Los infinitos

by John Banville, Benito Gómez Ibáñez (Translator)

La familia Godley se ha reunido en Arden, su finca, en medio de una verde campiña, cerca de un antiguo lugar sagrado y de las vías del tren. Han venido porque el vie­jo Adam Godley, un respetado y exaltado matemático, se está muriendo. Le acompañan Ursula, su segunda es­posa, madre de Adam y de su hermana Petra, y Helen, la mujer del joven Adam, bella como la homérica Helena. Y también están Ivy Blount, la última aristócrata del lu­gar, que ahora es la criada de la familia, y Duffy, un campesino que se ocupa de la poca ganadería de la fin­ca. Y más tarde vendrán Roddy Wagstaff, un modernillo que corteja a la angustiada Petra. Y Benny Grace, quizá un colega de Adam Godley o el dios Pan, que junto a otras deidades es uno de los personajes de esta luminosa y numinosa historia sobre los mortales; y sobre la dolo­rosa inmortalidad de los dioses, que interfieren en las vi­das de los hombres sólo para intentar experimentar esa mortalidad que anhelan. Porque las últimas ecuaciones de Adam Godley constituyen la combinación que abrió el «cerrado aposento del tiempo», la condición necesa­ria de esta literaria convivencia de dioses y hombres.

Genres: Fiction, Mythology, Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Irish Literature, Literature, Ireland

296 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2009

About the author

William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W.B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.
Banville has won the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer.
Banville was born and grew up in Wexford town in south-east Ireland. He published his first novel, Nightspawn, in 1971. A second, Birchwood, followed two years later. "The Revolutions Trilogy", published between 1976 and 1982, comprises three works, each named in reference to a renowned scientist: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. His next work, Mefisto, had a mathematical theme. His 1989 novel The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of that year's Guinness Peat Aviation award, heralded a second trilogy, three works which deal in common with the work of art. "The Frames Trilogy" is completed by Ghosts and Athena, both published during the 1990s. Banville's thirteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In addition, he publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black — most of these feature the character of Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.
Banville is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives in Dublin.

Reviews

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've read somewhere that the main thing a novelist needs to accomplish in the first 10% of a story is to convince the reader to keep reading. John Banville obviously does not feel bound by this advice. Hell, no, with a kind of oblivious arrogance that might almost be admirable, if it weren't so irritating, he launches this grotesquely overwritten galley of pretentious claptrap, and let the reader be damned!

The domineering patriarch lies dying in the upper chamber. Assorted members of the family he's mistreated over the years are fluttering around ineffectively. Also fluttering around is the omniscient narrator to beat all omniscient narrators, Hermes, whose pappy Zeus may or may not be ravishing the in-laws, while Pan ......

Oh, never mind. Who can be bothered? Reading the reviews of other goodreaders, I notice that there is a certain type of reader that Banfield spurs on to a kind of semi-ecstatic, hagiographic logorrhea. I suggest you read their reviews, which are among the funniest things I've read in months.

Life is too short. I gave it 60 pages. That's enough.

Upon winning the Booker Prize in 2005, John Banville commented that "it was nice to see a work of art win.... There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for real books."

This pretentious git* is president of his own fan club. The fact that I think his writing is ridiculous bloviation aspiring to be high culture won't worry him a bit. But don't say you weren't warned.

*: the fact that he's a countryman of mine seems to make it worse, somehow.

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Divine Perspective

Whenever I feel the need for a smooth read, for that sensation of floating into soft, elegant prose that requires no effort to appreciate and absorb, Banville is my go-to guy. Nobody does it better. And that includes a tale narrated by a Greek god about one of an infinite number of simultaneous universes is which the subtle differences from our own create an intriguing context for considering things like... well, infinity.

Hermes, the messenger of the gods, sets the tongue-in-cheek tone: “But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place! The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should be plausible in every detail—planting in the rocks the fossils of outlandish creatures that never existed, distributing fake dark matter throughout the universe, even setting up in the cosmos the faintest of faint hums to mimic the reverberations of the initiating shot that is supposed to have set the whole shooting-match going.” The immortals set the game up. We merely respond, mostly inadequately.

In such a world, “The secret of survival is a defective imagination... The unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot.” So we create consoling stories, like the Brahman Hypothesis, about the ultimate particle of time, “the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation.” Turns out that the hypothesis looks pretty pragmatic since it has led to automobiles powered by salt-water, the success of cold fusion, and hydrogen-fuelled machines (Oppenheimer failed in his attempt to create the bomb). But that’s just the gods having a laugh: “For what is spirit in this world may be flesh in another. In an infinity of worlds all possibilities are fulfilled.”

Adam (how could it be any other?) is the one who figured it all out. “—an infinity of infinities... all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there—well, you can imagine the effect.” But Adam is dying, and his son (the Second Adam as St. Paul would call him of course) understands almost nothing about either the nature of the universe, or his father.

Adam fils, however, has a very private, a very personal conviction, “He has a secret, one he will tell to no one, not even his wife, for fear of ridicule. He believes unshakeably in the possibility of the good... For him, good and evil are two species of virus competing against each other for hegemony in the heart of man, with good managing to hold the upper hand, though barely.” This Adam has no real story to tell about this intuition. He can only live out its implications and hope that others ‘get it’.

The gods know this is silly but wish they could be like the second Adam.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do we think of when we think of the abode of the gods? Swans gliding across still waters, laurel hedges from which butterflies tumble, birdsong hidden in dappled sunlight? That's the atmosphere of Arden, the home of the Godley family in The Infinities, also the home of the gods. Infinities here are described as time subject to slippages so that "all possibilities are fulfilled." Banville plays with the notion that the gods are still with us.

