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Bài viết, theo GNV, tuyệt nhất về Romain Gary, trên TV đã từng giới thiệu, là Romain Gary: A Foreign Body in French Literature, RG, một cơ thể lạ trong văn chương Tây, thực sự rút gọn cuốn sách của chính tác giả, Nancy Huston, Mộ của Romain Gary, Tombeau de Romain Gary, 1995, qua đó tác giả coi Gary muốn làm một Chúa Giáng Sinh lần thứ nhì.

Và điều mà tôi toan tính làm, là, sẽ thuyết phục bạn, về một sự kiện, bề ngoài xem ra có vẻ quái dị khó tin, ông Romain Gary này cứ nhẩn nha nghĩ về mình, và tạo vóc dáng cho mình, y như là đây là Lần Tới Thứ Nhì: Romain Gary là một tự xức dầu thánh, tự phong chức, tự tái sinh, và, sau hết, một Chúa Cứu Thế Tự Đóng Đinh Chính Mình .....

Sour ce

The strange case of Benjamin Black.

Note: Bài viết này, có cái tít ở trang bià là "Những Lạc thú của bút hiệu", The Plesasures of pen names. Viết về trường hợp nhà văn John Banville, còn viết song song/cùng lúc với cái tên Benjamin Black.

TV cũng đã từng viết về đề tài, nhân tình cờ biết được cái nick của Mai Thảo là Nhị, qua bài tưởng niệm ông của TTT, và đưa ra giả dụ, liệu Nhị, ở đây, là Nhị Hà?

Cùng lúc, trên TLS có bài điểm cuốn tiểu sử của Romain Gary. Ông này còn nổi danh với cái nick Ajar, và với mỗi cái nick, là một Goncourt!

TV sẽ post toàn bài viết, không chỉ 1 đoạn, như The New Yorker chào hàng, vì thật thú vị, và nhân đó, lèm bèm về GNV, cũng có hơn một cái nick, trong đó, có Jennifer Tran, nổi danh hơn cả GNV!

Nhị

Go on, run away, but you'd be far safer if you stayed at home.
(John Fowles trích dẫn Martial, nguyên văn: I, fugi, sed poteras tutior esse domi.)

Trong Tựa đề cho những bài thơ, Foreword to the Poems, John Fowles cho rằng cơn khủng hoảng của tiểu thuyết hiện đại, là do bản chất của nó, vốn bà con với sự dối trá. Đây là một trò chơi, một thủ thuật; nhà văn chơi trò hú tim với người đọc. Chấp nhận bịa đặt, chấp nhận những con người chẳng hề hiện hữu, những sự kiện chẳng hề xẩy ra, những tiểu thuyết gia muốn, hoặc (một chuyện) có vẻ thực, hoặc (sau cùng) sáng tỏ. Thi ca, là con đường ngược lại, hình thức bề ngoài của nó có thể chỉ là trò thủ thuật, rất ư không thực, nhưng nội dung lại cho chúng ta biết nhiều, về người viết, hơn là đối với nghệ thuật giả tưởng (tiểu thuyết). Một bài thơ đang nói: bạn là ai, bạn đang cảm nhận điều gì; tiểu thuyết đang nói: những nhân vật bịa đặt có thể là những ai, họ có thể cảm nhận điều gì. Sự khác biệt, nói rõ hơn, là như thế này: thật khó mà đưa cái tôi thực vào trong tiểu thuyết, thật khó mà lấy nó ra khỏi một bài thơ. Go on, run away... Cho dù chạy đi đâu, dù cựa quậy cỡ nào, ở nhà vẫn an toàn hơn.

Khi trở về với thơ, vào cuối đời, Mai Thảo đã ở nhà. Cái lạnh, trong thơ ông, là cái ấm, của quê hương. Của Nhị.

BIOGRAPHY

Stories of a self-made man

IAN PINDAR

David Bellos

ROMAIN GARY

A tall story

528pp. Harvill Seeker. £30.

