The Sea by John Banville began with an enigmatic mention of an unforgettable day in the life of the narrator, Max Morden. It was ‘the day of the strange tide’ some fifty years ago and we were told that he would not swim again after that day. My reactions to this book that won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 were strangely lukewarm. I admired it for its impeccable prose, sensitive handling of overwhelming emotions, and traces of wry humor. I was, uncharitably, impatient with the slow unravelling of Max’s memories and their significance, and irritated by a needlessly prolonged obsession with his pubescent sexual fantasies (recalled with revolting immediacy on one occasion in the present tense). Perhaps, if I had read this book while on vacation at some soothing seaside resort, I might have felt differently.

Max had returned to the Cedars, a childhood summer seaside house, ‘to live amidst the rubble of the past’ after his wife (Anna) died. To Banville’s credit, he did a skillful job stitching the story together despite Max being an unreliable narrator. The story moved back and forth between the present, the distant past and the more recent past, a narrative style that demanded concentration. Max returned to Cedars to cope with bereavement and live in the present. Yet, he let on that ‘The past beats inside me like a second heart.’ His mind returned to the time his wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness and the confluence of love, concern and anxiety that strained and alienated them from each other. Further back in his memory were carefree summers spent with the Grace family at the Cedars: a pair of twins (his coevals, Chloe and Myles), their governess (Rose), the rotund Carlo Grace, and his voluptuous wife (Constance) with whom Max was rapturously love-sick. There was a reason why these memories were co-mingled but you had to wait to the end to find out.

Max, the narrator, was hard to like. A moaner, ‘a little brute…with a filthy mind’, a chronic malcontent. The other characters did not fare any better although their physical traits and idiosyncrasies were captured with extraordinary vividness. What stood out for me was Banville’s exquisite prose that displayed the perspicuity of his observations. Powerful writing.

Max’s recollection of the day he and his wife were confronted with bad news: ‘We walked out into the day as if we were stepping on to a new planet, one where no one lived but us. Arrived home, we sat outside the house in the car for a long time, loath of venturing in upon the known, saying nothing, strangers to ourselves and each other as we suddenly were… I marvelled, not for the first time, at the cruel complacency of ordinary things. But no, not cruel, not complacent, only indifferent, as how could they be otherwise?’

Max’s memory of his first kiss:
‘Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability fully to believe one’s simple luck.’

My favorite is this haunting description of the sea and its dark call.
“The little waves before me at the water’s edge speak with an animate voice, whispering eagerly of some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Tri, perhaps, or the sinking of the Atlantis. All brims, brackish and shining. Water-beads break and fall in a silver string from the tip of an oar. I see the black ship in the distance, looming imperceptibly nearer at every instant. I am there. I hear your siren’s song. I am there, almost there.”

It seems to me that the sea is a potent metaphor that works on many levels to encapsulate the concerns of this book: the call of the wild, restless parts of ourselves, the forces over which we are powerless to control in our lives, the outsized sense of loss cast by grief, and the fear of the unknown.

The Sea is my first novel by John Banville, another Irish writer whose work I wish to read more of in the new year.

This is a Booker Prize winner. The language in this short novel is very, very rich, evocative and annoyingly, sent me to the dictionary far too many times for comfort. Banville is just showing off, descending into literary affectation perhaps. Two time-lines interweave as Max, a retired art critic, now living at The Cedars, a grand house of note from his youth, recalls those days when he lived with his family in much more modest surroundings and peered longingly into this place. Of course, it was not wealth per se that drew his 11 year old interest, but the presence of The Graces, not a religious fascination, but a family. A pan-like, goatish father, Carlo, an earth mother, Constance, white-haired (and thus summoning Children of the Damned notions) twins, a strange mute boy, Myles, who is sometimes comedic and sometimes sinister, a maybe-sociopathic girl, Chloe, and another girl, Rose, who appeared to be a mere friend, but was their governess. That this is left unclear for much of the book seems odd. Young Max enjoys the social step up he gets by hanging out with the twins, and is quite willing to go along with their cruelties to subservient locals, but is most taken with Constance Grace, pining for her in an awakening sexual way, until, of course, his heart, or some bodily part, is stolen by Chloe. There is a scent here of Gatsby-ish longing, and Max is indeed a social climber.

