Conversation In The Mountains. Paintings and Drawings by Donald Teskey. Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008. First Edition. Limited Issue. Brown cloth boards, title lettered in blind to outer margin of upper cover in publisher’s plain paper dust jacket. A fine bright copy.

Limited Edition of four Numbered Copies, Signed by John Banville.

The text of a play for radio, which was broadcast by the BBC on January 2006.

Accompanied by Tesky’s full color charcoal drawings, Banville presents the reader with a dialogue between poet Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew, and Martin Heidegger, a Nazi Party member.

Born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz (then Romania, now Ukraine), Celan was a Jewish poet who survived Nazi labor camps but lost his parents in the Holocaust. Celan was deeply influenced by German literature and philosophy, including Heidegger’s work, despite Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations. The two met in 1967, when Celan visited Heidegger at his hut in Todtnauberg—an encounter that has been widely analysed for its moral and philosophical tensions.