Ay Caramba! ’Tis John Bartville!

It may be a little behind in its Benny Blanco from the Bronx (aka Benjamin Black) coverage, but given that the elves are huge (as in, tiny-but-keen) fans of The Simpsons, we couldn’t resist the following post from The Writer’s Times :

Interesting piece in today’s Metro about John Banville’s new novel. THE SILVER SWAN is a break from his usual literary output. It’s a thriller, based on something that happened in his local Dublin neighbourhood. Writing as Benjamin Black, Banville has set the novel in the 1950s, exposing the dark side of Ireland, where church and state ruled with a grimness rivalling regimes behind the Iron Curtain … Adopting a different style seems to have helped Banville get back on track with the style which won him the Booker in 2005 for THE SEA.
“... I wrote the Black books, [says Banville] which are all about character and plot, to give myself a bit of a kick.”
It seems to have worked – he’s 6,000 words into a new Banville novel, although he says that, for a writer, all that matters is writing the perfect line: “Each time I sit down to write, I think of Bart Simpson inscribing on the blackboard, ‘I must write a better sentence.’ And I’d sacrifice anything to get a sentence right.”

Insert your own ‘Homeric struggle’ punchline at your leisure, folks …