PositiveThe Financial TimesBanville often gives his narrators an anguished sensitivity to the sublime, while also making them aware of their own sordid compulsions and ruthlessness. In his new memoir he drafts a self-portrait in the general likeness of these hard-hearted, heartbroken anti-heroes ... Banville is an expert in melancholy urban phenomena: the pleasures of dilapidation and overgrown parklands, the long-gone, gaudy shops of one’s past that blaze in the memory ... beautifully true and vaguely obscene, with people and place and weather positioned in artful, erotic balance.
