The Blue Guitar (Vintage International) - Tapa blanda

"Beautiful, heartbreaking." --The Washington Post

"Banville traces [a] journey of self-discovery in the distinctive language he commands so effortlessly: precise yet evocative, clear-eyed and down-to-earth, yet shimmering with the mutability and mystery of art." --The Boston Globe

"Eloquent . . . Oliver has some of the wry comic haplessness of a Beckett character . . . enveloping." --The Wall Street Journal

"Banville's sentences shine. The humble becomes memorable." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Elegant and affecting." --The Times Literary Supplement

"[Banville] shows himself, once again, as one of contemporary literature's finest and most expert witnesses. . . What enraptures--always--is the writing itself. He holds words up to the light as carefully as any watchmaker or poet." --The Observer

"A literary event to be savored and celebrated. . . . [A] brilliant effort punctuated with words and phrases that make life just a little more enjoyable in the reading. . . . Reading John Banville is truly good for the soul." --The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg)

"Stirring. . . Densely alliterative and purposely playful prose." --Financial Times

"Banville, the Nabokov of contemporary lit, can turn even a straightforward comeuppance tale into breathtaking literary art. . . . At times, [his] prose seems drunk with the sheer joy of describing a vibrantly strange world in perfectly knit sentences." --Richmond Times-Dispatch

"The best of literature, rich, lush and moving. . . . Every page is jewelled with startlingly evocative images. [Banville's] prose is a feast for all the senses. . . . His first-person narration sweeps like a lighthouse beam from present to past and back again, illuminating the dark with a pitiless glare." --The Independent on Sunday (London)

"The reader is carried along by [Ollie's] wonderfully narcissistic voice." --The New Yorker

"Ingenious and moving. . . . This engrossing and often beautiful novel is a true work of art that rewards careful reading." --The Daily Telegraph (London)

"[Banville] is in love with language, eloquent, witty and a master of illuminating description." --The Post and Courier (Charleston)

"Superb. . . . A remarkable work of literary art: subtle, resonant, whimsical and deeply touching by turns, the work of a great prose stylist with a masterly command of cultural history. . . . [Banville is] the most accomplished stylist writing in English in our time." --Sydney Morning Herald

"Moving, entertaining, edifying and affirmative. . . . The Blue Guitar is a remarkable achievement: the work of a writer who knows not only about pain and eloquence, but about the consolations of learning how to think, to look and to listen." --The National (UAE)

"Banville is such a fine architect of sentences--infusing them with wit and yearning--that the plot hardly matters. For what a brilliant navel-gazer Banville is: he creates loop-de-loops of self-absorbed prose that resonate so deeply about the human condition that they never become tiresome. Bon mots fill these pages, every one essential." --Publishers Weekly (starred)