978 1 84343 1701

"Fraud, imposture and charlatanism play an important role in your work", observes the journalist Francois Bondy, interviewing the novelist Romain Gary in La Nuit sera calme (1974). The delicious irony of this statement is that Gary is impersonating Bondy, who had nothing to do with the book. La Nuit sera calme is one of several faux memoirs Gary produced. In it he claims his mother was the driving force in his life - a mother figure, David Bellos observes, that he mostly invented.

Why did Romain Gary invent so much about himself? Especially when, as Bellos ably shows, his extraordinary and in many ways enviable life was so eventful? Gary's mastery of the "fabricated anecdote", his "liberal use of half-truths, subterfuges and outright lies", present enormous challenges to any biographer. "He hid his identity again and again," says Bellos, "blut gave a great deal of himself away through the recurrent motifs in his work."

Born in Russia in 1914, Roman Kacew recreated himself in France as Romain Gary (possibly in homage to Gary Cooper). When France fell, he served in the Free French squadron and wrote his first novel in a few months in 1943 while on active service. But Éducation européenne (A European Education) is not remotely about the air war he was fighting at the time. It is about Polish partisans resisting the Germans and, says Bellos, "Gary seems to have invented every bit of it". After the war Gary joined the Diplomatic Corps, living it up as the French consul general in Los Angeles until 1960, when he married the beautiful actress Jean Seberg. Always a ladies' man, he was also a bestselling novelist and won the Prix Goncourt with Les Racines du ciel (1956). However you look at it, it was a wildly adventurous life: "Litwak, immigrant, airman, diplomat, Don Juan, novelist and globe-trotting celebrity spouse".

Gary was an unashamedly popular novelist, but Bellos argues that his fiction was often more innovative than the work of the French avant-garde. Aside from a few unnecessary jibes at Samuel Beckett and the nouveaux romanciers, Bellos makes a good case. "In strange and unexpected ways," he says, "rereading Gary's intentionally middlebrow novels, with their rattling yarns and page-turning style, has made it clearer to me what literature can do. Comedy, kitsch, sentimentality and high ideals don't have to be treated as crimes. They can also be the vehicles and the freight of sophisticated verbal art."

Bellos appears to lose sympathy with Gary as the biography progresses, however. "Gary was not an admirable person in all respects", he declares near the end, "and in some he was monstrous, even repulsive." Bellos reveals that Gary visited prostitutes every day and had what Bellos calls "near-pedophiliac proclivities". Only his diplomatic immunity while consul general saved him from being arrested for statutory rape. Another biographer might have made devastating use of this, but Bellos is uncensorious and traces Gary's "taste for underage sex" back to the novelist’s earliest sexual experience - deduced from a repeated scenario in his fiction - around the age of fourteen with a girl about the same age. Gary's "sexual gluttony" is given meaning as a lifelong search for this original event.

Gary wrote under many names, but his most famous pseudonym is undoubtedly "Emile Ajar", who authored three novels, one of which, La Vie devant soi (1975; Life Before Us), was a bestseller and would have won the Goncourt had Ajar not withdrawn it. Bellos's enthusiasm is rekindled with the invention of Ajar, and he clearly relishes the "linguistic riot" of "Ajarspeak": "the irregular, enriched, unstable, deceptive and bastardised language to which Gary had always aspired". This ludic dimension (one chapter is entitled "Games with Names") appeals to Bellos, who is, after all, Georges Perec's biographer.

Creating Ajar "was a new birth", Gary said in his posthumously published testament Vie et mort d'Emile Ajar (1981). "I had the perfect illusion of a new creation of myself, by myself." But the "Ajar scam" soon became a nightmare for Gary, who dreaded being exposed as a fraudster (yet he complicated matters by asking his cousin Paul Pavlowitch to pose as Ajar for the French media). Romain Gary shot himself in 1980, his suicide note observing: "I have at last said all that I have to say".

As well as being an impressive work of scholarship (Gary wrote in French and English and indulged in "obsessive bilingual self revisions" that make his bibliography "devilishly complicated"), this is a profound book in its examination of what it means to invent oneself. Like Jay Gatsby, Romain Gary sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. As David Bellos tells it, he "wanted to become a character in a novel of his own invention". In fact, "The novelist is an invention of the text". Romain Gary, it turns out, was just another character in a story.

