DNF/page 150.

A couple years ago I would have forced myself to plod through to the end, but reading time is too precious these days to squander on books that give zero enjoyment. I began reading this book in early January, and all I can say four months later is I’d prefer to re-read Anne Enright's The Gathering than attempt to finish this. Banville's prose is so deliberately manufactured and precise that it’s a struggle to form any kind of emotional response to the words. It’s like leafing through a set of elaborate geometric constructions versus looking at paintings – devoid of spontaneity, texture, and colour.

Όταν ένα βιβλίο καταφέρνει να κάμψει κάθε δυνατότητα αντίστασης στην εσωτερική, ατομική σύγκρουση της πένθιμης μνήμης, των λυγμών ενός ανίκητου πόνου, που βαθαίνει όσο παλιώνει και της αξόδευτης νοσταλγίας, προσωπικών εμπειριών, βιωματικής προσομοίωσης με την κοσμική θλίψη, με την εκούσια απομόνωση στην αξέχαστη ευτυχία της φυλακής ενός τραγικού παρελθόντος,
τότε εκεί, μονάχα εκεί,
σωπαίνουν οι στεναγμοί και οι θρήνοι απλώνονται στο χαρτί.
Αλλά με κάποιο τρόπο η ομορφιά της τέχνης, της γραφής, λυτρώνει, απελευθερώνει, λησμονεί
και γίνεται «θάλασσα», στοιχείο της φύσης που δεν παρεκκλίνει απο τους νόμους της, μια θάλασσα... για κάθε ζωική και πνευματική ύπαρξη.

Μια γραφή προωθητικής κατάστασης σε βαθμό κακουργηματικής αυτοπροστασίας είναι το διαμαντάκι τούτο.
Πεζογραφία που το μελάνι της καταριέται τον άλλο κόσμο, εκεί, που μάλλον,
ζουν οι αγαπημένοι,
όχι εδώ, ίσως γι’αυτό δοξολογεί τον επερχόμενο θάνατο, με δέος και ντροπιαστικό ενθουσιασμό,
με ανακλήσεις στιγμών και επικλήσεις παρέμβασης
στο αναπόδραστο, μάταια, απεγνωσμένα, πραγματικά.

Τότε, σίγουρα, μιλάμε για ένα εξαιρετικά σπουδαίο βιβλίο.
Με συγκλόνισε και με συνεπήρε εξ αρχής η τελετή δραματουργίας του Banville σε ένα έργο δίχως δράση, χωρίς αγωνία, δίχως πιεστικό ενδιαφέρον γεγονότων εξέλιξης.
Η ομορφιά της τέχνης που μιμείται την ζωή,
η ζωή που συντρίβεται απο την τέχνη σε μια ζοφερή αλήθεια,
σε μια «θάλασσα»σκοτεινή, παγωμένη, αναζωογονητική, τρομακτική, με ηδονές και οδύνες,
με χαρά και δάκρυα, με βροχές που λιάζονται στα κύματα, και με φεγγάρια που πνίγονται στις αιώνια ερωτικές παλίρροιες.
Ψυχές που αγαπήθηκαν, βουλιάζουν στον βυθό για να φέγγουν στα μνημόσυνα της ζωής, που δεν κατάφερε να σωθεί απο την ίδια της την ασάφεια, απο τον εαυτό της, απο την ίδια της την ύπαρξη.

Μία ακαταμάχητη, συγκινησιακή ομορφιά, όλο το κείμενο. Ένας μαγνήτης αναθεώρησης που ελκύει και απωθεί, που μιλάει με ερωτευμένες λέξεις και ποιητικές ζωγραφιές.
Οι γραμμές της ποίησης του συγγραφέα μεταφέρουν συναισθηματικές γνώσεις,
παρατηρήσεις ανθρωπιάς
σε ένα ρεύμα συνειδητοποίησης και ανάμειξης του πνιγμένου παρελθόντος που σοκάρει το παρόν που έκανε χημειοθεραπεία θανάτου, για ένα μέλλον που δεν ήρθε ακόμη μα του αφιερώνουμε ένα πλήρως εμπεριστατωμένο μνημόσυνο.

Το αγάπησα αυτό το πένθιμο ηχηρό ιστοριάκι, με άγγιξε, μου τέντωσε τους ψυχικούς μύες και με έσπρωξε σε μια περιδίνιση, σε έναν εσωτερικό μαίανδρο στο παρελθόν του, πότε κοντά και πότε μακριά απο τα λεγόμενα του.

