Once Oliver Orme was a petty thief and a successful painter. Always desiring what belonged to others, he sought to capture it in paint and in life. Now he's just a thief, having stolen Polly, wife of his best friend.
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen previous novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain's most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin.
This engrossing and often beautiful novel is a true work of art
that rewards careful reading
*Daily Telegraph*
Banville is a gorgeous writer who can nail an emotion
*The Times*
He shows himself, once again, as one of contemporary literature's
finest and most expert witnesses... compelling and matchless
prose
*The Observer*
The book is cherishable as a meditation on life's transience, the
mysteries and fleetingness of love, the waning of sexual desire,
and the lost domain of childhood
*The Irish Independent*
An elegant novel of tangled infidelity
*The Scotsman*
A brilliant study of memory, regret and inescapable alienation in
relationships (...) a portrait of human frailty, it is surprisingly
uplifting
*The Lady*
Banville's prose sparkles as Orme ponders the nature of art, his
life, happiness, memory and love
*The Daily Express*
Banville is an expert in masculine interiority... achieving this by
a luminous prose style
*The Independent*
Banville, the Nabokov of contemporary literature, can turn even a
straightforward comeuppance tale into breath-taking literary
art
*Press Association*
Banville is one of the writers I admire the most - few people can
create an image as beautifully or precisely
*Hanya Yanagihara, author of the Booker-shortlisted 'A Little
Life'*
Deliciously off-beat, gorgeous prose
*Daily Mail*
This is a book to be enjoyed for the grand mastery of its
description and for the way it nails the challenges we face in
attempting to understand the world, others and ourselves from the
limits of our own perspective
*The Metro*
The Blue Guitar is arguably the funniest and most accessible of
Banville's many novels . . . beautiful, heartbreaking
*The Washington Post*
Eloquent . . . Oliver has some of the wry comic haplessness of a
Beckett character
*Wall Street Journal*
The cumulative effect of [The Blue Guitar] -the opening ludic
exuberance, the subsequent steady softening, the sheer force of
Banville's reflections on grief and loss-is moving, entertaining,
edifying and affirmative. The Blue Guitar is a remarkable
achievement: the work of a writer who knows not only about pain and
eloquence, but about the consolations of learning how to think, to
look and to listen
*The National*
Banville's descriptive gifts are undiminished as Oliver finally
stumbles towards an understanding of love
*Mail on Sunday*
Elegant and affecting
*Times Literary Supplement*
Self-depreciating and funny . . . Banville, with this narrator who
is messily making it up as he goes along, who is writing a dodgy
first draft in front of our eyes, seems at once to be having fun
and to be utterly serious. Serious about the demolition work at the
heart of this novel, a taking-down of the business of writing a
novel, all those strivings, strainings, fakings and
foreshortenings-and all the ridiculousness of
alliteration-for-effect, with a rake of unlikely character and
place names which seem right out of a sinister sort of nursery
rhyme-all the artifice that the reader pretends not to see as such,
all of the impulses and indulgences (stop alliterating!) with which
the writer expects to get away.
*The Irish Times*
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