The Godley family is in crisis. Old Adam, their head, has suffered a stroke and is in a coma. While the rest of the family gathers to deal with his illness and its potentialities, the gods have gathered to meddle and take advantage. They overlook everything happening at Arden. Yet, while the point of view is usually that of Hermes, flitting quickly about to spy on everyone, Adam also comments on the busy activity in the house, even from the depths of his coma, suggesting we're meant to make parallels. There is the constant feeling that Adam sees everything and influences all action.

It's all godly. Every description is in tones just a little beyond reality, as you'd expect in places inhabited by those more than human. Banville's prose is pitch perfect throughout. It's marvelously written, richly phrased and metaphored. The "oily sway of wine," he writes, and "the low-slung sky," the "unmanageable, greasy weight of grief" a character "carries under his arm"--all from the same paragraph. It's all this delicious, the way Banville writes.

This is a slick, sophisticated way to tell the story of a family emergency and the strain put on all the ties within it. I was reminded of John Updike's The Centaur, my favorite of his novels, in which every character has a counterpart from classical mythology. But Updike's novel is distinctly American. Darker, too, and tragic. Banville's atmosphere is more enchanting. It brims with Shakespeare's humor and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Infinities is a midsummer pastoral romp. Banville has his characters, situations, and words springing about Arden's lawns like lambs.

[Deea · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this deliciously humorous novel, Banville plays with the idea of being a modern Shakespeare. Taking as model “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, he explores one of the parallel worlds the “pater familia” in this story had theorized about in his earlier studies about the infinities of realities.

He enters the particular reality from the novel (which is the same as our reality, but slightly different) while being in a coma. We are presented the thoughts, feelings and reactions of the members of his household and of some friends to the tragedy of his paresis and also the actions of the Gods who interfere in their mortal lives (yes, in this particular reality, Greek Gods exist and they are envious of mortals). Hermes and Zeus fool around with mortals; the old story of Amphytrion and Alcmene is reloaded and staged differently, but yet in the same way, and all in the time of a single day.

The phrasing is deliciously humorous and plastic (typical Banville who never disappoints) and although this novel is not a fiver, not even an acquirer of a 4 star prize in my mind, I had a lot of fun reading it and enjoyed it quite a lot. And because nothing I say would sound as wonderfully eloquent as Banville’s play of words and also because this is not a review per se, but rather an exercise of expressing a like in spite of the grade I gave with more than stars, I will end this comment by quoting Banville’s eloquent words used while musing in this novel about one of the themes he likes most: time.

And then there is the question of time. What for instant is an instant? Hours, minutes, seconds, even, these are comprehensible, since they can be measured on a clock, but what is meant when people speak of a moment, a while – a tick – a jiffy? They are only words, of course, yet they hang above soundless depths.

[Charles Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. It's clever, witty, imaginative and filled with ideas -- all things I prize in a book. And yet it lacks coherence, perhaps even a sense of full commitment by the author to his novel. I don't feel Banville's dedication to the material, a sense that he really had a compelling reason or desire to tell this story.

It is a kind of homage to the story of Amphytrion -- the mortal cuckolded by Zeus, who took Amphitryon's own shape to seduce his wife, Alcmene -- and to Kleist's play based on the story. And there is something theatrical about the setting -- an isolated country house where a family has gathered to wait for the death of the father, comatose after a stroke. The place is also haunted by the Greek gods -- Hermes keeps watch on things while his own father, Zeus, has his way with the beautiful actress wife (named, rather obviously, Helen) of the son of the dying man. Both son and father are named Adam, which only adds another layer of confusion to the story, which is narrated by Hermes, and then by the elder Adam in his comatose state, and then by both of them, blending and alternating until it's not clear who, other than Banville, is telling the story.

The elder Adam is a prominent intellectual -- a mathematician or a philosopher or a theoretical physicist -- whose ideas about infinity, or rather infinities, have changed the world: applications of his theories have led to automobiles that run on seawater. But the world in which the novel takes place is not our own: In this alternate world, for example, Mary, Queen of Scots, beheaded Elizabeth I, not the other way around. And Alfred Russel Wallace, not Darwin, was credited with the theory of evolution, which in any case has been disproved.

Yes, Banville is having fun, playing as much with Shakespeare (there is a character whose name, Wagstaff, is a translation of "Shakespeare") as with the classic myth or Kleist's version of it. Another character, Benny Grace, is both the god Pan and a version of Shakespeare's Puck, and the whole thing has a Midsummer Night's Dream quality to it. But the novel has a dark side, too: Old Adam's first wife drowned herself; his current wife, Ursula, is an alcoholic; their daughter, Petra, is a morbid young woman who is compiling a list of human ailments and secretly mutilates herself.

Is the problem with the novel that there is too much going on and not enough of it winds up anywhere meaningful? Perhaps. It's a verbal feast -- Banville is often compared to such word wizards as Nabokov and Joyce -- but I came away from it feeling a little queasy, as if I'd just been to a banquet of appetizers.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

Infinite Ease (as if by Wings of Desire)

Within the realm of this novel, the gods are among us, they sometimes make love to us covertly, and they cause some of us to write gorgeous prose, out of the words they fashioned for us, with infinite ease. (1)



Markus Hoffmann - "Bent to Infinity" (Source:)


VERSE
(In the Words of
John Banville):


Sunrise

It is a spectacle
We immortals enjoy,
This minor daily resurrection.
Often we will gather
At the ramparts of the clouds,
And gaze down upon them,
Our little ones,
As they bestir themselves
To welcome the new day.