Οι παροντικές αναμνήσεις του μου αποκάλυψαν την καταστροφή του, με οδήγησαν σε ένα κεντρικό καλοκαίρι σταθμό απο τα παλιά, πολύ παλιά χρόνια που διηγούνται την ιστορία των ηρώων, οι οποίοι με έφεραν και πάλι στο μελλοντικό παρόν.
Στις τελευταίες σελίδες η κορύφωση αποθεώνει και αποκαθηλώνει τα ηθικά διλήμματα, την εύθραυστη ανθρώπινη ταυτότητα, την υπαρξιακή ανασφάλεια που αντιλαμβάνεται την έλλειψη της ουσίας και την πυκνότητα της αγάπης, όταν το βάρος της αλήθειας εμποδίζει τον αγνοούμενο εαυτό να βρεθεί με το έτερο εγώ του.

Είναι πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα η απόκλιση στις βαθμολογίες των βιβλιόφιλων για το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο. Προσωπικά, βρήκα την πλούσια πρόζα του Μπανβιλ σαγηνευτική, εμπνευσμένη, συχνά συγκινητική, ταιριαστή με την πλοκή και το δράμα του ήρωα. Η οξυδερκής και διεισδυτική ματιά του συγγραφέα στα πρόσωπα και στις καταστάσεις, εντυπωσιακη. Πρόκειται για ένα βιβλίο 230 σελίδων, οπότε ο αργος ρυθμός και η έλλειψη δράσης δεν αποτελούν πρόβλημα, ίσα ίσα βρήκα τον ρυθμό άκρως επιτυχημένο.

Σημαντικά θέματα, συναίσθημα αλλα και φιλοσοφικής πνοής ανάλυση, δουλεμενη μέχρι την τελευταία λέξη γλώσσα (με λίγες σχετικά στιγμές όπου αυτή ξέφευγε), για μένα ένα σπουδαίο βιβλίο.

This 2006 novel's main character is a widower who returns to the seaside resort he used to visit when he was a child. Banville's an author who focuses on the interior mental states of Max Morden, his main character, who was a timid child and who became a cautious adult. In this book, Banville swirls Max through mixed memories of the seashore when he was a child and of his courtship and marriage. The past holds a secret, which is finally revealed, a secret which seemed to me more dramatic than appropriate. The power of this book is bringing the reader so intimately into Max's interior mental life. For me one of the most carefully created characters is retired colonel who lives his very lonely life in retirement at the seaside resort. He lives a regimented life reading the paper and taking walks. At one point his daughter and her family are about to visit, and we see the colonel break out of his self-imposed rigid lifestyle. John Banville understands the way people create their own environments, and this book is a testament to that understanding.

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.
___

In the face of so many sublime reviews of this book I come up short. After the loss of his wife, Max comes adrift and seeks some kind of fertilization from visiting the seaside town of holidays in his childhood. Nice immersion in people and memories, but ultimately the book came off as too bland as Max had too little at stake, too little impetus to reshape his vision of the world, and not enough angst to take real risks.

John Banville's novel, The Sea represents a wonderful prose-poem to memory & a book I enjoyed very much. It profiles a character, Max Morden, whose wife has just died & who exiles himself to Ballyless, a coastal town where he encountered people & had experiences as a youth that continue to define who the now-older man is.



Does Max hope to use the past to somehow reshape the future or merely to wallow in the vague comfort of a fragmentary memory of days past? With this thought I am reminded that Marcel Proust's multi-volume epic is either translated as a remembrance of time past or as time lost.

As Max phrases it, "The past beats inside me like a second heart." And here is just one example of the eloquent prose that John Banville employs to capture a sense of Max's past:

So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems; a biding stillness; a vigilance. We were waiting in our as yet unfashioned world, scanning the future as the boy & I had scanned each other, like soldiers in the field, watching for what was to come.

We were led to believe that the tame, little seaside village had been of old, a place of terrors. The sign over the Strand Café, advertising cigarettes, Navy Cut, with a picture of a bearded sailor inside a lifebuoy, or a ring of rope--was it?--creaked in the sea breeze on its salt-rusted hinges, which for all I know is swinging yet, the sign creaking to this day, to this night, in my dreams.
n

Max Morden is both enchanted & bewildered by his memories of another family (the Grace family) from a class in society well beyond his own and in particular a mother & her daughter, with the complex fascination gradually eliding from mother to daughter during a long-ago summer holiday with his parents.

This memory wavers before my eye at a fixed distance, always just beyond my focus, moving backward at exactly the same rate as I am moving forward. But since what I am moving forward into has begun to dwindle more & more rapidly, why can I now not catch up?

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking new 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.

With the death of Max's wife Anna, life has become hollow & their house is now "a vast echo chamber." And so, Max flees to the seaside town where life seems to have stood still for him, taking residence in the place where the Grace family formerly lodged in summer, a place that is now a rooming house.



