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!

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.

What in the hell just happened. Did I really trudge through all that overly-wrought prose only to curse Banville for producing the hint of redemption in the end of this thesaurus-spawn mud puddle? Thank you Booker Prize for yet another quality laugh. Here's a quality quote for those in doubt:

"seeming not to walk but bounce, rather, awkward as a half-inflated barrage balloon buffeted by successive breath-robbing blows out of the past."

You've got to be kidding me John: here here I say to b'alliteration. Here here to absolute bullshit.

Or how about "Deedle Deedle This World..."

If some scholarly genius can tell me what this offal means I'd be in your debt.

Once again the Booker Prize anoints a gangrenous heel their stain of approval.

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

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

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

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

Quotes~:
Yes things endure while the living lapse

Memory as a world of shelter against the now

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

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

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

The mysterious protocols of childhood

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

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

To fulfil the fantasy of me

Everything meant something else for me

The delicate business of being the survivor

We were human beings you know, after all

I think I am becoming my own ghost

A person of scant talents and scanter ambitions

We forgave each other for all we were not

My mind seems filled with toppling masonry

I didn’t want to get where I was going

The indifferent world closing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Listen, this guy either has immense vocabularic prowess or he uses the Thesaurus a lot, either way his prose is stunning and chock full of words that will have you scrambling for a dictionary. Consider:

Chloe was engrossed in picking at the stipples of a ruby cicatrice just below her elbow where the previous day a thorn had scratched her. I examined the fern-wound on my ankle, an angry pink groove between translucent deckle edges of whitish skin; it had not bled but in the deeps of the groove a clear ichor glinted.

Ruby cicatrice? Really? Banville makes what should have been an ugly scar sound like a rare, marvelous flower that blooms once in a decade or something.

Don't get me wrong, I am normally an unashamedly great fan of purple prose, but even I have to draw the line somewhere and I am extremely dubious of Banville's descriptions. (Come on, I'm sure this guy would have our poor protagonist mistake Mrs Grace's sweat for champagne if the editors weren't meticulous enough.)

Ah but the follies of the heart often cannot be accounted for, and I still fell for this pompous, poetic and extremely purple prose. I admit to being partial in my opinions of this book, as I share both a love for Samuel Beckett and the sea with John Banville so I see him as a writer after my own heart.

I was also extremely charmed by his musings on age, the corrosive nature of memory, grief and death - themes I often find myself pondering upon.

What's more, my copy of The Sea had a picture in the end of Banville childishly trying to balance the book on his head, while gazing downwards, off-camera. And this, folks, sealed the deal. Banville is adorable, his writing marvelous and he will probably go down in history as belonging to the same literary tradition as that of Woolf, Joyce and Beckett.

I was only able to get this book from my local library in the large print version, and whilst at first this was a distraction, soon it became an integral part of the larger-than-life, intense lyricism of the book. It made me read more slowly, (and I did, and sometimes I read over and over again), and it helped me enjoy the crystal clarity and endless sensitivity of this writer.

It’s a story about a widower, Max Morden, still fumbling around in the trauma of the loss of his wife, going back to stay in a place by the sea full of childhood memories, especially of the Grace family. The Graces – leaders of this beachside social hierarchy, are tantalizing in many ways....the enchanting yet earthly mother, the coarse father and their twin children – the enigmatic and wilful Chloe and the sly but mute Myles. Young Max is transfixed by them all. We see the older and sadder widow Max go back to explore and remember the events of that summer with the Graces.

The writing in itself is a delight. Here’s a description of Chloe Grace...

“(Joe) said that Chloe had green teeth. I was outraged, but he was right; there was, I saw, the next time I had the opportunity to take a close look at them, a faint tinge to the enamel of her incisors that was green indeed, but a delicate damp grey-green, like the damp light under trees after rain, or the dull-apple shade of the undersides of leaves reflected in still water. Apples, yes, her breath too had an appley smell. Little animals we were, sniffing at each other. I liked in particular, when in time I got the chance to savour it, the cheesy tang in the crevices of her elbows and her knees. She was not, I am compelled to admit, the most hygienic of girls, and in general she gave off, more strongly as the day progressed, a flattish, fawnish odour, like that which comes out of, which used to come out of, empty biscuit tins in shops....”