World Upon World

In the welter of realities,
Everything endlessly extends
And unravels,
World upon world.


Pretty Place
[A Haiku]

This world we gave them
Appears a pretty place,
On most occasions.


Pluto

Pluto is a jealous god
And fiercely guards
His dread domain.


In Our Care
[A Haiku]

You see how, despite
Our callous ways, we keep
You all in our care.


Godly Embrace

I approach and lean over her,
Solicitously,
Folding my invisible wings
About her sad, sloped shoulders.




Still from "Wings of Desire" (Source:)


FOOTNOTES:

(1) Damiel - "End the Infinity" (from "Wings of Desire"):

"It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth."

The gods in this novel are not Christian God(s), but pagan gods, who are more analogous to the angels in the film, "Wings of Desire".


SOUNDTRACK:



"From an Angel to a Man" (from "Wings of Desire")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLfpS...

Blind Faith - "In the Presence of the Lord" [Live in Hyde Park, 1969]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcES...

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cannot resist reading Banville aloud. His command of prose style is without equal among contemporary writers in English. When Banville uses a comma, it is for a very good reason and must be read to preserve the rhythm of the sentence as well as the sense. Despite the beauty of his prose, which borders often on poetry, he is playful in The Infinities with both characters and readers, as befits a comedy. One can, in fact, read this novel as a play. It is, in part, a restaging of Amphitryon, complete with the neoclassical "Aristotelian unities" of action, place, and time. But which Amphitryon does Banville intend to replicate, the burlesque of Plautus, Kleist's nod to Moliere, or one of the later German productions? There is, I suspect, something of them all in this delightful tale, and not a little of Shakespeare as well. Is this Arden, where the twenty-four hour duration of the novel transpires, in an alternate universe (one of the infinities discovered by the comatose mathematician, Adam Godley, around whom the action turns), or is that even a meaningful question, given Godley's "Brahma [ब्रह्मा:] hypothesis"? Or should it have been the "Brahman [ब्रह्मन्:] hypothesis? "Et in Arcadia ego" with which the novel begins is soon reframed as "Et in Arcadia ille" with a sly wink at Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus. Although a comedy by classical definition and replete with modern comedic elements, Banville's novel tackles some very serious questions about family relationships, the meaning of life, and the nature of reality. It is a delight in an infinite number of ways and highly recommended.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should have bought my own copy of The Infinities; it’s a book to linger over, not read in haste because it’s due back at the library. It is a beautiful book.

I like Banville’s playful characterisation. This is a story about a household reunion because the patriarch old Adam Godley is dying, but the household is watched over by the ancient Greek gods. They watch the vigil with cynical amusement and mild jealousy; they interfere out of malice and selfishness. They are petty and vindictive; they are sensual and spiteful. Humans are their playthings, an amusing diversion, yet Hermes thinks of himself as benign too:

I hover in the air above them, my chlamys spread as wide as it will go, in the attitude of Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia, protecting my little band of mortal sinners. I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side. (p194)

Only a master like Banville could pull this off without it seeming ridiculous!

This playful tale also has a serious side. It deals with death, in an age when some of us in wealthy western societies can live well into middle age before the loss of someone we care about. Young Adam is surprised by the unexpected emotions that beset him when he sits by his dying father’s bedside, and he also has to confront all the issues that family reunion brings when relationships are strained and individuals are not really compatible. One should behave well at family gatherings of this type, but oh dear! it’s not easy!

Read the rest of this review at http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Banville has astonishing powers…This is unequivocally a work of brilliance” blurbs the Spectator on the back of the dust jacket. And my hometown paper, the KC Star placed it among its top 10 novels of 2009. So what the heck, I bought it on discount at Borders a year ago. It has been in my “to read” stack ever since. It never seems to move up. With a wild hair, I moved it above Adrian McKinty’s Bloomsday trilogy and several others that I know I will enjoy. It’s been a while since I have read anything blatantly literary.

First impressions upon struggling through the initial 27 pages: Banville, an Irishman seeks to claim his throne as the Irish Faulkner. On the second page of the novel Banville goes after Faulkner’s unending sentence record, falling short. His effort produced 149 words and no less than 12 commas. If he were here with me now I would challenge him to diagram it. He also offers “Sound and the Fury” profundities, “How can he be a self and others others since the others too are selves, to themselves.” Hmm. And for those of us who are avid dictionarians – there must be some out there – Banville offers these gems in a single paragraph: innocuous (the easy one), extravasation, parietal, obstreperous and ataraxia. The God Hermes narrates and he must be either a dictionarian, or all-knowing. I suppose, being a God, it’s the latter.

But some of this writing is exquisite and makes me envious of Hermes/Banville. A character named Adam observes “an early blackbird flies across at a slant swiftly from somewhere to somewhere else, its lacquered wing catching an angled glint of sunlight, and he cannot but think with a pang of the early worm.” Pretty cool stuff.

So I push on daunted but dogged.

-------------------------------------

Through page 55…………

Once, in a discussion which he thought to be off the record, William Faulkner mentioned that his contemorary Ernest Hemingway wrote simply, and never challenged his readers to open a dictionary. Faulkner was upset when he saw those words in print, and Hemingway was pissed. Hemingway, asked by a reporter to comment, responded “Faulkner thinks all of his big words really mean something.”
Upon reading Infinities one knows whose side Banville takes. During a fifteen page stretch Banville offers up: preterite, arcanum, mein, solipsist (three times), hydrocephalic, shriven, effulgence and my personal favorite, maenad: a woman beside herself with frenzy or excitement. Banville also provides a Faulknerian-length, page-and-a-half paragraph describing the son’s reflections as he watches the comatose father in his death bed. Again there is punch in Banville’s language that, in and of itself makes it worthy. But after fifty pages nothing happens, only philosophical thoughts and very cool descriptions like “The floor is of rough-hewn pitchpine beams that have driven a splinter into many an unprotected toe” – ouch!