Death figures very prominently in The Sea. “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide,” is how it opens, and goes on very briefly to summon an image of a rising sea intent on devouring all. I will spare you the final death scene, but Max does indeed cope with death, the passing of his wife, Anna, contemplation of his own ultimate demise and how death, as personified by the sea, not only affected his life, but seems always with us.

This is I suppose a novel of coming and going of age. Banville is quite fond of deitific references, finding a different god or goddess for each of his characters. And his art-critic narrator sprinkles the narration with references to paintings. Sadly for me, I am completely unfamiliar with the works noted, so may have missed key references. Max is not a nice person. He engages in cruel behavior as a child and appears to lack a strong core of humanity, confessing that he doesn’t really know his daughter very well, and not seeming to care much.

I was almost satisfied with the ending, which recalls the most significant event of his youth, but I felt that it left unsatisfactorily unexplained the reasons for its occurrence. I was also frustrated by the slowness of the book. Although it is a short novel, it seemed to take a long time to get going. And the central characters do not call out for any of us to relate to them. All that said, while I might not award it a Booker, I would recommend it. The language is sublime (tote a dictionary while you read. You will need it.) and the payoff is good enough to justify the slow pace.


PS - for a very different and fascinating take on the novel be sure to check out Cecily's review

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
- John Banville, The Sea



Over the years, I've collected about 3 or 4 Banville books (just bought a slog more). The first was given to me by a girl I liked in HS, but never got around to reading it or dating her. I was finally inspired (or moved?) to read 'the Sea' (and a couple other Ireland-themed novels) because I was going to spend a week with the wife in Ireland and there is nothing better to read about on vacation than sex*, death, loss and sand. It was beautiful. It was poetry. It was nearly perfect.

It is easy to borrow images and allusions from other critics. It is a snap to fit the Banville piece in the puzzle among his Irish peers (piers?). It is a picnic to park Banville's summer blanket next to Beckett or Joyce (yes, fine, they all dropped from their mother's wombs onto the same emerald island). It is easy to play the literary cousin game and compare Banville to Proust or Nabokov or Henry James. These things are all true. They are also all fictions and obvious short cuts.

I haven't read enough of Banville to say he measures up to Proust or Nabokov, but damn this book was fine. There really must be something in the water because I'm reading Enright's The Gathering right now and my first thought was 'da feck'? Two Man Bookers by Irish novelists about drowning, death and memory. I'm sure there is more than water and whiskey to this island.

Anyway, I loved and adored 'The Sea'. I used those slick little page-markers everytime I came across a line of Banville's that seemed especially quoteable. I gave up when I ran out of markers. The edge of the book looked like a colorful Stegosaurus with markers dancing up and down the pages.

* On a side note. It is VERY rare that a writer can actually write about sex without making me want to run from the room. They either make it too clinical (like a doctor popping zits) or too silly (like the cover of a romance novel) or too ethereal (like clouds copulating). Joyce could do it. Nabokov could do it. And I'm proud to say Banville can do it too.

The Depths of Vocabulary

John Banville loves words just as they are. Words like losel, and finical, gleet, scurf, bosky, cinerial, and merd that will really screw up your spell-checker. It's part of his masterful charm. Add his ability to put these words together in velvet sentences, and combine sentences into exquisite narrative, and voila: a writer worth his salt...as it were, especially with a title like The Sea. Inspired by Henry James? Very possibly, particularly by The Turn of the Screw and its permanent mystery. Nonetheless, uniquely and unmistakeably Banville.

An elderly man returns with his daughter, after the death of his wife, to the sea side village his family used to holiday in. The narrative is full of associations and diversions, showing the power (and unreliability) of memory
There are moments when the past is so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.

The writing of John Banville is beautiful but I feel the story of The Sea wasn’t enough to keep me engaged. Also the “reveal” near the end didn’t work out for me as an apotheosis.

