509 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Stunning
Banville is certainly one of the two or three most exciting writers of the last 30 years, and this is a mesmerising display of his talents.

On one level this is a book bristling with symbols, wherein a young man attempts to reconcile the opposing forces of chaos and order in which he finds himself. Working within and alongside this is the puzzle of the book itself. Themes are repeated, mutated and re-presented...the truth (of events and motives, of the world itself)always lying just out of reach for the narrator.

As ever Banville is passionately in love with language. His glittering, post-modern premise is rendered with such a rich landscape of imagery and description that literally every paragraph of the book soars and the reader is left reeling in wonder.

But Banville is also spare and wonderfully witty: "In the midst of wind-shivered foliage a deer would silently materialize - a glossy eye and a glistening tear-track, a stump of a tail, a unicorns dainty hoof" The poetic prose feels pared down, as if he's considered the cleanest, sharpest approach to each detail. An method he shares with that other master of language, Don DeLillo.

So, in short, if you love language, if you love literature then surrender to Mefisto!

Faust and His Symbols
Gabriel Swan is Ramanujan, Manfred, Cain and Christ in one. The sheer MEANING that this text expresses is beautiful beyond anything I have ever read in a work of fiction - a meaning that incorporates but overcomes language and lies within a kind of eidetic sublime. John Banville explores the significance of the dark truth that lies behind the world; unseeable, unknowable, but essential, if there is to be any validition for an individual who can recognise his worth only internally and personally. Banville grasps what Byron, Nietzsche, et al were about in their consideration of predestination (in 'Mefisto', consciousness appears to lie within a mathematical order that is always just out of grasp) not as a threat to humanity but as the means of escape from the impossible burden that freedom presents for one with any grasp of the eternal. Like Faust, any attempt to understand this truth results in destruction.

A vague devil
Mefisto left me dissatisfied. I enjoyed the writing (apart from the over-usage of similes), but the vagueness that runs through the book slowly and surely nibbled at my initial excitement. To be fair, there are subtleties in the story, themes of recurrence and unavoidable fate, and I am still interested in reading more Banville, but Mefisto just didn't take-off the way I'd hoped. Felix is an interesting character, though I think he could have been darker and more menacing. Part One is entitled "Marionettes", and that is how I found the novel's cast of characters: they are like marionettes, puppets on strings. (Perhaps that's the point?) Five stars for the writing, minus two for the story-shielding vagueness.