(Book 6 From 1001 Books) - The Sea, John Banville

The story is told by Max Morden, a self-aware, retired art historian attempting to reconcile himself to the deaths of those he loved as a child and as an adult. After the death of his wife, Max returns to the scene of his childhood, a summer in particular.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز پنجم ماه آگوست سال 2007میلادی

عنوان: دریا؛ اثر: جان بنویل؛ ترجمه: اسدالله امرایی؛ نشر: تهران، افق، چاپ اول و دوم 1386، در 212ص، فروست ادبیات امروز، رمان 39؛چاپ سوم 1389؛ شابک9789643693213؛ چاپ چهارم 1392؛ چاپ پنجم 1396؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایرلند - سده 20م

در این داستان «مکس موردون (مورخ تاریخ هنر)»، پس از مرگ همسرش، به شهری ساحلی میرود، که در کودکی تعطیلات خود را، در آنجا سپری کرده اند؛ خانواده ی «گریس»، در آن تابستان سال‌های دور، گویی از جهان دیگری آمده بودند؛ فرزندان دوقلوی آن‌ها: «مایلز، پسر لال خانواده»، و «کلوئه، دختر آتشپاره» همسن و سال «مکس» بودند، که توجه او را به خود جلب می‌کنند؛ رمان «دریا» آمیزه ای از یادمان و عشق است

در داستان راوی در پی پیدا کردن خود و هویتش است، همان‌ چیزی که خیلی از ما با آن بیگانه شده‌ ایم، از خود واقعی‌مان فاصله گرفته‌ ایم اما خیال می‌کنیم دیگران را خوب شناخته‌ ایم. به‌ راستی وقتی خودمان را نمی‌شناسیم، چطور می‌توانیم به فکر شناختن دیگری باشیم؟

ماجرا در فصل نخست از خانه ی «سدار»ها آغاز میشود؛ «سدار» همان سرو آزاد است؛ راوی داستان یک تاریخ‌‌شناس هستند که همسرشان را از دست داده اند، و اکنون به روستایی در «ایرلند» برگشته اند، که سال‌ها پیش تعطیلات خویش را آنجا سپری کرده بودند، و یادمانهای خویش را مرور می‌کنند؛ او دلش می‌خواهد در بگذشته ها سیر کند، مرگ همسر خویش را تاب نمی‌آورد، و از شرایط کنونی‌ خویشتن بیزار است؛ اوراق نخستین کتاب بازنمایی بیهمانند، و خاطره‌ انگیزی از آن خانه، ارائه می‌دهند؛ گویی نویسنده میخواهد خوانشگر را غرقه در داستان خویش کند، داستانی که بازگویی ساده، از یادمانهای مردی‌ است، که در میان‌سالی، به محلی بازگشته اند، که روزگاری، نوجوانی و جوانی‌ خویش را، در آنجا سپری کرده اند، و با مرور یادمانهای خویش، همه‌ چیز برایش دوباره زنده می‌شوند؛ او باور نمیکند که آن خانه نسبت به بگذشته ها، تغییر چندانی نکرده است؛

فصل دوم از یادمانهای نویسنده کنار دریا آغاز می‌شود؛ این فصل کمی ساده‌ تر از فصل نخست است، و نویسنده کوشش دارد، تصویر بهتری از آنچه در ذهن راوی داستان است، ارائه دهد؛ اما ذهن خوانشگر، همچنان درگیر پرسشهایی است، که از آغاز داستان بی‌پاسخ مانده‌ اند؛ از آنجمله این که راوی داستان که نامش چند بار دیگر می‌شود، یا مرگ، که گویی در همه جای‌ داستان کمین کرده است؛ «جان بنویل» با مهارت ویژه ای یکایک شخصیت‌های آن خانه را به خوانشگرش می‌شناساند، ظاهر و درونشان را میشکافد؛ آن‌قدر دلچسب، که گاهی خود را میانشان می‌یابید، و می‌کوشید با توجه به واژه های نگارگرش، چهره‌هاشان را در خیالتان بیارائید

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 19/04/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Ενα μελαγχολικό και στενάχωρο βιβλίο με θέμα τον θάνατο.
Ο ήρωας μας συμφιλιωνεται τελικά με το θάνατο των φίλων του.
Πρώτη φορά διαβάζω έργο του John Banville.
Η 'Θαλασσα' πήρε βραβείο Booker το 2005.