Bài viết, theo GNV, tuyệt nhất về Romain Gary, trên TV đã từng giới thiệu, là Romain Gary: A Foreign Body in French Literature, RG, một cơ thể lạ trong văn chương Tây, rút gọn cuốn sách của chính tác giả, Nancy Huston, Mộ của Romain Gary, Tombeau de Romain Gary, 1995, qua đó tác giả coi Gary muốn làm một Chúa Giáng Sinh lần thứ nhì.

Sour ce

THE CRITICS

BOOKS

PSEUDONYMOUSLY YOURS

The strange case of Benjamin Black.

Nietzsche said that the best way to enrage people is to force them to change their mind about you. As any author knows, the best way to enrage your publisher and offend your critics is to write a novel that differs wildly from your previous one. Though a few novelists manage to make versatility their brand, usually charges will be laid against you of "incoherence," "experimentation," or, even worse, "ambition." To stave off such remarks, some writers inform their editors, or agents, that they'd like to publish under a pseudonym. That generally makes things worse. At first, the agents or editors laugh nervously, then they fall back on certain phrases, hands in the air:

"It's not ideal," "brand recognition," "the book stores," "the horror, the horror." They pour themselves (and perhaps you, too) a triple Scotch. They beg you to reconsider. And if you have a reputation they mutter darkly about not wanting to see you ruin it.

If you're Doris Lessing, or Julian Barnes, or Joyce Carol Oates, or Gore Vidal, you may insist nonetheless. The result is a kind of literary bifurcation; a splitting of the authorial self Gore Vidal went undercover in the nineteen-fifties, winning himself a respite from the homophobic censure he was attracting at the time. His pseudonymous incarnation, Edgar Box, delivered three witty satires masquerading as detective novels and then was slain. (Vidal also published work as Cameron Kay and as Katherine Everard.) In the eighties, Julian Barnes briefly partitioned himself: as Barnes, he wrote his earliest novels, "Metroland" (1980) and "Before She Met Me" (1982) and "Flaubert's Parrot" (1984); as Dan Kavanagh, he produced sybaritic detective novels starring a bisexual porn addict called Duffy. This was less of a bifurcation than some; the protagonist of "Before She Met Me" was, at least by the end of the novel, a porn addict, quite as seedy and murderous as any of Kavanagh's criminals. The distinction lay mostly in style: Barnes was urbane and anecdotal; Kavanagh was lean and to the point.

Around the same time, Doris Lessing decided "to make a little experiment," becoming Jane Somers and publishing a novel called ''The Diary of a Good Neighbor" (1983). Lessing wanted "to be reviewed on merit ... to get free of that cage of associations and labels that every established writer has to learn to live inside." Her British publisher, Jonathan Cape, turned Somers down. The editors at Michael Joseph took her on, saying that she reminded them a little of Doris Lessing. Somers's book was published, received mixed reviews, and sold only a few thousand copies. Joyce Carol Oates, working as Rosamond Smith, sold a psychological mystery, "Lives of the Twins" (1987), to Simon & Schuster. When all was revealed, Oates's usual editor, William Abrahams, at Dutton, was "quite stunned." "I'm her editor and I should know what she's doing," he said. Rosemont Smith's editor, Nancy Nicholas, seemed almost to accuse Oates of unfair play: "I signed 'Lives of the Twins' in good faith as a first nove1." Dragged from her bolt-hole, Oates sounded like a plaintiff in the dock, on trial for masquerading as a police officer or impersonating someone's long-lost sister. "I wanted to escape from my own identity," she said.

