“Me asombra, y me decepciona, e incluso diría que me aterra,por razones que se me hacen oscuras, pues ¿por qué iba a desear algún cambio,yo que he vuelto para vivir entre los escombros del pasado? “

“¿Cómo es que de niño todo lo nuevo que llamaba mi atención poseía el aura de lo misterioso, teniendo en cuenta que, según todas las autoridades, lo misterioso no es algo nuevo, sino algo ya conocido, que regresa en una forma diferente, convertido en fantasma? De tantas cosas sin respuesta, esta es la menos importante.”

“¿Hay conciencia en el reino de Plutón, entre las inmensidades inexploradas por las que vago perdido, como Orfeo sin lira?”

“Déjame en paz, le grito a mi fuero interno, deja que pase de largo por la vieja y vilipendiada pensión de los cedros, que pasé junto al desaparecido café playa, que pase de largo por los Lupinos y el prado que fue, que pase de largo por este pasado, pues si me detengo seguramente me disolveré en un vergonzoso charco de lágrimas”

“Cierto, algo de nosotros permanecerá, una fotografía desvaída, un mechón de pelo, unas pocas huellas, unos cuantos átomos en el aire de la habitación donde exhalamos nuestro último aliento, y no obstante nada de eso será nosotros, lo que somos y lo que fuimos, sino solo el polvo de los muertos. “

Al principio da la sensación de haber llegado tarde a la trama, como si de alguna forma te colocasen en medio de un caos que no entiendes. Poco a poco se va aclarando todo, dejando paso a los recuerdos de una población costera, con sus alegrías, sus dolores y sus incertidumbres.
Se nota la influencia de Nabokov en cada página, pero no como un mero imitador sin ningún tipo de habilidad. Si no como una obra inteligente y muy bien escrita. Los fantasmas de los recuerdos llenan cada paisaje de esta obra, los personajes son en su mayoría recuerdos. Todo esto, con un paisaje de fondo, el mar.

Me ha parecido casi un cuadro, una obra que nos acompaña en cada pincelada, terminando de la mejor forma con la que se puede consolar al lector.
Me ha encantado cada detalle, cada recuerdo, el cuadro entero. Se nota que el escritor tiene un buen bagaje literario. Sin duda, habría sido una buena candidata para el premio Nobel.
Merece todo el tiempo que le he dedicado.

“The autumn sun fell slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.”

The longer I pause before writing anything about this book, the more I think I should read it again, before writing anything at all.

Suddenly I think I know what Chloe was thinking when she went into the water that day (and Myles followed, as he always did). Yes, I do.

The Sea gains more stars the more I ponder it. With time, I almost forget how furious I was at the constant need for my dictionary. Was this some Old Etonian joke? Then (ha ha) he pretends to forget the name of the very common Duputren’s contractures as he describes them in the Colonel’s hand.

But then I am charmed with another detail about the Colonel:
“There is a spread too that he prepares himself, he calls it slap, khaki-coloured goo involving anchovies, curry powder, a great deal of pepper, and other, unnamed things; it smells, curiously, of dog. ‘A great scourer for the bag.’ he says. It took me a while to realise that this bag of which he often speaks, though never in Miss V’s presence, is the stomach and environs. He is ever alive to the state of the bag.

All is forgiven when the narrator, curmudgeon that he is, reminds of my beloved father who would say things like: “I think God is angry at me because he knows I don’t believe in him.” ARB

“I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”

I seem to have read a lot of books like this recently - stories about memory and loss, recalling various unconnected events from one's life, reflecting on the power of remembrance and nostalgia. These books are generally very well-received and have often won awards; it sometimes feels like the combination of these themes with florid language is a foolproof formula for critical acclaim. In this case, our narrator is Max, an middle-aged man who, mourning his wife, returns to a seaside town he visited as a child. There he recalls one particular summer which found him becoming entranced by a well-off family, the Graces, staying in the same resort. The narrative constantly switches between the present day and that summer, as well as visiting other significant events in Max's life; thoughts of his parents, scenes from his wife's physical decline. His obsession with the Grace family, however, dominates, particularly his fascination with twins Chloe and Myles and his sexual awakening in the form of a crush on their mother Connie.