On top of the poetic qualities of this book there is also a darn good story....a delightful unravelling of enigmas as the book unfolds, and an exposure at the end which for me was totally unexpected.

My one reservation – and I think this is probably very personal – is that I was shocked by the references to cruelty that Max had practiced on his dog, on Myles, even on grasshoppers. Every time it was like a door slamming in my face, and rather than giving me a more rounded understanding of Max’s character I felt utterly pushed away and distanced. I think these episodes created an unnecessary discord. Other than this, I thought the book was superb....

This novel was a puzzle of contradictions. Max Morden is a recent widower working through his relationship with his wife, Anna, and with his daughter, Claire, while also trying to understand some events from his childhood. Some readers appeared to find this story too bleak; I didn’t. I enjoyed getting to know the characters and their story. In fact, that was one of the problems for me. There was too little of the story and too much description for me. I found myself wading through description to get on with the story, and I typically enjoy good description. Max Morden was a man very confused about love. His relationship with his wife was not perfect, nor was it broken. Max loves his daughter, but doesn’t know how to express his love for her. And then there was Chloe.

I like how the story moves back and forth through time and events, relatively easily, representing for me Max’s shifting thoughts and attention. I enjoyed the elegance of Banville’s writing style, but also found it choppy and thus never really found the rhythm in the writing that is true enjoyment for me. Ultimately, I was as mixed up about my response to The Sea as Max Morden was about love. This was my first by Banville, and I have read that some have found other efforts of his more enjoyable, so I am motivated to try another at some point.

ძალიან ლამაზი ტექსტია. მართლა არ ველოდი.

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.

I actually put this book in the same category as James Frey's "Million Little Pieces": so bad, it was enjoyable to read. But of course this was bad in entirely more ambitious, pretentious ways than Frey could ever achieve. It's been about two years since I read this, so forgive my lack of specificity, but I'll try to pin down some examples of appalling devices that both rankled and tickled me.

-Balliteration: Banville, perhaps due to his over fondness for the first letter of his last name (as others have been shown to feel, in psychology studies), found it wise to buffet us with a bounty of bubbly, bouncy balloonish words beginning with "b" to give us a sense of what, I'm still not sure.

-What was it called again? A device. Numerous times, Banville shows a sudden amnesia for common objects, which comes off as implausible after he has put so much attention showing off his knowledge. An example was his not knowing a common tree: a pine, was it? And what is that tool we use to record our thoughts? A pen?

-Which leads very well in to my next observation: I had the distinct sense Banville wrote this with a thesaurus in one hand and his cock in the other (I apologize to younger readers of this review). Am I merely hurt that I had to look up so many words I'd never heard of before? No. What shocked me was that, when I looked up all four definitions of one word, not one of them made sense in the context in which it was used, and it was not a term that could possibly be used as a symbol or metaphor, due to the specific nature of the word. Unfortunately, I forget which it was, but for a while, Frank and I did have a game of testing our memory of the various words Banville used.

-His choice to leave all identifiable plot to the last twenty pages, so that . . . we could see he was capable of telling a story? So the book ended on a high note of grief? So that the book of loose ends is tied up and made whole? I've read too many books in which the plot occurs in the last chapter to be amazed or blown away or impressed by the conclusion. In the end, it's a mere device to produce tension when it couldn't be created in a more honest fashion (because of course the protagonist already knows all the secrets that are kept from the reader).

What was most surprising was that, when I picked up "Christine Falls," which Banville felt it necessary to publish under the name Benjamin Black dare his reputation as a serious writer be tarnished, I discovered he could in fact write properly and engagingly without the above devices. Does that point to my having more common tastes? I trust my intelligence enough to say that this discovery merely points to the fact that Banville has lost sight of what "impressive writing" is.

But for whatever it's worth, it was fun to mark up the margins of this book. Bravo?