I was all set to write “Nothing has happened here in 50 pages except a sunrise. There is no meat, only beautiful frills and exquisitely elegant language. I’m sorry but I’m a carnivore” and then I would close my review and put the book away until I too, am on my deathbed.

And then something happened. While Adam, the son eats breakfast and spends a page-and-a-half paragraph pondering his father’s death, in his bedroom Zeus visits Adam’s sleeping - and very hot - wife Helen in what she believes to be a dream. Banville, Zeus and Helen provide the epitome of delicately handled erotica that invigorated my desire – intellectually and anatomically – to read on. So………

Daunted, dogged, frustrated and titillated, I push forward.

------------------------------------

Beyond half-way, the dreaded point of no tossing aside

Maybe I have grown accustomed to the flow of the words. Maybe I am finding more to enjoy than that of which to poke fun. For whatever reasons, the read comes easier and more enjoyably considering that still, virtually nothing happens. Banville’s tale – if one can call it that – is character driven, not story driven, and as he adds flesh and substance to those characters they become more and more worth following, particularly the son Adam and the Gods, Hermes and Zeus.

Banville's descriptive words often bring delight. “She was lavishly ugly, with a long horse-face and a mouthful of outsized teeth the front ones of which were always flecked with lipstick.” Or this one of Ivy’s cat, “He is a ragged old tom named Tom, mottled in grey-brown shades that make me think of slugs.” Or Hermes discussing bare human feet, “tuberous and pulpy, like things growing under water.” Yet as Ivy walks away “Her damp soles had left wonderfully slim stylized outlines of themselves on the blue steps – odd that such ugly extremities should make such lovely prints.” Some would call this kind of writing pretentious. I call it damn fine.

The real treat to this point of the book lies in the God's view, often misguided and funny, of humans. Hermes tells his readers “Yes, we gods sometimes do smile on our creation, but only sometimes, and never for very long. He tells us that we should never have fallen for the one God, that of Moses and the “pale-Galilean.” He says “thou shouldst have stuck with us. We offer you no salvation of the soul, but no damnation either; no afterlife in which to be bored for all eternity…no day of reckoning and divine retribution…nothing, in fact, except stories, comforting or at least comfortingly reasonable accounts of why things are as they are.” And Hermes suggests that all we have to do to get what we want in life is to “place oxen and the odd virgin before our graven images and slit their throats.” Sometimes, Hermes tells us, we’ll help you out afterwards and sometimes we won’t, “it is our way of demonstrating the inscrutable action of fate.” And he closes with this bit of wisdom: “That is the difference between us and your mealy-mouthed Savior, so called – we do not pretend to be benign, but are playful only, and endlessly diverted by the spectacle of your heart-searchings and travails of the spirit.”

Okay then.

And that’s what this book seems to be about, "human heart-searchings and travails of the spirit" in a world that could care less.

And so I read on, daunted, dogged, frustrated and titillated, perturbed but intrigued.
3/18/11

------------

It's been nine months and I have yet to take the bait and try to finish. I'm placing it onto my "pick up the next time I break my leg" pile. Impressive writing. Easy to put down (and leave down).

A long strnge trip, Mr. Banville

[D · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish for reasons mentioned in this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simply a stunningly beautiful book. It focuses on a family which is gathered together because the father, Adam Godley, a brilliant theoretical mathematician, is on his deathbed. He is attended by his second wife, his son Adam (and Adam's wife Helen), and his daughter Petra. Petra's "young man" visits, although his interest in Petra is not clear. There are a few others stopping by the Godley home as well. The narrator of the novel is Hermes, the Greek god (aka Mercury), and Zeus and Pan play key roles as well. Bringing in the gods to accompany a family facing the death of one of its members is Banville's genius: who better to opine on the end of life than the immortals, whose lives have no ends. The gods also play other roles in the lives of several members of this family; to be more detailed than that would spoil. Suffice it to say that Banville handles all this with brilliance.

Whether we are inside a god's head as narrator ("Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.") or the head of the dying man ("When the time comes, and it cannot be very long now, I want to die into the light, like an old tree feeding its last upon the radiance of the world") or seeing what family members are thinking and feeling, we are always in the presence of a knowing mind, a mind that understands exactly how we think and feel.

It is not for nothing that this is Banville's fifteenth novel; no young writer could be so wise or translate that wisdom in words so well. Every page is jeweled, studded with insight beautifully presented. I read a library copy of this book and am buying my own copy now, to reread and to annotate. I do not want to forget what is here.

