The Sea is a story of a lonely man adrift in the sea of grief and trying to reevaluate the past and to reconcile himself to the present.
Bereavement… Sooner or later everyone becomes acquainted with the pain of sorrow…

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.

Memory lane… Reminiscences of childhood… I think everyone possesses some childhood memories that keep haunting one from day to day…

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

And there is a tragic mystery hidden in the past…
Even in solitude one must never lose hope for consolation.

Beautiful. Will reread when I'm in the mood to appreciate.

"A tiny sweet face, delicate of nature and pinkly aglow, is set in the big pale pudding of her head, the fossil remains, marvellously preserved, of the girl that she once was, long ago."

"I do not want solicitude. I want anger, vituperation, violence. I am like a man with an agonising toothache who despite the pain takes a vindictive pleasure in prodding the point of his tongue again and again deep into the throbbing cavity."

"When I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit, it, for cosiness... To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all that 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."

"And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference."

John Banville won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for this novel, and what a well-deserved honour and tribute for this masterfully written, poignant and deeply moving story.

I read somewhere that John Banville is considered “a writer’s writer”. I can definitely see that. On the other hand, he is also “a reader’s writer” because I am a reader, and thousands of other readers have also enjoyed Mr. Banville’s writing.

This is Max Morden’s story and he narrates throughout. Seamlessly, we follow him along as he talks about boyhood summers somewhere on the South coast of Ireland. He refers to a nearby town as Ballymore and the summer spot as a nearby village, . . . let’s call it Ballyless. In the present, he is in mourning and having a difficult time dealing with his grief. He drinks too much, ignores his work, and is intent on seeking some answers, or something he can hang onto, from his past summers when he was young.

We meet the Grace family: Carlo, Connie, their children Chloe and Myles, and their minder or perhaps governess, Rose. This family is perceived by Max as his social superiors but he is drawn to them for many reasons – partly curiosity, partly out of loneliness, and somewhat out of boredom. The Graces fascinate him, especially noticeable while he relates his experiences with them as a boy. However, with all the time that has passed between then and now, their once large summer home has become a boarding house, and he seeks it out to stay in and perhaps looks to his past to help him heal.

As Max relates his story, moving back and forth between then and now, it is clear that his past influenced his future, and that his ‘now’ is also very much influencing how he views his past. He argues with himself, chastising himself at times for not being clear about a point. Sometimes he will make the point again – the same point using different words. Sometimes he corrects his course in the narrative with an addition that makes it clearer. Sometimes he says he is digressing too far or embellishing, so scratch that, and this is how it was. Of course, once it is stated, it’s not easy (nor is it prudent) to forget it and buy in completely to the new perspective.

This is not a long book, although it definitely is not one to attempt to rush through. The author sets the pace, takes control of this story, and doesn’t let it go for a moment. I was a very willing passenger on this journey with Max and there were times that something he said startled my own past memories into my reading experience. Countless times I had to set the book down and indulge in my own personal reveries. In most respects they weren’t connected to the story except by a small filament of invisible thread, yet once the thread was pulled into my sight, I had no choice but to follow it.

Oh! And the words. I wanted to mention the words – some of them I had to jot down because I might need them some day: for a game (like when you have a whole slew of vowels – etiolate could be most helpful), or maybe just because certain words add clarity to what might be a more watery picture without them. This novel is a masterpiece of words used exactly as they should be precisely when they need to be.

I had several quotes highlighted that I especially savoured, and then I changed my mind about adding them to my review. Please, please read this exceptional novel and discover them for yourself. Of one thing I am certain: each person will come away with their own reveries, their own captured words, and the phrases and sentences that moved them the most.

I recommend this to everyone who has ever danced with words and/or read a wonderful story composed of them, and a reminder that this is a slow waltz . . . one that you will always remember.

3.5 Stars

I was really excited to read this book, but sadly, it never lived up to my expectations.

John Banville is an extraordinary writer. So many of his sentences I reread, they were just so perfect.

“Amazed and disappointed, I would go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are obscure to me, since why should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of the past.”
“ The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

For me, the flow of the story was ruined by all the superfluous, unknown words that he inflicted on me- so many I had to look up and many I just ignored.

The basic plot: Max Morden has just lost his wife and is in a state of abject grief. He decides to go back to the place by the sea that his family used to go when he was a child. It was there he met the Grace family and 50 years later he is still trying to come to terms with a tragedy that occurred.

Our narrator is Max and he is very honest with us his readers. I felt sorry for him and the intensity of his grief but he does not paint himself as a sympathetic person. He admits to hurting his dog as a child cause he liked to see him react to pain. There are other instances of his unkindness and even brutality.

