John BanvilleThe Sea

Don't read this review if you don't want to ruin the surprise ending because I'm going to give part of it away. If you're at all like me, you may find it preferable to know, to know more than what the jacket cover reveals, that there was a death in the narrator's childhood that he revisits in memory as an old man. At the end of the book the narrator relates the sudden double death of twin children. And he reveals the true identity of Miss V, their former governess, now the narrator's landlady, which the narrator, otherwise forthcoming, keeps from his audience. Instead of being surprised at the ending, I would have preferred to have been given careful and haunting hints that would have allowed me to vaguely and unconsciously guess at what was coming. I imagine the overall experience of reading this book will be improved on a second reading now that the end is already in view.Banville's The Sea is a wonderfully written story that would be story enough without the shocking surprise. I don't know what the function of the surprises is, aesthetically I mean. The deaths themselves reinforce the notion that even in (or especially in?) Arcadia, Death is usually found lurking. But the surprise of the deaths just jolted me and made me sad, unnecessarily, and the revelation of pointlessly hidden identity made me feel tricked. I don't know why a good captivating story should be defined by an event that comes without warning. The opposite seems truer to me. In a story, events are presaged, somehow, in retrospect.I suppose Banville, who as his alter ego is a writer of thrillers and mysteries, has a fondness for that genre's plot line. For me, The Sea is the very heart of the genre of literary fiction, which has very little use for such plots. The real power of the book, I feel lies elsewhere.The writing is lovely, on every page. This is what literature should be. But I find most works these days calling themselves literary fiction don't even come close to what Banville seems to do effortlessly. Once I got over the confusion of the ending, I went back to mull over what I really love about this book and I am grateful to Banville for having written it. There is so little out there worth the time. First I loved existing in the mind of this narrator, an authentic and enlightening experience. Novels ought to do this to us, for us, teach what it's like to be someone else, bestow on us greater powers of empathy. I didn't always like the narrator, Max (his hypersensitivity to odors, his cruelty to dogs and his insensitivity to his parents), but I understood what it was to be him and that's the point.Max is grieving his wife's death, and wondering what death means in general. He meditates on the way in which people live on in the memories of those left behind, a consoling thought, until he adds that once those people die there is a second death of the first. The next offered solution to the perennially undefined dilemma of being human is successful self-expression. There is a universal desire to be known to another, that, if one could achieve it, would satisfy and make a life seem as if it had done something, done the thing it set out to do at last. Max admits, "I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him. No, what I am looking forward to is a moment of earthly expression. That is it, that is it exactly: I shall be expressed, totally. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said." As a writer I am wholly sympathetic to Max's (Banville's?) ultimate desire.It's important to note that this raising of self-expression as the highest attainable good comes after a description of the fall, when Max falls in love with Chloe (one of the twins), his other. "She was I believe the true origin in me of self-consciousness. Before, there had been one thing and I was part of it, now there was me and all that was not me. But here too there is a torsion, a kink of complexity. In severing me from the world and making me realize myself in being thus severed, she expelled me from that sense of the immanence of all things, the all things that had included me, in which up to then I had dwelt, in more of less blissful ignorance."Sadly, we find that Max's relationship with his wife, as good as it gets as it was, lacked the kind of intimacy that would have reconnected him with another and the world. They didn't know each other, not in that full way that would have been a good substitute for the "immortality" of being remembered. They did not know each other in the way that a reader can when he or she shares the existence of a character in fiction. So I'm sad for Max in the end, but not too because he has been "said" in this book.Bravo Banville. I did not need the shocking ending, but ultimately it did not distract from the beauty of this meditation on the meaning of completeness.[...]

Was it really only 210 pages? It felt longer. In some sense that's a positive as the character development was deep and compelling. But it felt like a lot of discussion and reflection about singular events that took place many years before. I honestly struggled with whether it's realistic that someone would have obsessed the way Max seems unable to move forward without going back. Perhaps the passing of his wife triggers some deep buried unresolved issues and perhaps I am too superficial but it felt like what he needed to resolve would not have been so traumatic.

I author seems to want to impress us with his verbiage rather than describe relationships, story line, etc. Then sums everything up in last chapters. Got frustrated with his style.