The narrator of The Sea is an odious man. I wasn’t sure I ever understood why Banville made him so odious. As a child he hits his dog for pleasure; he pulls the legs off insects and burns them in oil. As an adult, he’s a crude misogynist without knowing he’s a misogynist, a narcissist and a masochistic misanthrope. He makes constant allusions to his acquired humility and wisdom but he comes across throughout the book as largely ignorant and arrogant. There’s no apotheosis. Because Max is presented as a mediocrity with artistic pretensions I was often perplexed how seriously Banville wanted us to take the rarefied outpourings of his sensibility. I certainly found it difficult to reconcile the essential crudeness of Max’s nature with his Proustian sensibility. There was a disconnect between the narrator’s ugly soul and his susceptibility to the beauty of the natural world. At times it seemed like the ambition of this novel was to write as many pretty sentences as possible rather than a novel. You could save yourself time by simply reading all the favourite quotes here rather than the entire novel without missing very much. The writing is relentlessly elegant but often it’s elegant where elegance is inappropriate. It’s vacuously elegant. His aphorisms can appear vacuous too - “The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.” You could turn that sentence on its head –“The past matters more than we pretend” and it’s no less true. Despite its constant yearning for profundity I didn’t have one eureka moment when he enabled me to see something familiar in a new revelatory light. Like I said I was never sure if he was sending up his character by making a lot of his lofty musings deliberately vacuous, of no consequence whatsoever.

There’s little tension in this novel, no compulsion. It all hinges on what’s essentially a moment of melodrama which didn’t ring true for me. Neither did it explain anything. There are good things, like the descriptions of his childhood crush on his friend’s mother and his dying wife and his response, though once again Banville can’t resist his misanthropic form of dark humour which consistently puts his character in the worst possible light – ironic as he’s always waxing lyrical in the book about the transfiguring nature of light.

The Sea might be described as a grumpy meditation on growing old. I much preferred The Untouchables which had a plot, a sense of purpose Banville could embroider with his elegant prose.

Nude in the Bath and Small Dog, Pierre Bonnard, 1941-46

What has this luminous painting of a female bather to do with a book called "The Sea", you might ask? More than you might think. Pierre Bonnard, a French Post-Impressionist painter, often painted his wife Marthe. He painted this particular piece when she was in her 70s, and she had died by the time he completed it. We can see by virtue of the recognisable images of female form and bathtub, the general gist of the painting. But the image goes beyond the bounds of reality with the misshapen bathtub that accommodates impossibly long and bent limbs, the colours shimmering and waving on the organically undulating walls as though they might just disappear at any moment, a dog on what might be a mat or a square of light on the slanted floor, brushstroke after gorgeous brushstroke coming together to simulate Marthe's moment of private repose. The moment is almost certainly of a younger Marthe, though. It is the artist's memories of an earlier, more youthful moment.

"There is a formula, which fits painting perfectly," wrote Bonnard, "many little lies to create a great truth."

Not only is the narrator of this novella, Max Morden, attempting to write a book about Bonnard, not only did Max's own wife during her painful decline enjoy the silent comfort of baths, but like Bonnard, he is trying to cobble together an image, one of his wife and his life, looking back as an aging widower. These memories and images are as elusive, as distorted, as tricky as the painting. But when brought together, they capture the luminosity, pain and newness of a pivotal summer in his youth.

Max is a flawed and not particularly likeable character, and he's often looking through the bottom of a bottle, which adds to the hazy unreliability of his point of view. His aching melancholy is always felt, an aging man who can only look back and piece together as best he can, a story that is at once innocent and vaguely sinister. This exploration of memory, grief and loss washes over you with many waves, dragging you under to the murky depths.