While I found this book to be full of gorgeous prose (Banville's writing is often called 'sumptuous', and I think this is an accurate description), it totally failed to capture my interest. There isn't much of a plot, which I don't think should necessarily be an issue with a book like this, but nothing else about the story is exciting or resonant enough to compensate for it. The story of the Graces has a tragic ending, but a weirdly anticlimactic one, perhaps because nothing seems like it's actually going to lead to anything dramatic. I also felt there was an unpleasantly sexist tone to Max's narrative, and with stories like this one, it's always impossible to know whether such things are intentional or not. There was just something about the way every woman's physical appearance was analysed and critiqued in great detail, while the male characters were barely described, that irked me. The actual descriptions themselves, often making the women sound repulsive (Max writes about being disappointed in his adult daughter Claire's unattractiveness and speculates that she is probably still a virgin) and focusing heavily on smell and bodily excretions, also seem somewhat misogynistic. Or, if not that, just generally unpleasant anyway.

In many ways The Sea reminded me of Anne Enright's The Gathering - both are set in Ireland, both deal with the aftermath of a loved one's death and involve extensive recollection/reconstruction of memories from childhood and family history, both are written in a flowing lyrical style that cuts between past and present, and both won the Booker prize. However, I found Enright's novel much more engaging, and comparisons with it only serve to make this seem even less satisying. A beautifully crafted piece of writing, but one that left me cold.

How have I missed John Banvlle? He was totally unknown to me. Months ago I read a review of Mrs. Osmond which peaked my interest. Since that book was unavailable at the library I thought I'd try an older Banville book, hence, The Sea. This was a disappointment turned into a wonderful surprise.

Banville is just the kind of author I love.He is a master of language. So many sentences are so beautifully contructed you want to read them over and over. I often think when I read authors of Banville's talent, "I have seen that or I have felt that, but I couldn't express it so adequately."

As I read this book I couldn't help but notice similarities to Julian Barnes' A Sense of an Ending and The Only Story. The writing also reminded me of Ian McEwen, although I can't recollect a McEwen novel with a similar theme. Is it just that all the above authors are older, from the U.K. and express ideas so well, or is it something more? Do I love the writing of all three because being of a similar age I ponder and reflect on the same concerns - the authenticity of memory, disappointment in the adult self, regrets, youth, and mortality to name just some? Regardless, I will read Banville's other books and figure it all out (or not).

--- Trigger warnings: rape, sexual violence, death

On its face, The Sea by John Banville is the story of Max Morden, a sixty-one-year-old widower mourning the death of his wife, Anna. But about half-way through I have come to think of this as the story of someone who mourns his own life, and who recounts the childhood memories that have formed him into who he is.

I never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone. I know what I mean. Anna, I saw at once, would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made right.

The question I am left with now, anyway, is precisely the question of knowing. Who, if not ourselves, were we? All right, leave Anna out of it. Who, if not myself, am I? The philosophers tell us that we are defined and have our being through others. Is a rose red in the dark?

After fifty years and the death of his wife, Max Morden has come back to the beach resort of his childhood holidays where he met the Grace family – the twins Chloe and Myles, and the parents Carlo and Connie –, when he was eleven years old, and who in a profound way have shaped the man he was to become. He has come back to the demons of his past, the happenings which made him who he is.

Who is Max Morden? Well, to be absolutely frank, he is a misanthropic, sexist, and horrible human being. He belittles his daughter and leaves her alone in her sorrow of losing a mother, selfishly seeing only his own sadness and loss. He is obsessed with what he perceives as his daughter's and other women's ugliness in appearance. (Needless to say, he describes himself as “smooth and not unhandsome – I am being modest”.)

As I understand the story and the character of Max, a lot of resentment towards women and women's bodies come from his relationships to Chloe Grace and her mother Connie. In a strikingly honest moment during a picnic with the Graces, he describes being aroused by Connie's adult tanned body, her black swimsuit, and being titillated by her inner thighs. Living in fear of sin, he at once blames Connie for his arousal, calling her a “demon tempress”. His own lust is at once turned on its head, and he frames himself a victim of a woman's sexuality (bear in mind: Connie Grace did nothing to tempt him. Her only 'fault' here is having a body.)
Max then falls in love and begins a relationship of tentative sexual contact with Connie's daughter Chloe, who is the same age as he is. She mistreats him physically and mentally, beating him and pressuring him to intimidate and beat other boys on the beach. In one scene, just after he helps Chloe and her twin brother Myles beat another boy he comes to a realisation:

I had the urge of running after him and put a hand on his shoulder, not so I might apologize or try to excuse myself for helping to humiliate him, but to make him look at me again, or, rather, to make him withdraw that other look, to negate it, to wipe the record of it from his eye. For I found intolerable the thought of being known in the way that he seemed to know me. Better than I knew myself. Worse.

