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The Sea
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The Sea
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The Sea
Audiobook6 hours

The Sea

Written by John Banville

Narrated by John Lee

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

The author of The Untouchable ("contemporary fiction gets no better than this"-Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child-a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins-Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless-in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the "barely bearable raw immediacy" of his childhood memories.

Interwoven with this story are Morden's memories of his wife, Anna-of their life together, of her death-and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him "like a second heart."

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel-among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.


From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 15, 2006
ISBN9780739333785
Unavailable
The Sea
Author

John Banville

JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of numerous novels, including The Sea, which won the 2005 Booker Prize, and the DI Quirke novels written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain’s most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin.

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Reviews for The Sea

Rating: 3.5044255868167196 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

1,244 ratings90 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Exquisitely written bringing back memories of beach vacations when I was young. The plot is a mysterious blend of three story lines and finishes subtly.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Banville's Booker-winning work relates the story of a man who revisits the place he spent childhood holidays. Memories come flooding back to him as he grieves the recent loss of his wife. The story's words seem carefully chosen, allowing the reader to savor their use. While he mainly reflects on the past, he interacts a little with the present. It is easy to see why this book earned the Booker Prize.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a difficult book for me. The language and writing are in many ways beautiful and enthralling, but the simple fact was that I could not find any reason at all to like the main character. The book is very depressing as it flashes back and forth between a man who has just lost his wife to cancer, his time at the end of her life, and his childhood summers spent by the sea and the people he knew then. There is no real build up to the story and while there is a bit of a twist toward the end, it did not have a great impact on me. Basically when I finished the novel, it left me feeling both sad and full of a sense of hopelessness.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Slow-moving
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Elegant, sparsely-written meditation on memory, nostalgia, love and the loss of innocence. It won't leave you gasping with revelation, but it is a quiet, sensitive joy to wallow in.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Tried this as an audio book - way too slow, my eyes were glazing. Not my cup of tea.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Disappointing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My friends complain I never read fiction, so this was a choice made based on its many short-listings and the author's many previous awards. Beautifully written novella used the setting of a widower reflecting on his past loves and life. Lovely metaphors and images. Some very thought-provoking passages concerning the meaning of life, and death that would bore most younger readers but were comfortably familiar to those of us who have begun to experience our friends and loved ones dying. I will find more of his novels for future 'novel breaks' in my usual reading pattern.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Lovely writing, if a bit pretentious and precious. I actually tweeted a sentence I found hard to believe. "The woman dips her fingertips in the font, mingling traces of tenacious love-juice with the holy water." Bleurg.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Gorgeous writing; a beautiful, elegiac, deeply felt tale. The most touching bood ever. Any further description would do a disservice to this wonderful book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There is the beauty of this book -- the watercolor writing that gives the slanted sunlight and cresting waves nuance and, often, intent; the presentation of the purity of youth, delighting in the salty softness of summertime sands and discovering the arresting humidity of puberty and sensuality; and the meandering reminiscences of the main character, Max Morden, who has come back to the seaside resort of his youth to understand who he is and, after the death of his wife, where he belongs. But then there is its brutality -- death and decay and depression and drunkenness; Max Morden's anger and repulsion at the gritty realities of life, from his wife's death to the realization that the physical of act of sex is sweaty and smelly and so far removed from that single moment of "instant divinity" when one finally touches a breast or touches the lips of a pretty girl. Then, of course, there is Max's constant, nearly instinct-driven journey toward his own death and destruction, rejecting all manner of love and acceptance along the way.


    The Sea, by John Banville, was the Man Booker prize winner in 2005. Understanably, it garnered massive praise. But it is a complex, often deadly cold tale that requires a detachment in the reader to fully appreciate the work and to step back to gather in its breadth. It also takes some patience, because Banville's brilliant writing is almost undone by his sophomoric use of names and symbols to underscore his meaning. To wit, the word "morden" in German means to kill or to end life, which is Max's apparent life-goal, at least as far as his own life is concerned. Giving the character the name "max" makes it only worse. The visiting family in the seaside resort are the Grace family -- the source of Max's fascination with daughter Chloe, her mother, and even the governess, Rose. Max indeeds finds grace in the lips and scent of Chloe, and in the upskirt views that her mother offers Max. And then there is the color blue which the author hits us repeatedly over the head with, blue as in sea, light, air, breath, etc


    But that aside, Bannville offers a look into a character type that lives for that perfect moment of glee -- discovery, awareness, delight -- but then shuffles off into hiding when it realizes that extending the moment requires hard work, defeat, assertiveness, and, well, living. Max falls in schoolboy love with Chloe's mother, and reaches near ecstasy when she gives him a look at her private regions, but then feels instantly used, even taken advantage of. Same with Chloe, a nymph of the sea who he dislikes and bashes mere moments after he kisses her lips and declares his love for her.


