Shroud was published by Picador in 2002. Axel Vander is a celebrated literary theorist and critic — Belgian-born, living in America, author of foundational works of deconstruction — who has built his entire career on a stolen identity. During the Second World War, he assumed the papers of a dead Jewish friend and used them to escape Europe; his subsequent academic career has been constructed on this original fraud. Now a young Irish woman, Cass Cleave (daughter of the Alexander Cleave from Eclipse), has discovered evidence of his deception and comes to confront him in Turin.
The novel is transparently based on the Paul de Man affair — the revelation in 1987 that the renowned Yale deconstructionist had written collaborationist articles for a Belgian newspaper during the German occupation — but Banville amplifies and complicates the story. Vander has not merely collaborated but has literally stolen another man’s life, making his theoretical work on the instability of meaning and identity a kind of inadvertent autobiography.
Banville constructs an elaborate intellectual thriller: Vander, aging and ill, tries to determine what Cass knows and what she wants; Cass, damaged and unstable, seems both his accuser and his last chance at human connection. The novel is dense with allusion to Nietzsche, de Man, Shelley, and the intellectual culture of postwar European theory, but remains gripping as narrative — a study of how the lies we tell to survive become the prisons we cannot escape.
Collecting Shroud
First edition (Picador, London, 2002): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- US first (Knopf, 2003), fine/fine: $15–$40
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
The Impostor
Shroud (2002) is the second novel in the Cleave trilogy. Axel Vander, an aging literary theorist living in exile, is confronted by a young woman (Cass Cleave, from Eclipse) who has evidence that his entire identity is fabricated — that the real Vander died during the war and the protagonist assumed his name. The novel is inspired partly by the Paul de Man controversy (the Yale deconstructionist revealed to have written pro-Nazi articles during WWII). Banville explores questions of identity, imposture, and the relationship between intellectual brilliance and moral corruption.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this based on Paul de Man? The parallels are unmistakable — a European intellectual with a hidden wartime past, living in American academia, whose posthumous exposure devastates his followers. Banville uses the scenario to explore broader questions about how we construct and inhabit identities.