An elderly man returns to his past, both figuratively and literally, in the sense that he returns to the coastal place her grew up. The narrative is full of associations and diversions, triggered by olfactory observations or other stimuli, showing the power (and unreliability) of memory. The graces in this book are not gods, but a family the main character reminiscing about. Sexual awakening of a child in the form of an obsession with the mother of his friends and the hypertextuality of the past, superimposed on the present, makes this an introspective novel. Despite its small size, it felt hefty and erudite, with many words I never read before in the memories of the main character.

Twins Chloe and Miles (who is mute), governess Rose, Carlo the father, Conny, end up in a greek tragedy in terms of number of deaths, with Max Morden, the flawed main character in the centre. If Max was more engaging in terms of narrative voice (and didn't abuse animals) I feel I would have cared a lot more about his story. Gorgeously written, but also a bit distant and storywise definitely done before, this book reminded me a lot of fellow Booker prize winner Julian Barnes his work, just slower and more convoluted.

Quotes~:
Yes things endure while the living lapse

Memory as a world of shelter against the now

A fight with one’s daughter is never less than debilitating

What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence, through the autumn dark

A little brute so to say, with a filthy mind, is there any other sort? We never grow up.

The mysterious protocols of childhood

This is what I thought adulthood would be, a long autumn summer

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it

To fulfil the fantasy of me

Everything meant something else for me

The delicate business of being the survivor

We were human beings you know, after all

I think I am becoming my own ghost

A person of scant talents and scanter ambitions

We forgave each other for all we were not

My mind seems filled with toppling masonry

I didn’t want to get where I was going

The indifferent world closing

4,5*

Perdi-me. Vejo tudo confuso. Por que razão me atormento com estas ambiguidades insolúveis, não elaborei raciocínios sofísticos que chegassem? Deixa-te em paz, Max, deixa-te em paz.

Há autores que se esmeram no início de um livro, prendendo ou encantando o leitor logo nos primeiros parágrafos. John Banville está nos antípodas e, em ambos os livros de ficção literária dele que já li, remata-os com frases finais simplesmente perfeitas.
Ainda que não pertença à “Cleave Trilogy”, encontrei várias semelhanças entre “Eclipse”, a primeira parte da trilogia, e “O Mar”. Enquanto naquele um homem de meia-idade volta à casa onde cresceu, que também servia de pensão, numa fase conturbada da vida também devido à relação crispada com a mulher e a filha, neste livro, Max, depois de ficar viúvo e não tendo um relacionamento muito próximo com a filha, regressa à casa de hóspedes onde passou umas férias inesquecíveis e traumáticas quando era miúdo.

Quando Miss Vavasour me deixou no quarto que a partir daquele momento passava a ser o meu quarto, atirei o casaco para cima de uma cadeira, sentei-me na beira da cama, inspirei fundo o ar cediço e abafado e senti que andava a viajar há muito tempo, há anos, e chegara finalmente ao destino para onde, durante todo o tempo, sem o saber, me dirigia e onde devo ficar, já que é, por agora, o único lugar possível, para mim.

Pretendia ler John Banville para a Irish Readathon do mês transacto, mas desisti da minha primeira opção, “O Livro da Confissão”, por não estar com paciência para tanta misantropia. Mal sabia eu que o protagonista de “O Mar”, além de ser também um narrador capcioso, nada tinha de cativante. E ainda que de início pareça em profundo sofrimento pela morte da mulher, no final, até nisso me é difícil empatizar com ele, pois tem mais pena de si próprio, pelo vazio da sua vida, pela falta de rumo, do que propriamente pela perda recente.

Pensava em Anna. Obrigo-me a pensa nela, faço-o como um exercício. Está enterrada em mim como uma faca e, no entanto, começo a esquecê-la. O quadro que guardo na memória começa já a esboroar-se, pedacinhos de pigmentos, pequenas partículas de folha de ouro vão-se desprendendo, quebradiços. Será que um dia a tela vai ficar vazia? Cheguei à conclusão de que a conheci muito pouco, isto é, que a conhecia de modo muito superficial e insuficiente. Não me censuro por isso. Talvez fosse melhor assim. Terei sido demasiado indolente, demasiado desatento, demasiado ensimesmado? (...) Mas esperem, não, não é bem assim. Não estou a ser sincero – para variar, dirão vocês. A verdade é que não nos queríamos conhecer um ao outro. Mais, o que nós queríamos era precisamente isso, não nos conhecermos.

