Question

Critical summary of shroud

Answer 1

Summary
Axel Vander is an elderly survivor of the Nazi purges. Having relocated to the United States, he teaches at a university in Arcady, California, and has a formidable reputation as one of literature’s most controversial theorists. Vander heads off to Turin for a conference and to meet a woman who claims she has uncovered secrets from a past he prefers to keep hidden.

Cass Cleave, a character reprised from John Banville’s previous novel,Eclipse (2000), appears as an emotionally ravaged graduate student who poses no deliberate threat to Vander. Her appearance, however, throws his life into unanticipated turmoil. In a long monologue addressed to Cleave, he reviews the details of his murky secrets. In short, Vander is not Vander; he assumed a boyhood friend’s identity to keep himself out of the death camps. In so doing, however, he has inherited his friend’s legacy of anti-Semitic articles written for a collaborationist Antwerp newspaper.