The Blue Guitar by John Banville

In terms of plot, this novel is so unremarkable as to be banal: a painter has an affair, is found out, and the world falls to pieces around him. But the language, oh, the language! And the way Banville's narrators have of speaking to their readers, it's absolutely irresistible. This is definitely my favourite book by Banville after The Sea that I've read so far, I hugely enjoyed it. He has a particularly way of depicting the world that is both intensely lyrical and terribly precise. He can transform the most mundane and even distasteful occurrences into magical events. The book is flooded with reminiscences, reflections on the past, on memory, on the dead, on loss. Banville's narrators are always uncanny, a strange mix of unsavoury and fascinating, this one, for example, is a bit of a kleptomaniac and serial adulterer, yet they're irresistibly silver-tongued and they draw you in. There's always something wrong with their world, something that doesn't add up. Also, I've never been able to figure out why Banville's books take place in a subtly alternative dimension. Nothing major is altered, this one has people travelling by zeppelins, and I'm just not sure what purpose this serves. I know he's interested in exploring theories of parallel universes, but I don't get the point. This always sort of nags at my mind when I'm reading his books, I wish I felt more securely attached to the ground when reading them, but other than that, I loved it.