[Fionnuala]

A book of many layers which I should reread - I'm sure I barely scratched the surface.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Banville is a writer I read, primarily, for the quality of his prose and the story and plot are secondary. The story in this book is about the Godley family whose father is dying. He is a theoretical mathematician who has suffered a stroke and is in a coma. Unbeknownst to his family his mind is still working but he is unable to communicate to them. The other members of the family are his wife and two children, Adam and Petra. Also, secretly living in their house are an assortment of gods led by Zeus and the narrator of this story is Hermes. There is no actual plot in the book but it is, simply, about the interactions between the family members and some of their friends, as well as, the interference and mischievous behavior of the gods. A very entertaining book beautifully written by the great John Banville.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does anyone write a richer more mellifluous prose than John Banville? Still, at times I find his style too oleagenous for my taste, to use one of his favorite words (moreover, his obsession with "f" alliteration can sometimes tires). This novel, very much in the Irish tradition, deals with a dysfunctional family--or, actually two, dysfunctional families, the second being the family of Greek gods who overlooks and at certain points interferes with the earthly family. The narrator is Hermes who has to watch his father Zeus's lustful behavior, even as he watches over a mortal family gathered at their father's deathbed. Mortals are sad beings. Everyone in the Irish family in question is in some way a loser, but ultimately the gods are a sadder lot, trapped as they are in their cold immortality. It is our human capacity to love and to die that makes us superior to the gods. Banville's novel is a work of great imagination, philosophical insight, and humor. Despite all its merits, "Infinities" is sometimes confusing, with the slippage between divine and human voices, which seems to be a critical aspect of the novel, not always easy to follow.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great mathematician lies dying in another of the infinity of separate but intermingled worlds that he has discovered exist. It is subtly different from ours -- cold fusion works, Wallace and not Darwin is remembered, Kleist is the great genius and Goethe forgotten, and, most importantly, the Greek gods continue to fumble about in the lives of mortals. The place is called Arden and has more than a little of the whiff of Shakespeare's wood about it.

But this is really mostly beside the point, since the entire point here is the beauty of Banville's language and the intensity with which it makes present each detail of the magical green world he describes and the emotions and thoughts of its inhabitants, mortal and immortal.

If plot and event are what you're after, stay away. This books is 273 pages of poetry.

[Terri · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this. It had moments where the writing was really engaging, and one metaphor early on that was really moving. But I just couldn't buy it. Overall, I found the language overbearing, the mythology ridiculous and shoe-horned into the story, and the "plot" completely pointless. I don't even mind, sometimes, there not being a plot. I resolved, pretty early on, that this book was more of a vignette of a day than a plot driven novel, and I could live with that. But the ending was absurd.

Worse, Banville insults his readers with painfully obvious referenced to Greek mythology. And just in case you miss any of his too-obvious references, he takes great pains to explain them to you. The novel is the worst kind of "clever."

In addition to issues with prose and plot, the entire setting is distracting. I found myself pulled out of the story again and again: first by being bludgeoned with metaphor, then by being bludgeoned with word-use, then by being taken down with a distracting setting. This is the sort of novel that makes students give up reading.

I gave it two stars for a clever concept and one scene I found moving.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is currently a discourse in literary circles that pursues this central question:

What are we to do about the fact that no one reads literary fiction anymore?

Some people think "we" need to subsidise the writing of literary fiction if it is to survive. If you follow this link, however, you can read a satisfying article in The Guardian which can be summed up as follows:

If people aren’t reading literary fiction, it’s because literary fiction is not good enough.

The tension in this discourse is between the idea that a literary novel is one in which nothing actually happens, and that a mass market novel (i.e. one that people will read) is one in which something,,, well, happens.

The latter style of novel has been characterised [you can read this in the article as well] as fodder for “silly boys”: readers who need things to happen in order to capture and fixate their fleeting and fragile attention. The former is lauded by the Literary Establishment as high art, and thus the achievement of writing a novel in which nothing needs to happen in order to hold the reader’s attention is the only (?) esteemable goal for a writer to have in their… well, mind.

What is supposed to form the basis of the literary novel is high quality prose and impressive (and well maintained) style. So long as those elements are in place, then it doesn’t matter that the whole “story” (or, perhaps, “plot”) of the novel is nothing more than that a group of people drift in and out of a rambling country house while a father figure lies in a literal coma in an upstairs room. The characters think things, reflect on things, made erudite references to things, and so on. But very little, or perhaps nothing at all, happens. Maybe there’s a misplaced kiss, a slapped face, some meals are served… but essentially these so-called “actions” are not what is important, except perhaps as a bubbling up and manifestation of the internal cogitations of the characters.

And you know what: that’s fair enough.

When film producers read a David Malouf novel and then hammer on his door to buy the film rights, he always takes a moment to remind them that the novel they’ve just read and been so impressed by is about two people sitting in a room talking to each other, interspersed with them sitting in separate rooms thinking quietly to themselves.

Oh, yeah, the producer realises. There is no way that such a premise could be made into a film that modern audiences would sit still for, let alone understand. There would need to be a lot more explosions, preferably some capes, and a daring motorcycle chase through downtown Kowloon...

Thing is, though, that when David Malouf writes a literary novel, it would seem that he keeps the Four Elements of Effective Storytelling in mind:

Relatability (the reader can connect with the world)
Novelty (there is originality in the premise)
Tension (“what is” and “what should be” vie for ultimate victory)
Fluency (the reader can access and understand what is being said)

This is where Banville goes wrong.

RELATABILITY

First off, it’s set in an alternate universe to our own which is still 99.999% our own but with minor, unimportant differences. That’s an unnecessary confusion right there. Why bother to make a bunch of fundamental changes to the world that don’t really matter? This is one way to bring in the Infinities of the title, but this is ultimately a paradox (see TENSION below).

Secondly, much of the narrative is delivered from the POV of Hermes, the Greek god. You need to have a very sound knowledge of Greek Religion (aka “Mythology”) to get 93% of the jokes and 98% of the “clever” allusions. Much of the time it seems to be a bit of a fetish piece where the sexy times of Zeus roll around in the author’s mind like an All Day Gobstopper.