In these brand-obsessed days, the author may find herself hanged either way. If she comes clean to her editor and agent, they beg or command her to reconsider. If not, she gets accused of fraud. And yet nothing could be more fraudulent than the idea of a homogeneous oeuvre with a single name attached to it. "The authorial persona is a construct, never wholly authentic," Carmela Ciuraru writes in the recently published "Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms" (Harper; $24.99). "Never to be yourself and yet always" is how Virginia Woolf put it. The single authorial self, so consoling to publishers, booksellers, and reviewers, can become a mask, clamped onto the authors face in such a way that she can no longer remove it. It's like asking any other person to stay the same, day after day-always to be her twenty-year-old self, saying the same things she said then, in the same way. Life is flux, Heraclitus said; existence is change and the self alters at every stage. Proust even questioned Christian eternity on these grounds. At the end of a life of constant transformations, physical and otherwise, who would want to change permanently into an unchangeable thing? Wouldn't it be just a trifle boring?

This month, Benjamin Black, the alter ego of the celebrated Irish writer John Banville, will release his fifth novel, "A Death in Summer" (Henry Holt; $25). The birth of Black, according to an interview Banville gave to the Paris Review, was sudden, and surprised even his creator. In 2005, just before the publication of his novel ''The Sea," which went on to win the Man Booker Prize, Banville was staying at a friend's house in Italy. It was March, the countryside still furnished with skeletal trees, the opulent spring burgeoning yet to begin. Banville hadn't realized at the time that he was great with child. Then the labor began:

I sat down at nine o'clock on a Monday morning, and by lunchtime I had written more than fifteen hundred words. It was a scandal! I thought, John Banville, you slut.

The first child of Banville's literary slutting was "Christine Falls" (2006), a detective noir, starring a pathologist detective called Garret Quirke. The day "The Sea" was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Banville's agent sent the manuscript of "Christine Falls" to his publisher. "Of course, everyone tried to persuade me not to use the pseudonym, but I wanted people to realize that this wasn't an elaborate postmodernist literary joke but the genuine article, a noir novel from Banville's dark brother Benjamin Black," Banville explained. "It was pure play when I invented Benjamin Black. It was a frolic of my own." When "The Sea" won the Man Booker, Banville's acceptance speech contained a haughty reproof to the exigencies of commercial publishing: "It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize." These sounded like the words of a man who felt he'd spent years on the margins for his art, but they were also the words of a man who had just finished writing his first mystery novel. On the eve of the publication of "Christine Falls," Banville's editor, Andrew Kidd, was at pains to differentiate the book from the rest of Banville's work. "He doesn’t want people reading [Black] and looking for the same things they do in a Banville novel," Kidd told Reuters. 'With this, his main intent is to entertain."

Entertainment as opposed to Banville's usual enterprise of High Art, Kidd was saying. Banville's novels are really prose poems, concerned principally with rhythm, cadence, and incantation, and far less with character and plot. Take the opening lines of "The Sea":

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes.

These sentences are wrought from careful alliteration, with added consonantic and asonantic rhymes - every word exactingly balanced. The author seeks out the unusual phrase, the original image. In "The Infinities" (2009), he describes dawn breaking thus: "Many of them sleep on, of course, careless of our cousin Aurora's charming matutinal trick, but there are always the insomniacs, the restless ill, the lovelorn tossing on their solitary beds, or just the early risers, the busy ones, with their knee-bends and their cold showers and their fussy little cups of black ambrosia." At its best, the incantation works. Banville's novels can become heady and beguiling, "like hits of some delicious drug," as one reviewer wrote. Some books you read with a sense of creeping unease; they only confirm your isolation, as if everyone else were having a conversation you simply can't understand. Other books console you, because they draw something up from the depths, something that resonates. Banville can really be like this, the sort of writer who, distrustful of ordinary modes of expression, locks horns with language in order to convey authentic individual experience. "An ordinary day," he writes, in "Ghosts" (1993). "So I am sitting here at the old pine table, in that light, with the breakfast things set out and a mug of strong tea in one hand and a book in the other and my mind rummaging idly through its own thoughts." Banville's novels are inquiries into the baroque business of being in the world, what it feels like to be a mortal, your transient brain full of recollections, stories, love for others, and yet never free of the sense that everything must vanish in the end. For Banville, this is the crucial stuff, and mere mechanisms such as plot are less compelling.

