Here is John Banville explaining his decision to write as Benjamin Black: “It was a way of breaking free from the books I had been writing for the last 20 years, these first-person narratives of obsessed, half-demented men going on and on and on and on.”

And here is one ecstatic reading of the result:

It’s all about being put under a seductive spell, an erotics of reading, the pure lust pleasurable books arouse that is like nothing else except perhaps impure lust.

For instance, I can barely stand to continue writing this column because it’s taking me away from finishing The Silver Swan, the second novel by “Benjamin Black” (a pseudonym for Irish novelist John Banville) about a Dublin pathologist in the frowsy, drowsy ’50s that I swear surpasses Joyce’s Dubliners and, aside from certain mad genius patches, Ulysses, too.

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