The Sea is a marvel of efficiency; in less than 200 pages, Banville writes a "memoir" that is spare and yet touching and profound.The Sea is the story of a rapidly aging widower who, after the death of his wife, travels to the seaside resort town where he spent several summers as a child. Taking up residence in a long term boarding house filled with other hurting and lost souls, he thinks about his life; first his childhood summers and the life defining relationship and events of those years, then the days preceding and during his wife's illness and death, and then finally the unkind truth of his present life. These narratives are weaved together throughout the novel until they coalesce towards the end.I could ramble on for a while about how much I liked this book, how true Banville's observations rung, how deep the sense of loss is, how scary it makes one feel about getting old. I could, but you should just buy the book and experience it for yourself.Banville won the Mann Booker prize for The Sea. Some quotes:"On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning. Usually these days I do not dally before my reflection any longer than is necessary. There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly disheveled figure in a Hallowe'en mask made of sagging pinkish -grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.""When we arrived I marveled to see how much of the village as I remembered it was still here, if only for eyes that knew where to look, mine, that is. It was like encountering an old flame behind whose features thickened by age the slender lineaments that a former self so loved can still be clearly discerned.""I looked aside quickly for fear my eyes would give me away; one's eyes are always those of someone else, the mad and desperate dwarf crouched within. I knew what she meant. This was not supposed to have befallen her. It was not supposed to have befallen us, we were not that kind of people. Misfortune, illness, untimely death, these things happen to good folk, the humble ones, the salt of the earth, not to Anna, not to me.""I recalled walking in the street with Anna one day after all her hair had fallen out and she spotted passing by on the pavement a woman who was also bald. I do not know if Anna caught me catching the look they exchanged, the two of them, blank-eyed and at the same time sharp, sly, complicit. In all that endless twelvemonth of her illness I do not think I ever felt more distant from her than I did at that moment, elbowed aside by the sorority of the afflicted.""[my daughter] understands me to a degree that is disturbing and will not indulge my foibles and excesses as others do who know me less and therefore fear me more. But I am bereaved and wounded and require indulging. If there is a long version of shrift, then that is what I am in need of. Let me alone, I cried at her in my mind, let me creep past the traduced old Cedars, past the vanished Strand Café, past the Lupins and the Field that was, past all this past for if I stop I shall surely dissolve in a shaming puddle of tears.""Have I spoken already of my drinking? I drink like a fish. No, not like a fish, fishes do not drink, it is only breathing, their kind of breathing. I drink like one recently widowed-widowered? - a person of scant talent and scanter ambition, greyed o'er by the years, uncertain and astray and in need of consolation and the brief respite of drink-induced oblivion. I would take drugs if I had them, but I have not, and do not know how I might go about getting some."

As an underliner there were very many delicious bits that could thus be found & re-read again and again. Joy! Highly recommended.

"They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for the rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day."Max Morden has come to stay in a small seaside village he calls Ballyless, where his family used to spend their holiday each year when he was a boy. Now he is elderly, grieving the death of his wife, Anna, after a long illness, and seeking some kind of comfort in visiting the past. His thoughts and memories alternate between the time of her illness and of a summer much longer ago, when he first felt love and first encountered tragedy. That was the summer the Grace family rented the Cedars, when Max was around eleven and beginning the difficult journey through adolescence. At first he observes the family from afar, with a kind of lonely longing, but soon he will be allowed into their enchanted circle. His first obsession is with the mother, Connie, whose fleshy abundance sets his pubescent hormones ablaze, but it is the daughter, Chloe, for whom he eventually comes to feel an emotion that he slowly realises may be what adults call love.The book is a wonderful meditation on grief and how it impacts us. Max’s grief for Anna is new, but it is the grief of the mature, perhaps elderly, when a death has come naturally and slowly, though cruelly. Banville speaks of this grief with profound empathy and sometimes with searing honesty, on how those of us observing may sometimes wish the dying would soon be over, partly for the sake of the dying but partly also for ourselves. He talks of ageing and the deterioration of mind and body, of withdrawal from the future and retreat into memories of the past. His writing is beautiful and full of emotional truth.The other strand is a coming-of-age story as young Max begins to move out of childhood with all the turmoil of emotion, the narcissism and selfishness of first love, the sudden gateway to maturity but seen still through a childish lens. As he becomes friends with Chloe and her brother, there is much foreshadowing that leaves us in no doubt that this strand too will lead to grief, for an old tragedy that Max is reassessing from his now elderly viewpoint.It reminded me in many ways of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, and I suspect (hope, perhaps) that that’s deliberate. The golden, god-like stature to his mind of the family he becomes involved with, the long-ago summer, his coming-of-age and lack of full understanding of the adult world, the stirrings of first sexual awakening, and the perspective of a man now elderly looking back at this youth – all of these elements echo Hartley. My stock phrase in these situations is that if a writer is going to force his reader to think of another great writer, then he’d better make sure his own writing won’t suffer from the comparison. This is one of those very rare cases, perhaps unique, in fact, where I feel Banville’s writing is indeed as beautiful as Hartley’s. And there are plenty of differences to prevent it from feeling like a pale copy or worse, nor even an homage.In place of Hartley’s heatwave, Banville uses the sea as his natural element and uses it wonderfully, to create mood and atmosphere and danger. He describes the tides and the shore so that we can almost taste the salt in the air and hear the seabirds shrieking overhead. Sometimes friendly, a playground for holidaymakers, but always the sea is given that sense of power and unpredictability that makes it something we must fear even as we love it.But it is Max himself who is the heart of the story as we see him contrast what his young self thought adulthood would be with how his life actually played out. Nearing his own end, he is musing on the fundamental insignificance of any individual human to all but those nearest to him, and even to them solace will come in time. And yet he is comforted by that thought – if life is meaningless, then death is not to be feared.“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.”Beautifully written, emotionally perceptive and with enough touches of humour and self-deprecation to prevent the tone from becoming too overwhelmingly melancholy – for once, a truly worthy Booker winner!

Poetic, beautifully written with beautiful thinking

good

Irlanda, ai nostri giorni. Max Morden, non più giovane e non ancora vecchio, vedovo recente, è alla ricerca dei propri ricordi e del proprio passato. Vuole mettere in vendita la casa dove ha trascorso la vita con l’amata moglie Anna e la figlia Claire e torna nel paesino dove passava le vacanze durante l’infanzia, prendendo alloggio nella casa detta Cedars tenuta da miss Vavasour, in cui è l’unico ospite oltre a un colonnello in pensione. Ripercorre il passato in un arabesco della memoria in cui i ricordi si distendono come ramages in nero su un paesaggio nevoso, un susseguirsi di attimi che costituisce la narrazione, attraverso una complessità di sensazioni e sentimenti assolutamente inverosimili in un bambino. Scrittura meravigliosa, un po' compiaciuta.