Banville is one of my sister's favorite authors. She's lent me a few of his books, but I never got around to reading them until a week or so ago when she started asking around about who had which of her books by him. So I dove into Mefisto. Although Banville has yet to make it to my list of favorite authors, this book was definitely enjoyable. There were several passages that were so metaphorical that I would have to read to the end of the section before I understood what it was he was talking about, then have to go back and read the whole thing over again to really get it. Normally this would annoy the poo out of me, but somehow it was worth it.

The life story of a surviving twin. He is fascinated by figures.
Felix enters his life. Felix is a kind of Mefisto. Thanks to Felix he meets strange persons.
Characteristic is this that everybody around the main character dies in tragic circumstances; his teacher, who marveled at his aptitudes with figures, his mother, father, uncle, …. ( )

Banville's Mefisto is a hell of a novel, brim-full of the evocative and penetrating prose for which the author is justly famed. I read it rapidly; the compulsiveness of the story and lucidity of its style was balanced by my desire to savor the images and ideas it conjured. The tone is quite dark throughout, moving unflinchingly through passages of pain, confusion, and disgust, punctuated by moments of ecstatic reflection and reverie. The unreliable narrator often pauses to question and contradict himself.

I found it strange that some of the conspicuous narrative elements in Mefisto had been presaged in other, longer novels by different authors I had read within the last year. The opening passage, in which an autobiographical account commences in utero and proceeds with failed twinning, was strikingly similar to the beginning of And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave. The build of the first part toward a mining accident, the consequences of which would define the remainder of the story, was like Robert Coover's The Origin of the Brunists. Banville's anti-hero Gabriel Swan "doesn't believe in coincidence"; do I?

Swan is a mathematical prodigy who lets his ideas entrance him. In the two parts of the book ("Marionettes" and "Angels") the mephistophelean Felix is perhaps one of those ideas. (Having previously read Fight Club was in no way injurious to the experience of this book, which further made me observe that Palahniuk's debut was also a Faust story.) I couldn't help picturing Felix as an actual charming sociopath of my former acquaintance, even in defiance of some of Banville's details, like his red hair. There are many internal parallels between the two parts: each involves a sanctuary, a patron, a woman whom Swan desires, and an arc through an enterprise to its unraveling. Perhaps Sophie in the first part is Faust's Margaret, and Adele in the second is Helen.

The novel takes place in a 20th-century Ireland, with a certain parabolic vagueness of time and place. Could it be a politico-historical allegory? Not to the extent that it would diminish the human story presented at the individual scale. It is definitely a book worth multiple readings, and one that can hold its own in the rarified club of elite Faust literature alongside Goethe, Bulgakov, and Mann.

Astonishing skill with words. Masterful storytelling. ( )