Reading John Banville is like gazing at a painting. His poetic style is incredibly evocative and visual. He brings his readers to the scene, right up close to his subjects. We can smell their breath, we can see the little imperfections. At the same time, we are not entirely sure how this person got there, were they wearing a blue dress or a floral one? He meanders between past and present, revealing just enough, a trail of literary breadcrumbs. Each brushstroke works with the next to complete the story. This 2005 Booker Prize winner is gorgeous, a masterpiece, delineating the difference between literature and just plain fiction.

n  

Night, and everything so quiet, as if there were no one, not even myself. I cannot hear the sea, which on other nights rumbles and growls, now near grating, now afar and faint. I do not want to be alone like this. Why have you not come back to haunt me? Is the least I would have expected of you. Why this silence day after day, night after interminable night? It is like a fog, this silence of yours.

n
What is John Banville’s The Sea all about? An infinite weave of contemplative and melancholic feelings of a man lost in his sufferings. It is about the impossibility of hope; the harshness of loss, and the inescapability of pain. A convulsive probe into the past, it revisits times gone by that sets it all adrift. Constant guilt for what could not have been changed, accounts of resentments, and the restraints and combat of a man to the intimacy of grief. All coupled with constant images and metaphors of a turbulent and immeasurable sea.
n  

There were things of course the boy that I was then would not have allowed himself to foresee, in his eager anticipations, even if he had been able. Loss, grief, the sombre days and the sleepless nights, such surprises tend not to register on the prophetic imagination's photographic plate.

n
The story is narrated by Max, a retired art critic, who is mourning the death of his wife, Anna, and now living at The Cedars, which he remembers from his youth. Whether recalling those days when he lived with his family in more modest surroundings and gawked eagerly into the house and its inhabitants, the Graces.

John Banville impresses with his beautiful, splendid and brittle writing. His protagonist Max is governed by his whims, which twists and weakens before its sorrowfulness, his mourning, the sutures of old dislikes, and the trace of his fossilized tears.
n  

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses, it is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live among the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

n
Among meditations on losses and presages of death, we encounter once in a while a specter of happiness, might we dream of hope? Possibly this is too far to imagine, but even Banville protagonist’s wanderings remember to point to the existence of peace if not happiness. Like the sun that steals a chance to come through on an overcast and dark sky, with its rays reflecting alluringly in the tumultuous sea. How does Banville present us with a scene not so wistful, how can he, amidst so such melancholy, bring up moments of joy? His only escape is through remembrances of a long gone past: a past of friendship, a past with wisps of seduction, forgetting the losses that followed for mere moments. Those moments invariably invoke the sea with its vastness and its depths, along with its mysterious personal allure.
n  

Still that day of license and illicit invitation was not done. As Mrs. Grace, stretched there on the grassy bank, continued softly snoring, a torpor descended on the rest of us in that little dell, the invisible net of lassitude that falls over a company when one of its number detaches and drops away into sleep. ... Suddenly she was the centre of the scene, the vanishing-point upon which everything converged, suddenly it was she for whom these patterns and these shades had been arranged with such meticulous artlessness: that white cloth on the polished glass, the leaning, blue-green tree, the frilled ferns, even those little clouds, trying to seem not to move, high up in the limitless marine sky.

n
All is not darkness; the memories bring back those long ago days of lightness. Thus, there are furtive moments of carefree recollection that appear to console our protagonist:
n  

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much a matter of simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously 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.

n
I have always loved the sea with its ever changing tides and undercurrents, and its massive waters always invoked sentiments of peace or turbulence in me; never of melancholy and sorrow. Thus, Banville through Max seems to view a different sea from mine. No matter what sea we contemplate: a lush tropical one or Max’s frigid and bleak one, the differences persist. Could a more austere sea invoke the sentiments Max tells us in his narrative? No, I do not think it comes from the sea but from inside. And it seems frozen by the winds of gloom in Max’s heart. However, there are rare moments of peace and hopefulness, even if short lived. And ultimately he returns to his sufferings and the loss that so ravaged him.
n  

We forgave each other for all that we were not. What more could be expected, in this vale of torments and tears? Do not look so worried, Anna said, I hated you, too, a little, we were human beings, after all. Yet for all that, I cannot rid myself of the convictions that we missed something, that I missed something, only I do not know what it might have been.

n
Thus, Anna tried to liberate Max of his guilt. Yes, we are allowed to hate those we love; and if we can hate is solely because we loved. That’s how human beings can form relationships, by being truthful to themselves. However, Max was not ready to give up on his guilt that still hangs on together with his memories of Anna.

