Erin

I listened to the audio version of this book. That might have been my first mistake. The language is beautiful. Banville's vocabulary is huge and he uses it well, poetically at times. Perhaps if I had read this the old-fashioned way, where I could linger over the words...

My second mistake was to listen to this book directly after Any Human Heart. I've had enough of men's interior monologues for a while.

Yes, it's probably an important book to read. But I just didn't enjoy it as much as the story could have been enjoyed. More foreshadowing, more build up to the climax might have helped.

But, anyone who is a lover of words and their infinite combinations will enjoy the process of reading this book.

I might give this one a 3.5 if I could. The first two chapters or so are possibly the funniest things I've ever read. Oof the book stopped with the fish incident, it would easily be a 5 star short story. During the rest of the book, it was hard for me to separate the quality of the writing from the man himself. He described an apparently non-consensual sexual encounter - he was the aggressor and he never expressed awareness of the potential that it could be rape. In addition to the class issues others have mentioned, he also said something about how WWII should have ended in 1941 because Naziism had been effectively quashed by then. Tell that to all the people who died in concentration camps after that.

In fiction, we could give 5 stars to well written novels about unpleasant people. It's harder to do with memoirs, however, regardless of how much is true and how exaggerated.

You hear a lot about the opening lines of books. Not so much about closing lines, though. This book of Mike Trimble's work closes with the best line I've ever seen at the end of a book. You'll, of course, need to read it to find out what it is. It summarizes the humor, love, worry, heartbreak, indignation and literary cleverness that Trimble had a talent for bringing to each of his pieces and was a genius move on Ernie Dumas's part. It's a good approach to life too, come to think of it.

Starting with a laugh-out-loud piece way too funny for bedtime reading and ending with strong opinions on Texas politics, The Thane of Cawdor Comes to Bauxite exercised all my emotions. What a treasure to have all these journalistic gems under one cover.