The summer turns solemn when Max mistakenly thinks that Rose Vavasour, the Grace’s nanny, is having an affair with Carlo Grace. He confides this to Chloe, who in turn confides this to her twin brother Myles. The two of them commit suicide by drowning in the sea. Max Morden still, after these many years, bears this dull burden. (Banville may have chosen the name Morden because it means 'to murder' in German. He alludes to this logic in a similar case of Anna's doctor being named Mr. Todd, nicknaming him Mr. De'Ath, because, as Max points out, Tod is the German word for 'death'.)
Upon his visit to the beach resort he meets Rose Vavasour who tells him that it was not Carlo she loved but Connie. Max is stunned, realizes his mistake and its consequences. He barely recovers his equanimity, and feels the burden of death the same way as he did when he walked into the hospital after his wife died, as if he is “walking into the sea.”

Whether or not Max Morden ever changed since that summer fifty years ago, whether, as he says, Anna helped him correct the distortions of his personality, we do not find out. Yet we do know that after Anna's death, he is the same boy he was before.


I have to say, I really struggled with his book. I came into it confident that I would love it. I just finished You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie, a personal and emotional account of grief and loss, so I was ready to get stuck into Banville's account. And I did not care for it. At all.
There are some honest, raw and vulnerable passages about dealing with grief:

Have I spoken of my drinking? I drink like a fish. No, not like a fish, fishes do not drink, 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.

Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I cannot bear the way she looks at me these days, all tenderness and daughterly concern, her head held to one side in just the way that Anna used to, one eyebrow lifted and her forehead wrinkled solicitously. I do not want solicitude. I want anger, vituperation, violence.

But I cannot stop to wonder as to the motivation of Max Morden. Why does he go back to remember the summer of fifty years ago? Certainly it is not to confront his demons. He lacks the emotional maturity to actually face his past. He recounts the stories, he drowns in the memories, yet why does he do it? To know, to feel his motivations would have greatly improved this novel. As it stands, it is an account of someone who – I feel – does not seem genuine in the sense that he is not a real human being. Max Morden, and in extention this novel, is going nowhere in terms of insight into the inner workings of his soul. To my mind, in consequence, this novel has no soul.


Oh, and one last thing, can we just briefly mention a certain sex fantasy real quick:

The thought of all that tensed and tensely quivering naked flesh, untrammelled save by the marmoreal folds of a robe or a wisp of gauze fortuitously placed – fortuitous, perhaps, but fully and frustratingly as protective of modesty as Rose's beach towel or, indeed, Connie Grace's swimsuit – glutted my inexperienced but already overheating imagination with reveries of love and love's transgressions, all in the unvarying form of pursuit and capture and violent overmastering.

Wow! Now that was the most nonchalant mention of a rape fantasy I've ever seen. To hell with you, Max Morden.

Contrary to most reviewers, I wasn’t all that impressed by the prose; in fact it may have been a point of distraction for me. It’s certainly elegant, but it feels overwrought and lacking in character. Banville frequently sacrifices clarity of meaning for the sake of an offbeat word or original turn of phrase (I recall one awkward instance of the word “twelvemonth”, meaning year). I don’t ordinarily have a problem with this kind of writing – in fact it often appeals to me – except in this case it didn’t seem all that capably brought about. There were so many shoehorned adjectives and adverbs, an over-description of mundane and recognisable items, a certain overused anthropomorphism of natural and inanimate occurrences, such as imbuing the chiming of a clock or the beating of the sun with emotional intent: it all felt like an attempt to instil a sense of movement and vitality into an otherwise very flat, very small story. There were indeed some lovely sentences, but I felt the most personally affected when the interjection of an occasional loose or course phrase broke apart the monotony.

The novel itself is a perceptive study of a flawed character, exploring some interesting aspects of this time of reflection. There were many elements I enjoyed: of the narrator grappling with grief, his complex relationship with his wife, and the retrospective examination of the ways in which feelings and ambitions can be moulded, and change throughout the course of one’s life (or perhaps this constitutes less a change than an acknowledgement of earlier self-deception). I found the climax of the story (if it can be so-called) to be uninspired and not really credible in the context of the world that the novel had established. In fact it seemed somewhat superfluous, and came across to me as a last-ditch effort to make a mark, and leave the reader with a plot point by which to recall and justify the novel. The fact is, if all the disparate relationships and events described up to that point had not been sufficient to give overall significance and purpose to the novel, a final surprise plot twist certainly wasn't going to do it.

“The waves clawed at the suave sand along the waterline, scrabbling to hold their ground but steadily failing.”

