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Title: It's Like I'm Stranded In the Ocean and It Never, Ever Ends
Review: ...and I mean that in the most excruciating way. I believe some writers get lost in the words and the construction of sentences before they realize that they don't have a plot. So, with about 25 pages left, they throw in a twist, the pay-off, that has been projected, painfully, for a few hundred, tedious, ponderous, and stupefying pages. I had just read 500 pages of Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin", another Man Booker Prize winner with incredible writing, an unlikable narrator and a missing plot, before I picked up this John Banville novel. Thankfully, it was, at least, short. Ostensibly about death and the nature of memory, I found it to be meandering and confusing. Obviously a terribly gifted writer, with sentences that beg to be read again and again, I just think that being able to manipulate words isn't enough to garner the praise it deserves, much less a Booker Prize.
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