Finally, it’s English. Set in a place called “Arden”, which according to Wikipedia used to be a forest in Warwickshire. So that - in a terribly English manner - alienates much of the anglophone world. I couldn’t see this still working the same if it were set in Korumburra.

NOVELTY

At one point [I wish I’d written down the page number] Banville / Hermes / Maybe The Comatose Father actually taps on the fourth wall, winks at us, and admits that the whole thing is a genre set piece: The Dying Paterfamilias Upstairs while the children and wives fret and strut about downstairs.

Acknowledging this doesn’t make it alright. You’re not Agatha Christie, Banville.

TENSION

There are gods involved. There is a Deus Ex Machina hovering on literally every page.

Spoiler Alert: It’s all going to be okay.

FLUENCY

This is the most accumbrous aspect of the novel, for me. His contamulate breaking of the signal rule not to have your audience needing to be variently scudding to the xicograph perimontously is… well, scadamous.

So, to sum up: There is nothing wrong with the endeavour of literary fiction, unless the person writing it is arrogant about how they are going about it, and alienate the reader in the process. This novel is everything that is wrong with literary fiction. Enjoy.

[Κατερίνα Μαλακατέ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Δεν θα ξεκινήσω να εξηγώ γιατί πήρα το «Άπειροι κόσμοι» του Μπάνβιλ, γιατί δεν θα έχει κανένα νόημα. Πριν από μερικά χρόνια, όταν διάβασα τη «Θάλασσα», δυσκολεύτηκα να βρω την όποια γοητεία στη γραφή του, οπότε μάλλον έφταιξα που εμπιστεύτηκα το οπισθόφυλλο και έδωσα στο συγγραφέα μια ακόμα ευκαιρία. Μου πήρε χρόνο να τελειώσω το βιβλίο, και το έκανα από αναγνωστική διαστροφή και τίποτε άλλο. Ούτε το τέλος με ενθουσίασε. Είπαμε, στην τελική ανάλυση έχει να κάνει και με τη χημεία βιβλίου- αναγνώστη.
Ο Αδάμ Γκόντλι, άλλοτε βραβευμένος μαθηματικός, έχει πάθει εγκεφαλικό και οι συγγενείς του μαζεύονται στο σπίτι πριν πεθάνει. Ο γιος του, Αδάμ, είναι ένας αδέξιος αλλά αξιόπιστος άνθρωπος, η κόρη του Πέτρα μια σαλεμένη τρελή, η μαμά Ούρσουλα μια γυναίκα τριάντα χρόνια μικρότερη του Αδάμ του πρεσβύτερου που κάνει όμως σα να πεθαίνει αυτή.
Δυσκολεύτηκα να ταυτιστώ με τους χαρακτήρες κυρίως γιατί δεν τους γνωρίζουμε παρά αμυδρά. Το όποιο ενδιαφέρον του βιβλίου εστιάζεται στον αφηγητή που στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος δεν είναι άλλος από τον θεό Ερμή, που με κάποιο απροσδιόριστο τρόπο μπουρδουκλώνεται στις ζωές αυτών των ανθρώπων που δεν κάνουν ούτε παθαίνουν απολύτως….τίποτα. Την εμφάνιση του κάνει κι ο Πάνας, ο πιο μη σεξουαλικός Πάνας που έχω συναντήσει ποτέ στη λογοτεχνία. Με λίγα λόγια, οι «Άπειροι κόσμοι» με συντρόφευσαν σε άπειρα χασμουρητά.

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Infinities replays the myth of Amphitryon, in which Zeus seduces a mortal woman while disguised as her husband. Banville's modern-day retelling, however, with all its conceits of the classical gods' ability (or inability) to impersonate humans and its celestial-earthly humor, met with dissent from critics. Many thought that the novel reached the literary heights of The Sea in its rich, elegant writing, sensuous details, and witty farce. But a few reviewers described the novel as overwritten and an intellectual exercise more than a substantive drama. With its erudite inquiries, The Infinities is perhaps best suited to readers who enjoy pondering questions of mortality and immortality; others may wish to start with The Sea. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

And then there is the question of time. What for instance is an instant? Hours, minutes, seconds, even, these are comprehensible, since they can be measured on a clock, but what is meant when people speak of a moment, a while—a tick—a jiffy? They are only words, of course, yet they hang above soundless depths. Does time flow or is it a succession of stillnesses—instants—moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in an unbreaking wave? Or is there only one great stillness, stretching everywhere, in all directions, through which we move like swimmers breasting an infinite, listless sea? [...] There are lights now in the sky that set out from their sources a billion years ago. But are there lights? No, only light, flowing endlessly, moving, every instant.
Everything blurs around its edges, everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate.

[Catachresis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Couldn't get into this one, but Banville's Athena is absolutely superb.

[Magdalena]

On the surface of it, The Infinities is a simple story, set, like Joyce’s Ulysses within the space of 24 hours in a single setting – an old country house in Ireland. The story pivots around Adam Godley, the aptly named family patriarch and famous mathematician/scientist who lies comatose and dying after a massive stroke. During this time, although a number of visitors come and go, and there are revelations, resolutions, and perceptions, nothing particular appears to happen, at least by human standards. After all, it's just one day. However, like Ulysses there is nothing simple about the story. For one thing, it’s narrated by Hermes, sort of, although as you might expect of a god, Hermes is omniscient, and flicks in and out of the consciousness of Adam Sr, his children Adam Jr, and 19 year old Petra, Adam Jr’s beautiful wife Helen (of course), a strange visitor named Benny Grace, and Adam Sr’s wife Ursula, the household matriarch. This creates a theatrical and comic effect, not least of which because every now and then Hermes himself interrupts the reflection to put in his own two cents worth and comment on the value or otherwise of the previous narrative or respond during the deepest moment of reflections to the hot demands of his own father Zeus.