To be at sea. It means to have lost your bearings, like a ship adrift in the ocean. While grieving for his recently-departed wife, Max Morden visits a place from his childhood loaded with intense memories. He embodies that lost at sea state of mind, and in this novel we observe what brought him to that point, and his half-hearted attempts to survive it.

“There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.”

Max is an art historian. He describes beauty for a living, so it’s no surprise that as he muses over his memories, his story assumes a similar shape. If you have ever taken an art history course, you may have experienced the joy of studying a scene--sometimes for days on end--seeing well beyond the composition. You observe the appearance of light and texture, the use of line and shades of color. The more you look at it, the more the art comes alive, stroke by stroke.

“Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off.”

John Banville writes in a style that almost forces me to take in his prose this way, like studying a painting. I had to read most of the book sentence by sentence, letting the beauty of the prose sink in. He doesn’t bury symbols or force you to solve puzzles, like some poetic novels I’ve read. He brings it all to the surface, with his extraordinary ability to describe in words.

There was a plot, and revelations at the end you may or may not suspect. But the joy of this book is the experience of reading the words. I don’t think the characters from this novel will necessarily stay with me, but what will stay is something much more important: the desire to look deeply. At everything.

“Really, one might almost live one’s life over, if only one could make a sufficient effort of recollection.”

I read this years ago, but it is time to bring my review to Goodreads.

The Man Book Prizer winner for 2005. Not that that should impress the reader. Not all prize winners are good books. Sometimes they are complex, and difficult to read.

The Sea is a small book, only 195 pages. So rare these days. I wish all books were short. I read so many of them.

This story is about Max, recently widowed, who takes a trip to the coast where he vacationed as a child with his parents.

He reminisces about a summer he spent with a family in Ballyless, his wife's illness, gets a concussion after falling down drunk on his way home from a local pub, and his daughter comes to get him and take him home. The end.

Not very plot-driven, right?

It's the passages in-between that grab you.

The thoughts about time and memory and aging. And character.

Maybe less sympathetic.

Maybe not even all that likable.

But, the ending...the surprise of it all.

Will that help us understand Max? 3.5 stars.

اسطوره های یونانی ناشناخته میان کاکایی های در حال پرواز بر فراز ساحل. باد، رطوبت، ابر، خاکستری. بو. بوی رطوبت و نا. رایحه‌های بیشمار. آدمهای نفرین شده و آبستن حوادث ناگوار. شخصیت های شیدا و داغدیده. متنی شکسپیر گونه و فاخر. غم و فراق. و البته خودآگاهی بی نظیر راوی که گویا در اتاق روان شناسی به خلسه ای فرو رفته و برون ریزی میکند.
اینها آنچیزی است که از کتاب برای همیشه در ذهنم باقی میماند.
گویا متن زبان اصلی این کتاب مملو از واژگان فاخر و نثر با شکوه شکسپیر طور است که اسدالله امرائی (مترجم) هم تا جایی که توانسته از لغات مهجور و ثقیل در ازای کلمات اصلی استفاده کرده است تا بخشی از آن متن فاخر را به خواننده منتقل کند. که البته از نظر موفق نبوده. شاید هم یکی از دلایل انتخاب این رمان به عنوان برنده ی جایزه من بوکر 2005 همین زبان رمان باشد. متن ترجمه شده مانند نسخه ی مصنوعی یک قهرمان است. پیکری که فاقد روح و جنبش و فراز و فرود است.
همانقدر که میشود لذت خواندن شعری در زبان ترجمه شده را عیناً درک کرد، میتوان از زبانِ این کتاب هم لذت برد.
القصه،
راویِ پیر این کتاب (مکس موردن) ما را به دنیای خاطراتش میبرد. به سالها پیش و ویلایی که در آن در نوجوانی (حدودا 10 یا 11 ساله) با خانواده ای تقریبا متمول آشنا شده است. خانواده ی گریس: آقا و خانم گریس و دو قلوهای همسن و سال مکس، کلوئه و مایلز و البته رز، که مربی جوان بچه ها است. مکس در عالم نوجوانی دلداده ی این خانواده شده و اکثر اوقاتش را با آنها میگذرانده.
اما حالا پس از گذشت سالها از آن دوران، اتفاقی ناگوار (مرگ همسرش) او را به همراه دخترش، به همان دریا و همان ویلا و همان روستای دوران نوجوانی اش بر میگرداند. در این بازگشت عملا تک تک خاطرات با خانواده گریس مرور میشود. تک به تک رازهای رابطه ها و عشقها برای خواننده بر ملا میشود. راوی هیچ ابایی ندارد تا لایه های تاریک و مزورانه ی شخصیتش را فاش کند.