E embora afirme o contrário, Max é um diletante.

Seja como for, trabalho não é bem a palavra que eu usaria para aquilo que faço. Trabalho é um termo demasiado vasto e demasiado sério. Os operários trabalham. Os adultos trabalham. Para nós, os medíocres, não existe uma palavra suficientemente modesta que seja adequada para descrever o que fazemos e como o fazemos.

Sem ser propriamente ambicioso, o seu objectivo de vida desde muito novo é a ascensão social e o bem-estar proporcionado pelo dinheiro.

Mas quando olho para trás vejo que a maior parte da minha energia foi sempre desperdiçada na simples busca de protecção, de conforto e, é verdade, tenho de admitir, de comodidade. (...) Tudo aquilo que sempre desejei foi sentir-me defendido, protegido, resguardado, refugiar-me numa toca da tepidez uterina e ficar acocorado lá dentro.

Não se deixem iludir pela primeira frase da sinopse da edição mais recente. “O Mar” é o oposto de luminoso. É turvo e tumultuoso.

Afinal não passamos de pequenos botes de tristeza a vogar num silêncio lânguido por entre as trevas outonais.

Reading John Banville is like taking a long, sumptuous bath. In my book, he is one of the finest prose stylists alive. The man can write. His language and sentences are gorgeous.

I’d like to say Banville is a marvel at describing characters but in fact he’s a marvel at describing everything, from a breeze to a rain barrel:

“It was a wooden barrel, a real one, full-size, the staves blackened with age and the iron hoops eaten to frills by rust. The rim was nicely bevelled, and so smooth that one could hardly feel the joins between the staves; smoothly sawn, that is, and planed, but in texture the sodden grain-end of the wood there was slightly furry, or napped, rather, like the pod of a bulrush, only tougher to the touch, and chillier, and more moist. Although it must have held I do not know how many scores of gallons, it was always full almost to the brim, thanks to the frequency of rain in these parts, even, or especially, in summer.”

The narrator is pretending to write a book about the painter Bonnard and here is one of my favorite passages from The Sea, which surely brought to mind the sumptuous bath of language:

“In 1927, Bonnard bought a house, Le Bosquet, in the undistinguished little town of Le Cannet on the Cote d’Azur, where he lived with Marthe, bound with her in intermittenly tormented seclusion, until her death fifteen years later. At Le Bosquet she developed a habit of spending long hours in the bath, and it was in her bath that Bonnard painted her, over and over, continuing the series even after she had died. The 'Baignoires' are the triumphant culmination of his life’s work. In the 'Nude in her bath, with dog,' begun in 1941, a year before Marthe’s death and not completed until 1946, she lies there, pink and mauve and gold, a goddess of the floating world, attenuated, ageless, as much dead as alive, beside her on the tiles her little brown dog, her familiar, a dachshund, I think, curled watchful on its mat or what may be a square of flaking sunlight falling from an unseen window. The narrow room that is her refuge vibrates around her, throbbing in its colors. Her feet, the left one tensed at the end of its impossibly long leg, seem to have pushed the bath out of shape and made it bulge at the left end, and beneath the bath on that side, in the same force-field, the floor is pulled out of alignment too, and seems on the point of pouring away into the corner, not like a floor at all but a moving pool of dappled water.”

I was well aware of Banville’s powers going into this book, and the fact that this one won the Booker Prize made me hope it would be the best. But for all its beautiful ruminating, I would have appreciated a tiny bit more plot. And I felt that the narrator asked me to plunge too quickly into sympathy with him with his “ah me”s and other emphatics on the first pages. Not that they were huge on plot but I found Athena or The Book of Evidence superior to The Sea. Athena had its dark mystery, The Book of Evidence its blunter, more ironic dark. I think the Booker folks were afraid, having let some other Banville beauties go by, that if they didn't give this one the Booker Prize they might not see its ilk again. (In a similar case, Ian McEwan won the Booker for "Amsterdam," which had to be one of his worst books, in my opinion.)

