I don’t know what to make of this book.  It has one of the most unpleasant narrators I’ve ever come across, and his preoccupations are mostly nauseating.  Added to that, I can’t work out the significance of the title and its allusion to the Shroud of Turin, and I’m still not clear about what actually happened at the end.

‘Alex Vander’ seems to be an academic who assumed the identity of the real Vander just after Kristallnacht when he returned home to find his parents gone and his own life at risk.  Is this true? Is it just one of the lies he tells to cover up his anti-Semitism? Or was his friend Vander the one who wrote the anti-Semitic articles?  I haven’t the faintest idea.

Vander returns to Turin because Cass Cleave, a young American with a mental illness called Mandelbaum’s Syndrome, has threatened to expose him.  Is she really mad? Is the secret to be exposed that the fake Vander has built his career on the dead Vander’s articles?  Or is it just ’Vander’ trying to discredit what she says? Again, I haven’t the faintest idea.

It was hard to read, and even harder to interpret.  For more erudite reviews than mine, see the Guardian, the New York Times or the Village Voice.  But only if you really care, because the reviews are as difficult to comprehend as the book.

On the plus side, I learned some new vocab, as one does, from John Banville. Lucubrations means ‘Laborious study or meditation, or writing produced by laborious effort or study, especially pedantic or pretentious writing’.  This is a word which could come in handy for John Banville reviews…