Still drowning in his grief, from his hard and recent loss, we read and feel for its inevitability, like the tide that stops for nothing, and Max unavoidable memories hurt and haunt him. His memories only escalate his sentiment of gloom and remorse. I have to confess that this was one of the scattered moments where I read more than the beauty of Banville well-chosen words; his suffering with the loss of his wife touched me deeply.
n  

I sat in the bay of the window and watched the day darken. Bare trees across the road were black against the last flares of the setting sun, and the rooks in a raucous flock were wheeling and dropping, settling disputatiously for the night. I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her.

n
However, Max not ready yet to let Anna go, calls for her in his immense sadness, like a sinking boat that is missing the saving grace of a gracious wind that picks up on the waves of forgetfulness, which would push him to a safe shore and acceptance.
n  

I said something, some fatuous thing such as Don't go, or Stay with me, but again she gave that impatient shake of the head, and tugged my hand to draw me closer. "They are stopping the clocks," she said, the merest threat of a whisper, conspiratorial. "I have stopped time." And she nodded, a solemn, knowing nod, and smiled, too, I would swear it was a smile.

n
Alas, all Banville’s lyrical and bittersweet chronicle left me with plenty of beautiful quotes. Yes, I was carried away by his lyricism and kept going between quotes. Banville mostly gives us poetry in prose. However, I felt Banville's eloquence and his gorgeously passionate way of phrasing what he wants to say somehow impacts adversely on his storytelling ability. I recently read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and there her lyricism worked because that was what she aimed to do. There was no storyline, no plot and it worked perfectly. No so here, I felt Banville’s characters suffered from the weight of his lyrical prose. I ended loving it for its poetry but not loving it so much for his characters. Yes, Max is not the kind of protagonist I appreciate. Yes, the themes are explored to the fullest. Yes, Banville tells his tale alluringly, with a delightful language that few writers can glue together. Yes, I loved the theme, it's profound reflections on love, loss, regret, and the role memory plays in the grieving process. His insights are certainly great literature. But it left me wanting more, wanting a protagonist I could fully comprehend and grasp. Perhaps it is not so terrible to be left wanting more, hence do not judge me harshly for my dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, highly recommended.
___

“Elegiac” is one of those literary adjectives, having to do with death. You get your fill of that with this one. Hell, the main character is named Max Morden, so what do you expect? Unfortunately, the better written an elegiac novel is, the sadder it seems.

Banville, it’s fair to say, is a writer’s writer. This one got him a Booker Prize, so, lit cred out the wazoo, right? (I love playing the lowbrow in the face of such splendid erudition.) Actually, I can see how highbrows might value The Sea for its craft. It had sentences with lots of commas and a discernably tuneful cadence. It was structured well, too, switching often among settings: his boyhood summers in a seaside town, obsessed by young love; his last year with his charming, though human, wife; and his visit again to the sea as an older man with his memories and a bottle. The atmosphere was dense in a foggy sort of way.

I’m debating between 3 and 4 stars. When I think back, maybe it was a little too lyrical for my taste (which surprised me because I don’t remember feeling that way with the other Banville book I read, The Untouchable). At some level, I could appreciate the pain and the verity, but I’m not sure I really wanted to. Three it is.

I think there's a big difference between literature and fiction, and this book is a perfect example - as is obvious from the number of negative reviews posted on this website! Some books can be read purely for their entertainment value. We like reading them because the plots and settings and characters capture our interest. That's what fiction does. But some books provide an additional dimension for readers who are willing to put a little more time and thought into what they are reading and who enjoy digging a little deeper below the plot line to think about the things that motivate the characters to behave the way they do. Those of us who who are looking for more than plot and characterization in a good book, tend to be intrigued by the way authors use language and amazingly enough we actually enjoy discovering new words even though it means looking them up in a dictionary!! Banville's writing is going to be lost on a lot of readers because it's much more than a work of fiction. But for the rest of us, it's a great example of why we love to read in the first place....it's because we love to see our language used so beautifully in the hands of a writer who has such deep insights into some of the great themes that good literature has always dealt with. This is one of those books. It's a profound reflection on love,loss,regret, and the role memory plays in the grieving process. Those who love to read because they enjoy thinking about the insights to be found in books that are beautifully written will most likely love this book. Obviously not everyone reads for that reason, which is fine for them....but for the rest of us it's easy to see why Banville is considered such a fine writer.

Ah, the sea - especially the smell of the sea, a phrase as familiar as the idea that aromas have a visceral power to exhume memories we didn’t know we had ever had and lost.