At times, Banville strives so hard for novelty that the enterprise threatens to collapse entirely, and, for every reviewer who applauds, there is one who stifles a yawn. 'There's lots of lovely language, but not much novel," Tibor Fischer complained in the London Telegraph. For those who've never been able to get on with Banville's work, the arrival of Benjamin Black might be taken as evidence of authorial capitulation: high-flown style gives way to that most trustworthy and workmanlike of plots, the detective trail. Where Banville writes, "The cafe. In the cafe. In the cafe we," or "Oh, agog, agog!," Black writes, "He crossed the street, dodging a green double-decker bus that parped its horn at him." Black isn't exactly aiming at stylistic iconoclasm. Occasionally, he is even content with cliché. Crossing the border between literary fiction and genre fiction, Banville appears, at first glance, to be working to reinforce rather than to dissolve that boundary. The birth of Black, he proposes, is a generic saturnalia, and the point about a saturnalia is that we know order will be restored, that Banville will publish as Banville again. Black is defined as the "dark brother," the evil twin- "Banville, you slut." In interviews, Banville has explained the difference in almost artisanal terms, contrasting the ease of writing the Black novels with the "concentration', required for Banville: "If I'm Benjamin Black, I can write up to two and a half thousand words a day. As John Banville, if I write two hundred words a day I am very, very happy."

"The Rogue," as Banville now calls Black, in a piece of presumably playful schizophrenia, can certainly hammer out books. In six years, he has produced four Quirke novels-"Christine Falls," "The Silver Swan," "Elegy for April," and "A Death in Summer"-and one, "The Lemur," that doesn't feature Quirke. Set in nineteen-fifties Dublin, the Quirke novels are riddled with seediness and decay. Characters dine on cold and greasy food; they regard their sallow faces in cracked mirrors; they endure successive evenings in smoky bars filled with volatile, lonely drunks. They stumble home, to their inhospitable, drafty flats. Key characters include Malachy, Quirke's brother who is not quite his brother, and his daughter, Phoebe, who for years didn't know she was his daughter. There is also a shifting cast of self-loathing Irishmen and faded, disillusioned women. The novels invariably open with a mysterious death, Quirke handily placed in the local morgue, his scalpel revealing the anomaly. Something doesn't quite add up. Quirke, reluctantly, with a sense that sleeping dogs and rotting corpses might best be left to lie, nonetheless finds he has been delivered, once again, the itch he cannot scratch. The bar beckons-can he swallow enough whiskey to defer the hunt? Alas, though he tries, he cannot. And so off he meanders: the classic melancholy, solitary detective, womanizer, and alcoholic, peering into the shadows.

In "A Death in Summer," the proprietor of a successful newspaper chain is found dead. At first, it is assumed that he has committed suicide, but soon Inspector Hackett and Quirke are having the inevitable conversation: "'Are you saying that what we have here may not be a suicide?' ... They grinned at each other, somewhat bleakly." Q1lirke struggles to comprehend the dead man's fiery wife, sardonic sister, and disconcertingly calm daughter. He wanders the corridors of a vast sterile mansion or two, feeling "like a stonyhearted old roué embarrassingly shackled to a lovesick youth," and signals to successive barmen "to bring the same again." He sinks into despond, gets "lost in the wilderness." And gradually the mystery is just about solved. Black is more pragmatic than Banville, more inclined to use stereotypes, and his narratives are more often driven by cultural common denominators, such as things that are in the news. Where there's a priest, there's usually a child-molesting pervert. Other trademarks of the Black oeuvre include: women, who are either thin and dangerous or buxom and consoling. (Thin French women are particularly troublesome, liable to "glint" when you're least expecting it.) The smirking English have a penchant for petty crime. Families, when not downright incestuous, are fraught with turmoil. Quirke's own clan is a feuding mass of pain and guilt; his daughter, Phoebe, is an anxious, "nun-like" girl who dresses as if she were in permanent mourning. Quirke isn't called Quirke for nothing. He two-times his girlfriend with the wife of a murder victim, dallies with the estranged wife of a murder suspect, and has an affair with another murder suspect, who is, worse still, an actress. He lies repeatedly to the longsuffering Inspector Hackett, he gets drunk, sobers up, goes on the wagon, tumbles off the wagon, and generally conducts himself as the genre requires.

