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Birchwood
 
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Birchwood (Paperback)

by John Banville (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Minerva; New edition edition (3 Dec 1992)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0749398116
  • ISBN-13: 978-0749398118
  • Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 12.7 x 1.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 869,214 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #42 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > B > Banville, John

Product Description

Product Description

Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a baroque madhouse for its ruined inhabitants. One disaster succeeds another until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a travelling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful writing from first page to last!, 10 Oct 2009
This review is from: Birchwood (Paperback)
This book has very clear echoes of Proust, both in the writing style and in the sense of nostalgia that pervades the story of aristocratic decline. The references are clear and deliberate - in the very first chapter, Banville's narrator refers to his fragments of memory as "madeleines" and talks of his "search for time misplaced."

Birchwood is a book that I thoroughly enjoyed. While the writing style is reminiscent of Proust in its dreamy beauty, it clips along at a much faster pace, as does the sometimes bizarre plot of childhood resentments, exploding grandmothers, running off to join the circus, searching for a long-lost sister, etc. Also there's a detachment from the destruction that comes to Birchwood, a sense that it's inevitable and even deserved, a strong context of the social unrest in Ireland at the time.

The writing was brilliant from the first page to the last, and made me want to read a lot more of Banville's work.
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