And then there is the mysterious Dionysian Benny, who shows up unexpectedly under the guise of having a quick word with the comatose Adam Sr. We come to understand, just a little, what Benny’s role is in the narrative through Adam Sr’s own reflections, and also through the slightly ill tempered descriptions from Hermes:

"Through a gap between the straining buttons of his shirt he palps with idel fingers the folds of his belly, eyeing lazily, like the happy faun he is at heart, the sweltering back of stirless tress that edges the garden. A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon. It takes a god to know a thing like that.(178)"

The gods are everywhere, from the Amphitryon inspired sex-mad Zeus, who hints at his involvement in the family history through an earlier coupling with Ursula, and who reasserts his involvement through Adam Jr’s wife Helen. The Zeus/Helen coupling passages may have won Banville his second nomination for the Bad Sex in Fiction award, but aside from a few bull metaphors, they really aren’t so extraordinary. In fact, there’s a distinct disconnect between the comic and lighthearted passages of the gods: Benny, Hermes and Zeus, and the deep introspection and internal changes of the humans. There are plenty of hints too, that Adam himself has a godlike spirit, partly through his mathematical genius and partly through a kind of melding between all of the gods and the humans that culminates in an almost Buddhistic message underneath all the farce:

"He gazes into the twilit garden. Thick, tawny sunlight creeps along the grass, drawing spiked shadows in its wake. The trees tremble, talking of night. The birds, the clouds, the far, pale sky. This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may life, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed for ever in a luminous, unending instant. (299)"

The gods envy the mortals because they exist. The beauty of humanity is in the everyday, limited action morality that involves eating, using the toilet, copulating (human to human, regardless of the guise), bleeding, feeling pain, giving birth, and above all, dying. This is the underlying celebration of the novel: the beauty of flawed humanity amidst the bodiless, bloodless gods. If characters like the self-wounding Petra, or the alcoholic Ursula, the big bumbling Adam Jr, or the hungry Molly Bloom styled Helen are better drawn and richer than Benny, Zeus and Hermes, who claim omnipotence but provide only comic relief, it is because they are intended to be more real. The real poetry is all in the human passages, and this is where the novel shines, pitting poetry against the comical. Overall, and taken at its deepest level, The Infinities is a fun, heady novel that turns over our sense of reality, only to restore it to us in all it's tarnished glory.

[Jerry Balzano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. The characters are amazing, and each one charming in his or her own way, and their interactions with one another, also a source of endless delight. To be introduced to such an interesting group of people at such a critical watershed event in their lives, is almost all one could possibly want. The story -- or I should say, interleaved and interpenetrating stories -- well, I found those compelling too, but once you care about the characters, perhaps that's not surprising. I entered this book with no expectations -- the way to read most books, I think -- and immediately saw it as a book to be savored. So leave your expectations at the door, prepare to savor the prose and the portraits of the people involved, and perhaps you'll get swept up into the maelstrom just as I did.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

I rarely give up on a book, but I did on this one. I am a huge fan of Greek mythology and love the whole multiverse, infinite worlds theories. This book takes place over just one day, it is about the death of a father, that happens to be a god. Yes some interesting thoughts on the infinite, on gods, and on families but not enough to ramble on for an entire novel. Just because one can write eloquent sentences, does not mean that they are writing good novels. I cannot recommend this novel as I was only able to force myself through half of it.

[Paul Holden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great writing, but I didn’t care for the story. I’m not even sure there really was a story.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can easily say this is the best book I've read this year. I almost want to reread it again, right now. It was brilliant. Banville is a god. Or at very least, he knows how to channel one.

The scene is a quirky Irish country house. The time is today-ish: Midsummer's Eve, more precisely. The characters are mainly the Godley family: Adam Snr, a theoretical mathematician who in his prime upset the balance of the universe with his great discovery; Ursula, his second (and much younger) alcoholic wife; Adam Jnr, their grown son; Petra, their twenty-something emotionally challenged daughter; Adam Jnr's wife, Helen, an actress; and a few "friends of the family"—Ivy Blount, a dowdy spinster, last surviving member of the Protestant Ascendency family whose estate this once was (Ivy now occupies the gate lodge and works as a cook/helper and former nanny to the children); Roddy Wagstaff, the foppish 'boyfriend' of Petra, whose only interest in the her is access to Adam Snr so as to pursue his own career by writing a biography of him; Adrian Duffy, an illiterate local bachelor farmer who runs a few head of cattle on the land but also has designs on Ivy; and Benny Grace, a somewhat smarmy associate of old Adam who ingraciates himself upon the family.

Oh yes, and the narrator. Hermes, the winged messenger of the gods, down from Olympus to guide us through the plot and act as pimp for his father, Zeus. Always good to have an omnicient narrator, even if he can be occasionally unreliable. And one other family member, the only one who actually can see and hear the gods flitting about the place: Rex, the dog. But he doesn't tell anyone.

What brings this happy group together? Nothing less than old Adam's impending demise. For the senior Godley is in a coma, brought home from the hospital to die. He is ensconced in the upper-most room of the house (the "Sky Room"), plugged in and hooked up to various medical equipment; he is totally immobile but maddingly concious—even hyper-concious—of all the events of the house.