Often, Banville's characters are art historians, or people profoundly interested in art, allowing him to interweave painterly images, or anecdotes from the life of an artist, with the personal recollections of the protagonist. In ''The Sea," the symbolically potent painter of the novel is Pierre Bonnard. In "Ghosts," it is a fictional painter, Vaublin, "the painter of absences, of endings. His scenes all seem to hover on the point of vanishing." In "The Untouchable" (1997), the narrator, Victor Maskell, is based on Anthony Blunt, the eminent British art historian who was uncovered as a Soviet spy. For almost fifty years, Maskell has owned a (fictional) painting by Nicolas Poussin, ''The Death of Seneca." The subject of this painting-Seneca accused of conspiracy, and ordered to commit suicide, "which he did, with great fortitude and dignity”-is carefully intertwined with Maskell's past conspiracy and present public disgrace.

The wider references in Banville are resolutely Western classical and Mittel-European. The consultant delivering terminal news in "The Sea" is called Mr. Todd- Tod is German for "death"-and the narrator is called Morden (German for "to murder"). The bed in a mediocre seaside boarding house is "a stately, high built, Italianate affair fit for a Doge," the headboard "polished like a Stradivarius." The Greeks proliferate, frequently strolling on to amplify a sentiment. In "The Sea," Morden regards himself as a "lyreless Orpheus." Maskell feels like "Odysseus in Hades, pressed upon by shades beseeching a little warmth." "The Infinities" is based on the play "Amphitrion," by the German author Heinrich von Kleist, though it diverges significantly from, and could be read without any knowledge of, the original. Yet the narrative is bulging with classical allusions:

Men have made me variously keeper of the dawn, of twilight and the wind, have called me Argeiphantes, he who makes clear the sky, and Logios, the sweet-tongued one ... have conferred on me the grave title Psychopompos, usher of the freed souls of men to Pluto's netherworld. For I am Hermes, son of old Zeus and Maia the cavewoman.

Argeiphantes does not feature much in the works of Benjamin Black, and you can imagine Black knocking back his fourth whiskey of the day, having already churned out a couple of thousand words, leaning back in his chair, and saying, "Banville, you swot." Quirke does have a plaster bust of Socrates in his flat, but it was given to him as a joke.

Yet these details are not entirely to be trusted, and it would be a little simplistic to assume that they prove the distinction between Banville and Black, High Art and Pulp Fiction. If you become a bit of a Quirke yourself, and delve deeper into Banville's bifurcation, all is not as it seems. As with so many detective trails, some of the clues turn out to be red herrings. Saturnalia, really? Or is someone trying to put us off the scent? Black's pared-down style is not entirely pared down, and, once you look closely, you find that his narratives are loaded with poetic devices: "the fleshy heat of him pressing against her like the air of a midsummer day thick with the threat of thunder"; 'The city seemed bewildered, like a man whose sight has suddenly failed." In "A Death in Summer," Quirke starts reading French, sipping claret, and dreaming of "some sultry impasse beside the Seine, with swaggering pigeons and water sluicing cleanly along the cobbled gutters, half the street in purple shadow and the other half blinded by sunlight." He even switches his usual maximum-tar cigarettes for a packet of Gauloises.

Themes and preoccupations course from Banville to his dark brother, stripped of some of their elegant attire, but not transformed completely. Banville's obsession with tainted, traumatic childhoods as in "The Sea," "Ghosts," and his early novel "Birchwood" (1973)-becomes Black's obsession with the crime of pedophilia. Banville's obsession with scarcely knowable origins becomes, well, Black's obsession with scarcely knowable origins. The difference is in emphasis, but these are often sleight-of-hand gestures, magician's tricks, making us think that things are substantially different when really they are almost the same. Here is Banville on the shifting self "Is the oldster in his dotage the same that he was when he was an infant swaddled in his truckle bed?" Here is Black: "Isn't it strange to think ... that people who are old now were young once, like us? I meet an old woman in the street and I tell myself that seventy years ago she was a baby in her mother's arms. How can they be the same person, her as she is now and the baby as it was then?" Neither Banville nor Black can escape this sense of perplexity-about how we change as we move through time, and how, as Banville writes, "pieces of lost time surface suddenly in the murky sea of memory, bright and clear and fantastically detailed, complete little islands where it seems it might be possible to live, even if only for a moment."