“The past beats inside me like a second heart."

I originally read The Sea a few years back, when I was reeling from the deaths of my brother and my cat. I always embrace the sadness, the melancholy when I am down. I chalk it up to an Irish spirit in me. Depression was abetted with a weekend listening to Neil Young’s desperate “ditch trilogy.” This sort of thing has always suited me.

“The Sea” is a brilliant study of Max who, after recently losing his wife, flees to a time in his boyhood when the innocence of youth was dealt an unspeakable blow by real life. The storyline is a good one, I did not see the twist at the end the first time out. It is Banville’s writing, though, that sets this apart. He makes the sea a heavy presence, a foreboding character holding secrets, regrets, memories. I stumbled along with Max, screamed with him, and felt his anguish in my soul. We struggled to find… whatever it is we search to find in these circumstances.

“The past beats inside me like a second heart."

My partner, Barb, passed away unexpectedly on Christmas Eve– and this was the only book I could handle. Non-fiction embracing fiction. One of my favorite books ever, it may be a long time before I can visit “The Sea” again.

Moj prvi susret sa Banvilom i mogu reci samo GENIJALNO!

I just have to say it: it's all semiunremarkable until page 170 or so (this book, like many in the modern canon, such as “Amsterdam,” another Booker winner, is short in that bittersweet sort of way—perilously malingering, at 200 pages, between being almost a novel, but not quite a novella)—the plot ebbs and flows (ha) through an ocean of profound memories. The narrator chronicles, basically, two points in his life which left him devastated. His first ever, and his latest, all revolve around the sea, its massiveness & its depths, its personal mysterious allure. He meditates on the last one of these presages of death, that looming event itself, so final and sad—and the end really is like dynamite. I can only compare it to “Everyman” by Philip Roth, even “The Death of Ivan Ilych” in its management of such a theme which is, at first glimpse, frankly, droll & overdone. The poetry which had been glimpsed at before creates a lasting impact on the reader at its speedy conclusion. The tedium and clichéd tactics become very much negligible once the ending gets there. Here is a paramount example of how the ending makes the book.

Sapore di mare

Probabilmente ho iniziato a leggere questo libro con l'approccio sbagliato, o forse semplicemente senza lo stato d'animo giusto. Fatto sta che io e il libro ci siamo separati quasi subito; dopo una decina di pagine la mia mente vagava, la noia cresceva, la comprensione scemava, l'impazienza montava, il mare l'avrei prosciugato con l'atomica e ogni parola era un'occasione per criticare ferocemente libro e autore. Uno sforzo enorme, come si può facilmente immaginare, arrivare alla fine.

Alla fine cosa potevo fare? Valutare il libro una stella e scrivere un commento che esternasse il profondo schifo che mi aveva suscitato la lettura?

No, non l'ho fatto. Non so come e non so perché ma mi sono fatto scrupoli e l'ho semplicemente ricominciato da capo.

E... luce fu.

Il libro si regge su una portante malinconica, su un ostinato sottofondo di tristezza dovuta principalmente alla lenta elaborazione di un lutto. Il protagonista rivede la sua vita passando in continuazione tra la sua infanzia, il suo presente, il suo passato prossimo con un effetto molto coinvolgente, ma solo a patto di cogliere quella portante dolorosa di cui accennavo prima. Tutto diviene malinconico se ci si concentra su ciò che poteva essere e non è stato e se lo sguardo è rivolto esclusivamente all'indietro, al nostro passato.

"Forse tutta la vita non è altro che una lunga preparazione a lasciarla"

Raffinato, elegante, colto, delicato, equilibrato, malinconico, sfumato, introspettivo, cupo, emotivo e emozionante, terso e freddo come una giornata al mare in inverno.
Un libro bellissimo, se letto nel momento giusto.

I really thought this was going to be a special book for me to read, and it just wasn’t. This book is narrated by Max, a man with childhood memories of time spent by the sea, with a family that greatly influenced him. Max has recently lost his wife, and goes back to the place by the sea where the childhood memories took place.
This is the longest short book I’ve ever read, I had to stop and look up words in the dictionary, continuously. It’s probably just me... there are many beautiful reviews for this book.