Smells of all sorts permeate the pages of this book and waft up, creating a synaesthetic connection to people and places in Max’s life. My second-hand paper book added a medley of vague aromas of its own. Not something to read on Kindle (though for me, nothing is).

Scents

This is an intensely sensual book, but not in the usual sense. It’s about the power of one of the senses, smell, in the context of bereaved reminiscence. Max frequently mentions the smell of things. Not all are pleasant, but they colour his memories in a profound way.

Smell and taste are interdependent. Unlike the other senses, it’s almost impossible to describe them except in comparison with other smells and tastes - hence wines with undertones of apricot, accents of peat, and aftertaste of daisies. I think it’s also why it's so difficult to remember, let alone imagine smells at will. One's mind's eye and ear are so much more biddable. Even touch is easier to recall and describe. Banville prompted me to to try, though.

Sit or lie somewhere comfortable, quiet, and dark. Touch is easy: start by noticing what you can actually feel: the curve of the chair, the fabric and seams of your clothes, the warmth of the sun on your skin.

Then remember or imagine touches: the shrill blast of a strong salt sea breeze on your face, stroking the soft silky fur of a cat, the abrasion of warm, wet, sand between your toes.

Now add sights and sounds: the view of the ocean and howl of the wind, the purring of the inscrutable black cat, the colour of the sand and the hiss of the waves coming down on it. You can see and hear and feel it all.

But smell and taste? Much harder. Think of a favourite food (siu mai). You can see it, you can feel its texture, and hear the sound as you bite into it. But can you describe, let alone experience its taste and smell?

Maybe it’s precisely because smells don’t readily convert to similes and metaphors that they are such powerful triggers?

Back to the book...

Narrators: Banville = Morden = Cleave?

“We sought to escape from an intolerable present in the only tense possible, the past.”

Max Morden is barely distinguishable from Alex Cleave in the Eclipse, Shroud, Ancient Light trilogy (Ancient Light reviewed HERE), who is apparently rather similar to Banville. Max and Alex narrate in exactly the same rambling, occasionally introspective, self-centred, curmudgeonly, largely guilt-free, and invariably misogynistic voice. The writing is sweet and sour. And beautiful.

Fluency disguises an underlying inarticulacy in the face of recent and ancient tragedies, where “the cruel complacency of ordinary things” is epitomised by “tight-lipped awkwardness” of furniture, and for the people involved, “From this day forward, all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.” Even the land is inarticulate: “Marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking desperately towards the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.” And web-toed Myles is literally mute: “Being alone with Myles was like being in a room which someone had just violently left. His muteness was a pervasive and cloying emanation.”

Both narrators are forever questioning their own motives and pointing out the inconsistencies of their memories: “It has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present”. As an art historian, Max is familiar with touching up portraits: “Memories are always eager to match themselves seamlessly to the things and places of a revisited past”

Alex, and especially Max, are trying to write. They both have a problematic daughter, referred to by two names beginning with C. Both had, or fantasised about, a youthful relationship with a mother figure, the similarly named Mrs Grace and Mrs Gray. And in this case, the inadvertent temptress even offers him an apple.

Most importantly, both have past and present tragedies, and revisit the former to understand and cope with the latter.

The ending is rushed (too many events and revelations) and I do not like Max or Alex - to the extent I almost wonder why I like these books: “With women, wait long enough and one will have one’s way” and his reveries are “in the unvarying form of pursuit and capture and violent overmastering”! Nevertheless, Banville’s skill is such that I have some sympathy for them, and I want to know their stories.

Quotes - Smells

* t“My daughter… usually has no smell at all” unlike her mother, “whose feral reek, for me the stewy fragrance of life itself, and which the strongest perfume could not quite suppress, was the thing that first drew me to her.”

* t“In her last months, she smelt, at her best, of pharmacopoeia.”

* t“The cool thick secret smell of milk made me think of Mrs Grace.”

* t“A mingled smell of spilt beer and stale cigarette smoke.”

* t“As I was heaving myself over in a tangle of sheets… I caught a whiff of my own warm cheesy smell.”

* t“She smelled of sweat and cold cream and, faintly, of cooking fat.”

* t“A whiff of her sweat-dampened civet scent.”

* t“Her milk-and-vinegar smell.”

