Shroud is a 2003 novel by John Banville

John Banville

John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.Banville's breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011...

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Plot summary

Axel Vander, famous man of letters and recently widowed, travels to Turin to meet a young woman called Cass Cleave. Cleave is a literary researcher and she has unearthed two secrets about Vander's early years in Antwerp, the first being that in the years prior to World War Two Vander contributed some anti-Semitic articles to a right-wing newspaper, and secondly, that he is not Axel Vander at all. He is Vander's childhood friend and appropriated his name and identity after Vander disappeared and was presumed dead.

Background

The novel is partly inspired by two scandals regarding famous academics that occurred in the 1980s: the posthumous discovery of anti-Semitic texts written during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 by literary critic Paul de Man

Paul de Man

Paul de Man was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s...

, and the death of Hélène Legotien, wife of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....

, by his hands.