this novel seems to be of the love-it-or-hate-it variety, judging by others' reviews of it. personally, i loved it. in fact, i loved it much more than both on beauty by zadie smith and never let me go by kazuo ishiguro, both of which it beat out to win the 2005 booker prize. this novel is told in stream-of-consciousness format by an aging irishman whose wife has recently died; he skips around through memories of various stages of his life, primarily a summer he spent at the sea when he was eleven. all the while he muses on the infirmity of memory, love and loss, and his own mortality. there's no denying that banville's prose is exquisite. it's almost baroque in its usage of circuitous sentences and its proliferation of sensual imagery. and what a vocabulary this man has! this novel introduced me to words like "effulgence," "maenad," "catafalque," "ichor," "casuistry," and "assegai." i think some people are put off by all these masturbatory verbal fireworks, arguing that they take the focus away from the story and the emotion (see: michiko kakutani's review in the new york times), but i'm a word nerd, and i thoroughly enjoyed both the language of the text and its underlying message - so much so that i read the entire book in one sitting. (to be fair, it's only 200 pages long.) i for one am glad that banville got his booker prize, and i plan on seeking out more of his work in the future.