ETD

• doppio
• fantasmi
• identità
• performance

Alexander Cleave, the 50-year-old protagonist of John Banville's ice sculpture of a novel, is not an easy fellow to love. A brilliant actor and unrepentant narcissist, he has spent his life onstage infiltrating other people's psyches, where he is far more comfortable than in his own.
But love is rarely the point in Banville's fiction, a landscape as beautifully austere
and cold as the desert at night. Instead it is the commodity sorely missing throughout these hollow ed lives, the empty air space around which grand but defective edifices are built.