Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir

Description

For the young John Banville, Dublin was a place of enchantment and yearning. Each year, on his birthday - the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception - he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day's adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery's and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour. The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped. It was a cold time, for society and for the individual - one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke - but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change. Alternating between vignettes of Banville's own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory - that 'bright abyss' in which 'time's alchemy works' - and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man. Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

Reviews

Banville is the greatest living master of simile and metaphor in prose, and Time Pieces is a trove of arresting imagery, from the lushly poetic to the luridly absurd ... [An] utterly delightful book' Irish Times

Author description

John Banville (Author) John Banville is an Irish novelist, an adapter of dramas, and a screenwriter. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. He has also been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize (2011); the Irish PEN Award (2013); the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2013) and the Prince of Asturias Award (2014). He has published a number of crime novels as Benjamin Black, most featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Paul Joyce (Author) Paul Joyce's debut film, a unique co-operation with the playwright Samuel Beckett, and exhibitions which followed, established him internationally as a film-maker and photographer in the 1980s. He showed at the National Portrait Gallery, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Witkin Gallery in New York and his documentaries have been nominated both for International Emmy and Cable Ace Awards. Paul as also published two collaborations with David Hockney and is currently Artist in Residence at Eastwell Manor, Kent.