Banville's exploratory monologues owe much to the modernist idea of the disaffiliated flâneur, Poe's "man of the crowd," who creeps through the teeming city, or through the dreamscapes of his own mind, trying to "understand and appreciate everything that happens," as Baudelaire put it. The "mainspring of his genius is his curiosity," Baudelaire added, and this description could equally describe the average noir detective. Indeed, the meandering flâneur and the solitary noir detective have so much in common that they could even be dark brothers. Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Borges's detective Lonnrot, Black's Quirke, and Banville's various narrators all creep through their own lives, and the lives of other people, amassing fragments, shards of experience, trying to understand something anything - of death, disappearance, the past, or why we live and perish, or the bizarreness of what we call ordinary life. They share a refusal of the world of "other people," a sense that exclusion is the only option. To be an insider-for flaneurs and detectives, for Banville and for Black-is to be an enemy or a fool. Phoebe, Quirke, Maskell, Morden are all fundamentally not at home in the world. The narrator of "Birchwood" thinks, "I find the world always odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations?" Quirke, opening his front door, "always felt somehow an intruder here, among these hanging shadows and this silence." In such a world, the thing to do is to find an occupation, to distract oneself from the seething mass of imponderables. "Let us have a disquisition, to pass the time and keep ourselves from brooding," Banville writes, in "Ghosts." Black might replace "disquisition" with "mystery," but the basic idea is the same. Banville's half-magical islands and shoddy seaside towns, Black's drab Dublin streets are full of perplexing figures, archetypes, as if the characters were stalking through some Jungian map of the unconscious: weakened, dying fathers, good mothers, bad mothers, twins, "dark doubles," ghosts surging up from the past. Bewildering and dreamlike, it doesn't feel like home, but where else is there in the end?

In the strange case of Benjamin Black of the author who became another man, put on disguises, slipped from one shadow to another-we may start to flounder, as we gather the clues, red herrings, fragments, and try to fit them together. Like Quirke, like Phoebe, like Banville's narrators, as they keep trying to "put it all back together ... like a jigsaw puzzle," Black writes. Or, Banville writes, as they keep "puzzling over the problem: if this is a fake, what then would be the genuine thing?" Which is which? Banville or Black? High Art or Low Art? Pose or Real Self? What if it's the other way around? What if Banville is really Black? So, for years, Black slaved away writing literary novels, under the pseudonym John Banville. Of course he could do it; he's clever and talented enough to write whatever he likes. Still, he found it a strain, sitting there with his thesaurus and his encyclopedia of the classical world. He longed for a time when he could give up this literary-fiction hackwork and write what he really wanted to write. Finally, in 2005, the moment came. Such a relief: once he began, he could barely stop. The words just poured out. After a few years, he thought, Oh God, better write another of those lit-fic novels again, just so they don’t forget all about my dark brother, Banville. And so he put his head down, back to two hundred words a day. Pure torture. "Never mind," he told himself "Soon I’ll be writing Quirke again."

As Banville and Black keep telling us, in superficially different ways, things can "never be complete." Words fail, pretty much everything is pretty much illusory, and, as Banville writes, in the last lines of "Birchwood," "some secrets are not to be disclosed under the pain of who knows what retribution, and whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent." Or, as Black writes, in the last lines of “A Death in Summer”: Quirke did not reply. How could he? He did not know the answer." Why did Banville bifurcate? Perhaps for money, a good enough reason for anything. Perhaps for fun. Perhaps as a nod to the world "of other people," even as he conserves himself as a rank outsider. Perhaps because he is no literary snob, and knows that any genre can produce its classics. Perhaps because he knows that literary genres, publishing games, and authorial identities are only half the story, and that beneath them somewhere lies the real interest, life itself, the strangest case of all .•

THE NEW YORKER. JULY 11 & 18, 2011