* t“Little animals we were, sniffing at each other. I liked in particular… the cheesy tang in the crevices of her elbows and knees… In general she gave off… a flattish, fawnish odour, like that which comes out of, which used to come out of, empty biscuit tins in shop.”

* tRecently bereaved, new places are “like a wedding suit smelling of moth-balls and no longer fitting.”

* t“Peppermints… the faint sickly smell of which pervades the house”.

* t“The squat black gas stove sullen in its corner and smelling of the previous lodger’s fried dinners.”

* t“The smell in the hall was like the smell of my breath when I breathed and rebreathed it into my cupped hands.”

* t“Smells of exhaust smoke, the sea, the garden’s autumn rot.”

* tRailway “giving off its mephtic whiff of ash and gas.”

* tIn a tree, “at this height the breeze… smelling of inland things, earth, and smoke, and animals”.

* tAn abandoned beach hut, “smelling of old urine”.

* tOn the point of death, “her breath gave off a mild, dry stink, as of withered flowers”.

Quotes - Sea

* t"The waves clawed at the suave sand along the waterline, scrabbling to hold their ground but steadily failing."

* t“Lead-blue and malignantly agleam.”

* t"A white seabird, dazzling against the wall of cloud, flew up on sickle wings and turned with a soundless snap and plunged itself, a shutting chevron, into the sea's unruly back."

* t“The seabirds rose and dived like torn scraps of rag.”

* t“The salt-sharpened light.”

* t“By the sea, there is a special quality to the silence at night… It is like the silence that I knew in the sickrooms of my childhood… It is a place like the place where I feel that I am now, miles from anywhere, and anyone.”

* t“Hearing the monotonously repeated ragged collapse of waves down on the beach.”

Quotes - Memories, Aging, Past, Future

* t“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

* t“I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself.”

* t“These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses, it is a sort of homeopathic cure… Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again… But no, that’s not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.”

* t“The image that I hold of her in my head is fraying, bits of pigment, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off.”

* t“Happiness was different in childhood… a matter of simple accumulation, of taking things… and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.”

Quotes - Other

* t"To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth, and cower there, hidden from the sky's indifferent gaze and the harsh air's damagings."

* t“Rust has reduced its struts to a tremulous filigree.” A gate.

* tThe wink of a new neighbour, “jaunty, intimate and faintly satanic”.

* t“The smile she reserved for him [husband], sceptical, tolerant, languidly amused.”

* t“The chalet that we rented was a slightly less than life-sized wooden model of a house.”

* tFather returns “in a wordless fury, bearing the fruits of his day like so much luggage clutched in his clenched fists.”

* t“Their unhappiness was one of the constants of my earliest years, a high, unceasing buzz just beyond hearing… I loved them, probably. Only they were in my way, obscuring my view of the future. In time I would be able to see right through them, my transparent parents.”

* t“Even from inside the car we could hear the palms on the lawn in from dreamily clacking their dry fronds.”

* t“Despite the glacial air a muted hint of past carousings lingered.”

* t“Beyond the smouldering sunlight there is the placid gloom of indoors.”

* t“Perhaps all life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

* t“Light of summer thick as honey fell from the tall windows and glowed on the figured carpets.”

* t“That fretful, dry, papery rustle that harbinges autumn.”

* t“The Godhead for me was a menace, and I responded with fear and its inevitable concomitant, guilt.” But that’s as a child.

* t“Devout as holy drinkers, dipped our faces towards each other… I tasted her urgent breath.”

* t“It was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving.”

* t“The open doorway from which a fat slab of sunlight lay fallen at our feet. Now and then a breeze from outside would wander in absent-mindedly.”

* t"For even at such a tender age I knew there is always a lover and a loved, and knew which one, in this case, I would be.”

* t“A series of more or less enraptured humiliations. She accepted me as a supplicant at her shrine with disconcerting complacency… Her willful vagueness tormented and infuriated me.”

* t“Is this not the secret aim of all of us, to be no longer flesh but transformed utterly into the gossamer of unsuffering spirit?”

* t“A chintz-covered sofa sprawls as if aghast, its two arms flung wide and cushions sagging… Piano, its lid shut, stands against the back wall as if in tight-lipped resentment of its gaudy rival opposite.”

* t“The canned audience doing our laughing for us.”

* t“The polished pewter light of the emptied afternoon.”
“The copper-coloured light of the late-autumn evening.”