کتاب به دو بخش مجزا تقسیم شده است: یک بخش ابتدایی که روالی کُند و بی رمق دارد و کمی هم خسته کننده است که در آن به معرفی خاطرات نوجوانی پرداخته. بخش دوم مربوط به زمان حال و بازدید از روستای قدیمی پرداخته میشود و بازیابی بخشهایی تاریک از خاطراتی که در بخش اول تنها شاهد سطح ماجرا بوده ایم. در بخش دوم در واقع از سطوح ترسیم شده عبور میکنیم و لایه های زیرین شخصیت ها و روابط و اتفاقات را درک میکنیم.

به سلیقه ی من بخش دوم جاندارتر و ملموس تر و جذاب تر بود.

Reread review, 10/'23:

As indicated below, I read first this almost 8 years ago, while my sister was in a coma, with a 50/50 chance of survival - so NOT the most optimal of circumstances (she survived and is fine). But I always thought this deserved a second chance - and am happy to say it lived up to my shadowy remembrance of its greatness.

It's very similar, in tone and plot even, to Julian Barnes' fellow Booker winner, The Sense of an Ending, so together I think of these as rather quintessential 'Booker books'. Banville's prose, even on the sentence level, is really exquisite, and although at first glance it might seem as though he wanders a bit plot-wise, by the final page you are astonished at how much control he is exerting over the proceedings, with every 'clue' meted out at just precisely the correct moment.

After the reread, I watched the 2013 film adaptation, the screenplay of which Banville wrote himself, starring the formidable Ciarán Hinds and film goddess Charlotte Rampling. At a brisk 80 minutes, the film lacks the complexities and nuances of the book, but is still a fairly good adaptation and well worth watching on its own merits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDICu...

Original review, 1/'17:

4.5 Because I took an unconscionably long time to read this in the midst of winter holidays and a family health crisis, I wasn't really able to give it the full concentration it richly deserves, so I hope to return to it one day with a clearer mind. However, there is no mistaking Banville's glorious prose, and I fully intend to also read other of his works in the near future.

Max Morden returns to the scene of a childhood event that has haunted him ever since. He is melancholic after the death of his wife and wants to make sense of his life. He turns to alcohol for solace.

The book flits between the long ago summer and episodes in his life with his wife. As it slowly unfolds we see the wooing and wedding of his wife and her fatal diagnosis and descent into death. Simultaneously we see the events of the boyhood summer and the beginnings of a first romance, together with infidelity and intrigue amongst the grownups - events that he does not fully understand.

The return to the house where much of the tempestuous summer occurred rakes up old ghosts but sheds not a lot of light.

I liked the pace and language of this book, it's gentle probing of old and new wounds - and I was impressed by the ending, which surprised and delighted even as it perpetuated the fog of misunderstood memories

Prose style: 2
Plot : 2
Depth of characters: 2
Overall sense of aesthetic: 1
Originality: 3
Entertaining: 1
Emotional Reaction: 1
Intellectual Stimulation: 3
Social Relevance: 2
Writerly Inspiration: 1

Average = 1.8

I think this suffers from one basic writerly technique; describe what something is, not what something is like. If there were characters, a story or some kind of dramatic tension in this pile of high brow prattle, it was buried underneath the weight of endless adjectives and billowy sentences. I began to really affirm my position that a large vocabulary doesn't add up to tremendous writing. In fact the two are almost mutually exclusive. There are many fantastic works of literature that draw from an incredible amount and complexity of words; Lolita, Infinite Jest, Absalom, Absalom!(okay, sure debatable).
But as Papa Ernest proved time and time again "big words don't mean big emotions!" That being said, I think it is important to expand your vocabulary so that you have more options to choose from. I don't think one should use large words for the sake of themselves. One should carefully pick so as to make the perfect turn of phrase in that specific dramatic moment. Or  your vocabulary is so big and your brain so large that you can write in any style, genre or situation!
The Sea isn't great literature. This is an author desperately trying to write great literature.
The book follows a man dealing with a traumatic loss and it jumps from time to time to simulate a man sifting through his memory to make sense of it all. Despite this justification of extreme leaps in time, it didn't bring me into the story at all. Instead it pushed me away. I had so little to grab onto. Maybe that was the point; to simulate the constant ethereal of water in the ocean. But again, it didn't make me feel anything for the characters or the plot lines.
I'm not done with Banville. I'm reading The Book of Evidence very soon. I've heard great things about it and I'm excited for it.
I was utterly disappointed by this one after all the gushing reviews of Banville's work. Oh well, off to  bigger and better things!