Style
Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of English, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, dazzling. David Mehegan of the Boston Globe calls him "one of the great stylists writing in English today"; Don DeLillo described his work "dangerous and clear-running prose"; Val Nolan in The Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious"; The Observer described The Book of Evidence as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." Banville himself has admitted that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form". He is known for his dark humour, and sharp, wintery wit.
In five of his novels (including one as Benjamin Black), he has used the trope of a character's eyes darting back and forth "like a spectator at a tennis match."
In 1984, he was elected to the Irish arts association, Aosdána, but resigned in 2001 so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas (annuity).
In an interview with Argentine paper La Nacíón, he described himself as a West Brit.
Banville has a strong interest in animal rights, and is often featured in Irish media speaking out against vivisection in Irish university research.
In 2011, he offered to donate his brain to The Little Museum of Dublin "so visitors could marvel at how small it was".
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
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“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)