* t“Puddles on the road that now were paler than the sky, as if the last of day were dying in them.”

* t“Drowning is the gentlest death.”

See Also The Sea, The Sea

I was strongly reminded of this Banville book (and also his Ancient Light) when I read Iris Murdoch's one from 30 years earlier: the title, setting, the narrator's character and introspection. See my review HERE. Banville is more lyrical, slightly less philosophical, and Morden less unpleasant.


Image source of nose sculpture on a beach at Colmslie Beach Reserve in Brisbane:
http://www.weekendnotes.com/im/002/05...

Originally recommended by Dolors, in relation to The Sense of an Ending. Her review of this is here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Max Morden is getting old. He has just lost his wife, Anna, and his efforts to deal with that loss cause him to revisit a past that predates her. I expect he is seeking the beginning, the source of who he is, the shaping of himself, a self that he isn’t sure he is at all pleased with.

I could relate to Max’s frantic grappling with death. I have reached that age when losing people has become far too frequent an occurrence. Beyond that, is the specter of his own death which hovers at his elbow, the realization that any one of us can be gone at any moment. In a world of constant change, one change is final and for each of us, things change no more.

”But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly changed, until the final most momentous change of all?”

I often find myself looking at ancient family photographs and being struck by the fact that every single person who ever knew or loved those people is gone. No one alive has one single memory of them. They are completely and truly erased. Not a moment of their lives belongs to the earth any longer, unless someone has taken an opportunity to write a shared memory down.

“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 their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations. I remember Anna, our daughter Claire will remember Anna and remember me, then Claire will be gone and there will be those who remember her but not us, and that will be our final dissolution.”

And, then the final question: Do we even know people when we do share our world with them? How much do we know or understand on one another or even ourselves?

”Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realize how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?”

The Sea leaves you with a lot to think about and a number of questions that seem to pertain to your own life as much as to Max’s. I believe Banville understands people in general and is able to translate that into an individual who is very specific. The story is unexciting and at times uninteresting, the characters boring and normal, the big surprises not very surprising. What makes it worthwhile, for me, are the themes that weave through it and remind us that we are Max; Max is us.

"And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination."Livro do desassossego, Fernando Pessoa

“Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it” proclaims Max Morten, narrator and main character of The Sea, after his wife Anna passes away victim of a long and enduring illness.
Drowning in the grief which comes with the vast and ruthless sea of loss, he decides to seclude himself in the little coastal village where he spent his summers as a boy. A flood of unavoidable memories charged with haunted emotion and digressive meditations recreate that dreamy atmosphere that only childhood can nurture. New found memories which serve to wash away his conflicting emotions between the impotence of witnessing life quietly fading away and the cruel complacency of ordinary things allowing death to happen indifferently.

But as Max invades his frozen memories he awakens ghosts long gone though never forgotten and the unsettling and seductive Grace twins, his childhood friends, will become sharply delineated on the wall of his memory, prompting unintended recollections about the strangeness and dislocation of one’s own existence and the immortal burden of being the survivor.
”You are not even allowed to hate me a little, any more, like you used to” says Anna to Max with a sad, knowing smile. Isn't it true that we can’t help hating the ones we love the most? We are human beings after all. And the guilt and the anger and the violence which come after our beloved have been irrevocably usurped from us, leaving us alone with all that self-disgust, with no one to save us from ourselves, hating them, the gone, even more.

Banville threads a complex pattern between the gratuitous dramas of memory, past traumas and an intolerable present which engages in eternal conflict with the enduring intensity of the natural world which, with all its ruthless beauty and nonchalance, mocks at our human insignificance. And it is precisely when we are devastated by this insurmountable, catastrophic truth that Banville's crafted poetry starts delivering rhythmic tides of controlled pleasure, dropping pearls of beauty, easing the sting of the meaningless words, holding us together, creating a new pregnant life full of wonder and possibilities.
I’m aware Banville's style might not appeal to every reader, he doesn't rush, he digresses languidly, teasing and eroding your perceptions relentlessly, his mortally serious ways can seem overdone, but I responded to his uncompromising tone, so graceful and precise. Poetry in prose.