And so the scene is set for hilarity. This is a very funny book. It is rich and lush (the language might make one swoon). It's Shakespearean in many ways; it wasn't until nearly the end when it occurred to me that there was something of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" about the easy intermingling of the gods and mortals. And definite allusions to its heirs, Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Commedy.

I loved it. I want to read it again. I won't go into the metaphysical aspects (entertaining as they are). I won't dwell on the aspects of alternative universe (Mary Queen of Scots had Elizabeth beheaded in this world, and the automobiles run of sea water, but Iarnród Éireann is still slow and dirty).

But a word of advice: have a very good dictionary handy.

[Eliza · Rating 4 out of 5]

5/2/2013: Every time I read a Banville novel, I am both more fascinated AND more frustrated. What the heck is he doing?! Well, something right, since I keep coming back. I think his most amazing skill is his ability to control. His tone, his pacing, his ability to make a scene or a character pop with one image, his dark sense of humor--every word, phrase, detail, is exact and right. Which is not to say the writing is spare; no, Banville knows how to use repetition and epithet brilliantly.

So...how is that fascinating and frustrating? Because while the words and descriptions are precise and clear, what he is describing is not clear at all. Yes, I could tell you the plot…sort of. The Godley family gathers at the patriarch's bedside after he suffers a stroke and appears to be dying. The action takes place in one day. And most of it is narrated by Hermes, who is having a grand old time watching, manipulating, and laughing at the mortals who inhabit the novel.

So…the problem? I might have thought I just wasn't reading carefully, but many of the reviewers' adjectives back me up: TI is "mysterious", "haunting", "ingenious", "mischievous"--and my favorite, "downright strange". Banville toys with the concept of self: the gods inhabit certain characters for their own purposes (for short periods); the narrator is often a blurred merger between two characters; the father and son are both named Adam (which is not always notable, but it is here!). He plays with the concept of time, pushing it forward and back. And of course space is also elastic.

But even all of that isn't what is frustrating. It's more Banville's way of not letting me in on his joke. Is the novel funny? Well, no, it's mostly quite poignant; the mortals are all clueless, thrashing about in their lives, never able to figure out what is going on. But the gods understand! And just as they are explaining, just as I think I'm getting it, they snatch away the logic, the rational construct that could make it all make sense. Which, I suppose, is the point. And the joke. I am only a mortal, after all! So I will keep reading Banville, keep trying to get it. We'll see!

[Novel Currents · Rating 3 out of 5]

As enchanted as I was by Banville's beautiful prose, this farcical meditation on what it means to be silly foolish human things, babes really, I can't deny I was ready for this novel to end. To say by closing page I was well-worn would be fitting. Time to move on, as though from an exotic restaurant, from a dinner perhaps appreciated more than enjoyed.

Other reviewers have noted the distinct lack of story here, and I can understand. While the novel has a feel of timelessness, in fact could be said to exist outside time, and is filled with turns of phrase meant more for the savor than blithe consumption, what chronology of events there is lasts no more than 24 hours or so and will leave some feeling a bit cheated out of a compelling event, let alone plot.

Even so, parts of this novel are quite humorous, which helps to mitigate tedium, but many parts also seem to endlessly bloviate at the reader's expense -- the conceit of the novel at times, lain threadbare -- and only rarely is a conversation between characters unbroken by narrative or descriptive or ruminative interjection. That can be frustrating.

Still, I enjoyed the novel. While the writing style is quite different in structure and tone, I found myself thinking of the highly stylized works of Jeannette Winterson, of whom I'm a fan. The Infinities is recommended with reservation, for those fans of stylized prose, eclectic taste, or a special affinity for Greek mythology.

[Петър Панчев · Rating 4 out of 5]

За бремето на хората и боговете
(Цялото ревю е тук: https://knijenpetar.wordpress.com/201...)

Каквото да кажа сега, едва ли ще мога да си обясня и десет процента от прочетеното в книгата на Банвил. „Безкрайностите“ („Колибри“, 2016, с превод на Иглика Василева) е дълбока и проникваща в на най-закътаните места, които човек може да си представи. Философският контекст обърква и мами, сякаш авторът държи юздите на света, с които е свикнал да борави, и има пълната свобода на някаква извратена божественост, която стъпква всичко човешко, прави ни да изглеждаме като марионетки, задвижвани от безсмислието на битието ни. Самото заглавие сякаш е инструкция за игра, която малцина биха се осмелили да изиграят. Моментът на осъзнаването, че книгата е сложна и многопластова, буди истински респект към автора и неговата визия за света, представена като един своеобразен сън, в който драмата е някак фалшива и по-скоро нанася обида на човешкото, отколкото да въздига неговата мисъл и да носи задоволство на четящия. И не, не е никак смешно, въпреки настройката, която човек придобива още в началото на романа. Аз съм изумен колко дълбоко може да се навлезе в един частен случай – едно обикновено семейство, очакващо близката смърт на най-прославената си издънка – и само в рамките на един-единствен ден да се натрупа достатъчно материал за нещо наистина голямо.
(Продължава в блога: https://knijenpetar.wordpress.com/201...)

[Karen Loveridge · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this book because I thought the story concept was interesting. However, the story totally fell apart under the EXTREME weight of similee and description. I listened to the audio version and couldn't get to the story because so much time was spent establishing mood. No object or person esecaped a minimum 3 sentence description chock full of metaphores.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good descriptive phrase, and metaphores are a good thing -- but a bit of restrait would have been a better thing. This book was so out of balance, it really started to get on my nerves. In fact, by the time I was half way through tape four of a six tape audio book and still bogged down in description and atmosphere, I gave up and stopped listening. And this is only the third time I have done so out of the last 200 books.