This book is about one’s memories- Max explores his childhood memories and memories with his wife when she was ill. Banville was at his best when describing the utter feelings of hopelessness when your spouse became terminal.

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

All the pieces come together nicely at the end which makes this book a solid 3.5 stars for me.

Published: 2005

Vociferous ocean; aqueous words; the smell of the sea between the pages, lyrical, hypnotic, themes of redemption, melancholic twins, what’s not to like? Plus, I read this book when I was Human as opposed to a Werewolf I’m now; head filled with the elusive scent of hooded, red-cloaked, girl.

This book had a fragrance of its own. An individual, distinctively lugubrious scent can be found within if you pressed your face between the pages hard enough.

I can read this again and again and again, and enjoy it every time.

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



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

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

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

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

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

Read before goodreads so no review but I remember being very impressed.

When my wife died suddenly in 1998 from a cerebral aneurysm, one of the things that I did in the wake of her death was to begin to reconnect with people and places that had meaning both for us as a couple and for me alone. In many cases, I ended up returning to places from my own childhood and reconnecting with people whom I had not contacted for years. Both the process itself and the actual reconnections to past places and friends helped me cope with the loss. It also activated memories that I had either forgotten or had feared I would be unable to recall.

John Bayville’s The Sea is a story that mirrors in some measure my own journey in grief. For Max Morden, the journey to his past was certainly more focused. Following his wife’s death after a long illness, he returned to the seaside town where his family had vacationed in his youth. And his reawakening memories swirled around a family, the Graces, he had met during a single summer when he was around 11 years old. For Max, mystery and tragedy were deeply embedded in his youthful past.

While there are clear differences in Max’s and my returns to our pasts, Max’s emotional responses to working through grief were similar. At one point, toward the end of the novel, Max reflects:

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I did know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralyzed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

That feeling I know well.

I more generally read fiction to open up new horizons for me, new worlds—to help me see and understand with the eyes of others the world around me. The Sea, however, was a far more personal adventure: in a sense, it was a return to old worlds along already trodden roads. I understood much of Max’s inner turmoil and disengagement from the people around him because it all rang true for me in my circumstances.

Apart the story thread, Banville’s language is elegant and often lyrical. Here Max describes a moment when he and the Graces are at the beach:

The sand around me with the sun strong on it gave off its mysterious, catty smell. Out on the bay a white sail shivered and flipped to leeward and for a second the world tilted. Someone away down the beach was calling to someone else. Children. Bathers. A wire-haired ginger dog. The sail turned to windward again and I heard distinctly from across the water the ruffle and snap of the canvas. Then the breeze dropped and for a moment all went still.

Banville fills his novel with the kinds of descriptions that pull the reader directly into the story, seeing, hearing and smelling with the protagonist.

Banville, as Ted Gioia emphasizes in his review of The Sea, also builds his story with words that will send most readers to a dictionary: assegais, horrent, cinereal, knobkerrie, prelapsarian and mephitic (Gioia's selection). It is that use of an elegantly mature vocabulary that seems to off put many readers. He is clearly in his selection of words not an Ernest Hemingway. But he is a different type of stylist than Hemingway. While Hemingway in his classic novels and short stories uses a sparse, tightly-constructed prose that hints at greater depth and meaning (his so-called “iceberg theory”), Banville brings everything to the surface, leaving the reader submerged in a world of profound emotion and surprise tightly controlled by the author. Reading The Sea is not effortless.

The Depths of Vocabulary

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

n  El pasado late en mi interior como un segundo corazón.n

El mar, uno de los grandes libros de mi vida. Una novela tan bella que duele.

n  Siempre he poseído la convicción, inmune a todas las consideraciones racionales, de que en algún momento futuro y sin especificar, el permanente ensayo que es mi vida, con sus numerosas malinterpretaciones, sus deslices y pifias, terminará, y la obra propiamente dicha, para la que me he estado preparando siempre y con tanto ahínco, comenzará por fin. Es una ilusión muy corriente, lo sé, todo el mundo la tiende. No obstante, ayer por la noche, en mitad de esa espectacular exhibición de petulancia valhalliana, me pregunté si sería inminente el momento de mi entrada, de mi "adelante", por así decir. No sé cómo será, este salto dramático al meollo de la acción, ni qué se espera que tenga lugar exactamente en escena. [...] No, lo que anhelo es un momento de expresión terrenal. Eso es, eso es exactamente: seré expresado, totalmente. Seré pronunciado, como un noble discurso de clausura. Seré, en una palabra, "dicho". ¿Acaso no ha sido siempre mi objetivo, no es, de hecho, el objetivo de todos nosotros, dejar de ser carne y transformarnos por completo en la sutiliza del espíritu que ya no sufre?n

Moj prvi susret sa Banvilom i mogu reci samo GENIJALNO!