The Infinities by John Banville

When will John Banville stop wishing he were Nabokov and just let himself be his own writer? Probably never. Ever since I read his best-known Man Booker winner The Sea, I have been reading other Banville novels in the (apparently) vain hope that I will find something to equal it. But even though I've been disappointed in my goal, his superb command of language just keeps dragging me back. I am completely seduced by his vocabulary, the richness of his language, the precision of it, and the strange atmosphere of his writing. In this novel, a family in a subtly alternate universe (think Nabokov's Ada or Ardour) are brought together by the imminent death of the father, and some Greek gods come along for the party. This is probably the best Banville novel after The Sea that I have read, but the alternate universe really threw me off (I feel like it's completely unnecessary), although I quite liked the gods, and how the lines between them and the humans blur and shift and sometimes vanish altogether. It's also full of literary allusions that went right over my head, unfortunately. But mostly I just reveled in the superb writing, the way he constructs his sentences is like a symphony. His language is so perfect at capturing every emotion from the tiniest to the hugest, how he does it I have no idea. The combination to incredibly lifelike precision and the most heartstopping poetry leaves me completely dazzled. I can basically just read his writing for hours on end and completely ignore the plot. So sometimes I don't really care that I'm left dissatisfied by the action.