Max's dreams are chaotic and in one remembered dream, he is attempting "to type out his will with a machine that was lacking the letter I. Later, Max suggests that he is becoming his own ghost. I am aware that for many a novel about the flights of memory of an aging, lethargic widower may summon up a large yawn but the author's prose so very often lifts this novel well beyond most, reason enough for it to have been awarded the Booker Prize.

There are other characters in Banville's 2005 novel, The Sea including Max Morden's daughter Clair but this is primarily Max's story, one in which "memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still" and at novel's end, Max recalls being down at the sea, standing up to his waist...

in water that was perfectly transparent, so that I could plainly see below me the ribbed sand of the seabed & tiny shells & bits of a crab's broken claw & my own feet, pallid & alien, like specimens displayed under glass...when the whole sea surged with a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deep and I was lifted briefly & carried a little way toward the shore & then set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the world's great shrugs of indifference.

There are some fairly obscure words that Banville inserts more than occasionally, caduceus & craquelured among them, perhaps a minor complaint in the midst of a very uplifting experience with words.

*Within my review are 3 images of author John Banville, including #3 near the sea.

Discovering John Banville last year was an amazing occurrence. n  The Blue Guitarn was one of my favourite reads of 2015 and has become one of my favourite novels. Period.

So I was both excited and apprehensive to read the Sea, Banville’s Man Booker prize winner, because I feared being disappointed.

I’m relieved to say that I LOVE JOHN BANVILLE! So much. Unequivocally.

His writing beguiles me. His writing consumes me. His descriptions and metaphors are works of art. His way with words, the turn of phrases are surprising and oh, so wonderful! I’m awed. I’m mesmerised.

Every phrase is polished, sometimes to a blinding glare, and it hits you and you’re left wondering - how does he do that!?!

Fair or not, Banville has become the yardstick against which I'll measure literary fiction. As far as I’m concerned, Banville should be studied. Because he’s unique, and surprising, and a wordsmith.

I retract everything I’ve been saying about not being a fan of the first person narrative. Had I read Banville sooner, I wouldn’t have made such a preposterous statement.

n  The Sean is a character driven novel. The narrator is Max Marden, a dilettante in his fifties. Following the death of his wife, Anna, the mother of his only child, Claire, Max is unable to move on. He’s dazed and mostly lives in the past. A certain summer of his childhood, when he met the Graces, is remembered in great detail. He remembers the smells, the tastes and the feelings of those times, in the little town by the sea. Banville weaves his way between the present and the past in a seamless way. Current and past happenings intermingle. The mind wanders and certain memories and feelings resurface. How the mind wonders, even at the most concentrated of occasions."

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.

As in the n  Blue Guitarn, Banville’s way of describing people, especially people the narrator loves, made me go - Oh, no, you didn’t just say that! You see, Banville doesn’t wax lyrically about one's beauty the way we’re used to reading. His descriptions of people are like no other writers'.
Take Claire for instance, Max’s daughter. “What age is she now, twenty something. I’m not sure. She is very bright, quite the bluestocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment, for I had hoped that she would be another Anna. She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stand out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and whitely pink. With those spindly legs and big bum, that hair, the long neck especially … Yet she is brave and makes the best of herself and of the world. She has the rueful, grimly humorous, clomping way to her that is common to so many ungainly girls. … Dear Claire, my sweet girl.” See what I mean?

Max isn’t any kinder with his own description. How about this extraordinarily accurate, I thought, spot on description of one getting startled by his/her own reflection? “There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I’m startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.” And there’s much more of that.

This novel is, to a great extent, about grief. About dying and loneliness. Because "perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

There is so much to say and analyse about this novel.

There are better, more eloquent reviews out there.

I am just a mere mortal who is completely and utterly spellbound by John Banville’s writing.

Again, I take a bow.

Meh. For me this was an ok read. The story itself is fine. It's about a man who's wife dies and he goes back to the place he spent the summers of his childhood. It's where he first experienced love and death. Sounds good right? Many people give this high ratings but for me it was so overly written, for example - entire pages being one paragraph describing the sky. Blah blah blah. I agree with another reviewer that the author "probably had a thesaurus in his hand while writing". I don't mind looking up the definitions of words (I enjoy adding words to my vocabulary) but in this case I didn't care. I just wanted to finish and move on. Maybe I'm not highbrow enough for this one.

I have another book by Banville published under the name Benjamin Black - Christine Falls. Hope this is a better read for me.

"O passado pulsa dentro de mim como um segundo coração."

Acho curioso que Banville opte por entrelaçar a trama deste seu O Mar em torno da arte e de Bonnard, pois é à luz da sua obra que leio este livro.
E é às águas de Bonnard, às cristalizações dos momentos que o artista escolhe retratar, que Max, recentemente viúvo, se recolhe, e a partir das quais tece o seu próprio retrato de memórias.