Memories may say nothing but they are never silent, pulling and pushing, futilely turned the wrong way, urging us to be drowned and get lost in them, never to return. But somehow these little vessels of sadness, these sinking boats we all are, sailing in muffled silence in this hollow sea of impotence and disregard, manage to catch the smooth rolling swells coming from the deeps only to be lifted and carried away towards the shore as if nothing had happened. And as our feet touch the ground we realize that our lives have been, in spite of everything, in spite of ourselves, acts of pure love and only for that, they are worth living.

(…) and it was as if I were walking into the sea.

VICINO E LONTANO VEDO SEMPRE IL MARE



La vita era soprattutto silenzio allora, quando eravamo piccoli, o almeno così sembra adesso, un silenzio sospeso, uno stato vigile. Aspettavamo nel nostro mondo informe, scrutando il futuro allo stesso modo in cui il ragazzino e io ci eravamo scrutati a vicenda, come soldati sul campo, in attesa degli eventi.


L’omonimo film è del 2013 diretto da Stephen Brown.

Max, il protagonista io narrante, ha da poco superato i sessanta, da dodici mesi seppellito la moglie Anna, ha una figlia, Claire, alle cui telefonate preferisce non rispondere per concentrarsi meglio sul suo lutto.
E per dedicarsi meglio anche all’attività principale che sostiene l’intero romanzo.
Visto che Max è tornato nel luogo sulla costa irlandese dove ha passato le sue estati dell’infanzia – e in particolare una, quella dove conobbe e frequentò la famiglia Grace, i cui figli gemelli erano sua coetanei e la ragazzina, Chloe, è stata il suo primo amore - l’attività principale consiste nel rievocare ricordi.
Tirare fuori dalla scatola della memoria cartoline del passato, senza neppure ricorrere alle occasionali madeleine proustiane, ma semplicemente camminando per i luoghi di mezzo secolo prima, facendo confronti tra ieri e oggi, cercando di sostanziare il suo doloroso oggi con quello struggente ieri.


I coniugi Grace sono Rufuss Sewell e la magnifica Natascha McElhone.

Continuamente avanti e indietro nel tempo, ieri e oggi, oggi e ieri, ricordi memorie rimpianti nostalgia.
Elegante, raffinato, evocativo, ricercato: ma qui e là la costruzione traspare un po’ forzata e il risultato è di una certa artificiosità. Tutto sommato, sostanzialmente noiosino. Non il primo incontro con Banville che avrei sperato.


Ciarán Hinds è Max. Sua moglie Anna è interpretata da Sinéad Cusack. La padrona della villa I Cedri è Charlotte Rampling.

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma.

The Grace family appear that long ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon finds himself entangled in their lives, which are as seductive as they are unsettling. What ensues will haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that is to follow.

John Banville is one of the most sublime writers working in the English language. Utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, The Sea is quite possibly the best thing he has ever written.


My Review: The experience of reading Banville is akin to the experience of going to a whole museum dedicated to Renoir or Monet: At first, the awestruck lip-smacking chin-drooling moaning of readerly joy:

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 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. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam.

(p3, Picador hardcover edition)

This gorgeous, sumptuous repast, this unsettling, foreboding atmosphere, this unbearably tense muscle in the brain MUST be leading to some cathartic, catastrophic release! There is a great change coming, there is something to contrast this soft and lovely tone, this unsettling beauty, this pastry cream in a pool of custard frosted with whipped cream with. Well, now:

Could we, could I, have done otherwise? Could I have lived differently? Fruitless interrogation. Of course I could, but I did not, and therein lies the absurdity of even asking. Anyway, where are the paragons of authenticity against whom my concocted self might be measured? In those final bathroom paintings that Bonnard did of the septuagenarian Marthe he was still depicting her as the teenager he had thought she was when he first met her. Why should I demand more veracity of vision of myself than of a great and tragic artist?

(p218, Picador hardcover edition)

And there it is, the catharsis. Sorta kinda, anyway. As much as you'll be getting, so take it and like it. There's a backstory to the catharsis, but it's all written in the ever-so-much of a writer's writing, and like the sugary sweetness of Renoir and Monet, in large doses it simply doesn't wear all that well. One longs for a smudge of dirt on the painting, or a misplaced modifier in the sentence, or even no modifier at all. But no. No indeed, there is no surcease, and therefore there is surfeit.

Now if the assembled company will pardon me, I am off to eat plain zweiback, drink tap water, and stare at a blank wall for a while, until my senses are defatted.