"A verdade é que as coisas vão resistindo ao passo que tudo o que é vivo desaparece."

E cruzando passados e presentes, reflete a vida, a morte, e a crueldade indiscriminada do destino.

"Aquilo não devia ter-lhe acontecido. Não devia ter-nos acontecido, nós não éramos esse género de pessoas. Os infortúnios, as doenças, a morte prematura, são tudo coisas que acontecem a gente boa, aos humildes, ao sal da terra, e não a Anna, não a mim. No meio do cortejo imperial que era a nossa vida em comum, um vadio inútil e trocista avançou dentre a multidão que nos aplaudia e, esboçando a paródia de uma vénia, entregou à minha trágica rainha a sentença de condenação."

Aquilo que Banville oferece não é um livro, é um pós-impressionista de pleno direito (não quis ir ver se o autor tem alguma ligação às artes plásticas ou à história da arte antes desta review, para não viciar a minha opinião, mas fá-lo-ei em seguida): um experiência com cores, formas e luz que no, final, resulta numa imagem algo difusa, meio etérea e inteiramente subjetiva do objeto que, tal como a musa de Bonnard, inspira e obceca o narrador.

"Os personagens do passado distante acabam sempre por vir ter connosco, para exigirem o que lhes é devido."

Apesar de o seu objetivo maior ser o de fixar a imagem da mulher amada e perdida, Max não resiste a reconfigurar o espectro da sua vida à luz do papel que essa mulher representa nela. Agarradas, se assim se pode dizer, à imagem de Anna, surgem as sombras de outras figuras femininas: Connie, Chloe, Rose, Claire que obrigam o narrador a saltos temporais que trazem com eles cenários, momentos, situações, pessoas que, no seu conjunto, compõem a figura do narrador.

"Estou a vê-los, aos meus pobres pais, movimentando-se rancorosamente dentro de casa, na infância do mundo. A infelicidade deles foi uma das constantes dos meus primeiros anos de vida, uma espécie de zumbido agudo e incessante mas inaudível. Não os odiava. Provavelmente, amava-os. Só que me obstruíam o caminho, obscurecendo a minha visão do futuro. Com o passar do tempo consegui ver através deles, através dos meus pais transparentes."

Mas a memória de Max não é fiável, e ele sabe disso. Como as vagas do mar, ela avança e recua apenas a seu prazer, e ele vai vogando sem controlo por esse mar adentro, acabado extenuado, à margem, arrastado pela força da rebentação.

"Há momentos em que o passado possui uma força tão grande que temos a sensação de que nos pode aniquilar."

Como narrador desta história, Max é absolutamente impotente perante os desígnios do destino, perante os caprichos da mente. Como o leitor, é um joguete nas mãos dos deuses.

"...em que momento, dentre todos os momentos, é que a vida não muda por completo até à derradeira e mais crucial de todas as mudanças?"

Porque se apercebe disso, a narrativa avança em direção à forma primitiva da existência, à conclusão que define a vida - Max, ao contrário de Bonnard, está destinado a terminar, não possui o "anátema da perpetuação" dos artistas e sabe que, quando encerrar a sua narrativa, isso será um fim em si mesmo. Anna não permanecerá se ele não a conseguir montar, como uma peça, no imenso puzzle da sua vida. E então, nada mais restará.

"(...)o que eu antevia para o futuro era de facto uma imagem que não passava de um passado imaginado. Poder-se-á dizer que mais do que antecipar o futuro me sentia nostálgico desse mesmo futuro, pois o que ia acontecer na minha fantasia na realidade já tinha desaparecido. E, inesperadamente, isso impressiona-me por ser de certo modo significativo. O que eu procurava era realmente o futuro ou algo para além dele?"

O Mar é um livro triste, sentimental, poético, claro, polido na sua forma e dotado de um estilo cristalino. A aproximação ao pós-impressionismo obriga à amputação do enredo: o subjetivo prevalece propositadamente, mas essa opção funciona muito bem, demasiado bem para admitir que é acidental. A ligação entre a pintura e a literatura não é só óbvia, é completa: da rapidez, à vivacidade, à expressão dos sentimentos. No final deve prevalecer a sensação provocada pelo todo em detrimento da análise do elemento técnico - só por essa razão não me alongo e alongo mais... Não é preciso.

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

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.

3.5 out of 5 stars. I may bump this up as I think some more about the book. It was beautifully written.

Follows a middle-aged Irishman as he visits the seaside town where he spent summer vacations as a child. His visit dredges up old memories from his childhood and the summer days he spent with a brother and sister from a more well-to-do family.

This novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. I've read many Booker prize winners/nominees and this definitely has the same feel as those.