    Bu the again, he is that type of man. He aches for his own demise. He will not accept his dying wife's admonitions to just go out and live. He is eternally caught in a threesome, whether with the Graces, or Chloe and her twin, or even with his landlady and the aging fellow boarder. But stepping out of that role would nearly sicken him -- he is more a leech, a sucker (and harsh judger of life) than an active participant. Deep in his soul, at least as a youngster, he sought consummation, but found that consummation was complicated. In reading this book I wonder if Bannville is aiming at male egos, always eager for the hunt and the capture, but bored with the aftermath. Max is surrounded by big, powerful women, many of whom seem to know themselves (and can see through him). And he realizes very late that two of his apparent male "conquests" -- one with Mrs. grace and one with the aging landlady-- were simply elements of lesbian love that he just downright misinterpreted.

    Three stars is the best I can do,
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Let me go get my thesaurus and look up some superlatives, because it's going to be hard to describe how good John Banville's prose is otherwise. In "The Sea," he takes the memory of an eventful childhood summer spent on the Irish coast and makes it an occasion for writing some truly awe-inspiring sentences, sentences that bulge and sway and roll and display their poetic inclinations like, well, like the sea itself. I didn't so much read this book as much as I let it wash over my eyeballs. As an exercise in pure reading enjoyment, I can't think of too many works by too many authors, living or dead, who you could stand toe-to-toe with "The Sea" to. It really is that good. And it's more than merely pretty: Banville creates, in Chloe and her mute brother, Myles, and their parents of compelling, memorable characters, seen through the mists of memory, by a narrator too young to really understand them and too far removed from their elevated social standing to really be one of them. The adult members of the Grace household seem, to the narrator's inexperienced eyes, both sinister, mysterious, and somewhat debauched, while Banville catches the Grace children at a particularly vulnerable and formative moment and shows them grappling with adult issues from a point of view that can still seem limited and childlike. The story is, in some ways, familiar, but the emotional stakes here are enormous: what we get, in the end, is snapshots of their life. This seems fitting enough, since our narrator grows up to be a minor authority on painting: the works hard to capitalize on the narrative possibilities of a few memorable, well-composed images. "The Sea" is also a supremely sensual book, a sort of Lolita-in-reverse in which the narrator falls for one female character and then another and learns about the intoxicating power of attraction and sexuality along the way and as he generously withholds judgment from his younger self. The only complaint I've got here is that while reading Banville's sparkling prose sometimes feels like looking at the world through a new set of eyes, there are elements of the book that feel somewhat familiar. Does every novel that wins the Booker have to include the a character that represents the fading, decrepit legacy of the British Empire? Also, while prose in "The Sea" flows easily and naturally, I could never quite forget that this book is, after all, a perfectly controlled performance: verisimilitude just isn't its strong suit. I imagine that anyone who's ever spent any time around the elderly, or read any Samuel Beckett, will recognize that most people's memories aren't so flawlessly composed or so lyrically expressed. At the end, the book's structure falls together as if it were, well, as if it were the novel that it is, and literature's big themes come charging in to finish things off. Readers who prefer realism will probably feel that "The Sea" is just a bit too much, impressive as it might be in some other ways. On the other hand, I imagine that readers who accept narrative's artificiality, or readers who just like feeling themselves under the spell of a supremely skillful writer, may end up placing "The Sea" on their list of all-time favorites.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautifully written story about love and loss.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pretty exquisite stuff, occasionally sublime. Never learned so many new words in so few pages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a quiet meditation on love, loss, memory, life and mourning. It took me a while to settle into the softer rhythm of this novel, but in the end I'm glad I did.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I had started this audiobook 2 other times before finally completing it. This is the story of Max Morden who has recently lost his wife. It is a stream of consciousness narrative and jumps back and forth in time. This is a good one to listen to if you are in a slightly melancholy mood. It will make you think about some pretty deep questions in life - the accuracy of memory and the indignity of dying. I loved the audio narration. John Lee is wonderful in this audiobook and throws in just the slightest Irish lilt.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    nicely written coming of age storywith a disturbing finish
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really enjoyed it. Not quite sure how it managed to win the Booker - it must have been a spare year - but it is beautifully written in a sort of gentle prose with very few errors. The dick sucking reviews printed all over it are a little over blown but it's very funny in places and very clever in it's study of a normal guy grieving. The things he pays attention to are well chosen. He held my interest over so many pages where nothing happens & I liked the revelations at the end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Booker Prize-winning author John Banville presents a sensitive and remarkably complete character study of Max Morden, an art critic/writer from Ireland whose wife has died of a cancer. Seeking solace, Max has checked into the Cedars, a now-dilapidated guest house in the seaside village of Ballyless, where he and his family spent their summers when he was a child. There he spent hours in the company of Chloe and Myles Grace, his constant companions. Images of foreboding suggest that some tragedy occurred while he was there, though the reader discovers only gradually what it might have been. While at the Cedars, he contemplates the nature of life, love, and death, and our imperfect memories of these moments. As Max probes his recollections, he reveals his most intimate feelings, constantly questioning the accuracy of his memory, and juxtaposing his childhood memories with his recent memories of his wife Anna's "inappropriate" illness and her futile treatments. Through flashbacks, he also introduces us to his earlier life with Anna and his fervent hopes that through her he could become someone more interesting. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone," he says, confessing that he saw her as "the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight." More a meditation than a novel with a strong plot, The Sea brings Max to life (as limited as his life is during this time), recreating his seemingly simple, yet often profound, thoughts in language which will startle the reader into recognition of their universality. To some extent an everyman, Max speaks to the reader in uniquely intimate ways. In breathtaking language, filled with emotional connotations, he captures nature in perfect images, often revealing life as a series of paintings--"a Tiepolo sky," a hair-washing scene reminiscent of Duccio and Picasso. He objectifies his thoughts about memory through Pierre Bonnard's many portraits of "Nude in the Bath," paintings of Bonnard's wife in which she remains a young girl, even when she is seventy years old. Images of the bath and the sea pervade the novel--cleansing, combined with the ebb and flow of life. Lovers of plot-based novels with snappy dialogue may find that the lack of external action and the novel's focus on the interior battles of an ordinary man of about sixty fail to engage their interest. Other readers, who may have faced the deaths of family or friends and recognized the limitations of memory, however, may see in Max a kindred spirit to whom they respond with empathy. I have rarely read such a short book so slowly--or reread with pleasure so many passages of extraordinary beauty and import. This is a stunning novel that requires a lot from the reader but the reward is more than worthy.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    nicely written coming of age storywith a disturbing finish
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    THE past beats inside me like a second heart,â€? writes Max Morden, the elderly narrator of John Banville’s Booker Prize short listed The Sea. Max takes up lodging in a boarding house, The Cedars, in the small Irish seaside town where he once spent childhood holidays.Ostensibly there to finish writing a book of art criticism, he makes instead a journey into the past, writing a memoir to make sense of his personal history. A tragedy is foreshadowed from the very first page of the novel.The Sea is about memory and how we reconstruct the past for ourselves. We embroider and edit, recall insignificant details with perfect clarity and yet forget things that are important to us.In Max’s narrative one memory conjures another as he moves between different layers of the past. Much of the story is told in a series of vignettes: time is frozen so that Max can step inside the frame and examine each detail for fresh significance.Recently widowed, Max wanders back through “the chamber of horrorsâ€? in his head and revisits his wife Anna’s terminal illness, from prognosis to death. “She is lodged in me like a knifeâ€? he laments, yet already the memory of her is fading.Memories are as “realâ€? as anything in the physical world, he decides: “Which is more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?â€?Max’s relationship with the Graces, another family he met at this town when he was a child, is also re-examined. The events of “the day of the strange tideâ€? continue to haunt him and he hopes that by returning to The Cedars, which the family made their holiday home, he can make sense of what happened.In flashbacks we watch as 10-year-old Max encounters the family on the beach and falls into an easy acquaintance with the strange twins, Myles and Chloe. Max, already aware of social distinctions, adopts the family hoping that something of their “godlikeâ€? stature will rub off on him.Despite definite echoes of L.P. Hartley’s classic novel, The Go-between, this is not a tale of childhood innocence lost. The children taunt the child-minder, Rose, cruelly when they think they have discovered the object of her secret infatuation. (The truth is revealed much later.) Max harbours violent feelings for the strange web-footed mute, Myles, and feels for Mrs Grace with an emotional intensity that has him weeping for her in “rapturously love struck griefâ€?, until he transfers his affections to the capricious and sexually precocious Chloe.The twins, though, remain distant and inscrutable: the mysterious psychic bond between them so strong that, as Chloe tells Max, it’s as if they were a couple of convicts on the run, shackled together.The Sea is an achingly melancholy and beautifully written novel. It is impossible to read it without feeling grief for our own small lives measured against the immensity of time and the uncaring physical universe.Consequently, we do not feel a particular horror at the long anticipated tragedy played out at the end of the book. It is, Max realises, “just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifferenceâ€? and there is a strange justice in the novel’s climax.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's the story of a man grieving the death of his wife. He goes to the sea - a place where he visited as a boy. The book's writing has a mesmerizing cadence. It wanders through his past - his childhood, his marriage, his life - without any reflection on the present or the future. A simple reflection of a life lived with its ebbs and flows.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A recently-widowed art historian goes to stay in the seaside village that was the scene of his first great romance, during a childhood summer holiday. The plot, with its Bridesheadish theme of a boy of modest origins being taken up into the life of a rather grander family that then proceeds to fall apart around him, turns out not to be that important, except as a framework for the narrator's philosophical reflections on childhood and adulthood, love and loneliness, and life and bereavement. There's just enough witty observation of the social complexities of a dingy Irish holiday resort to keep the tone from getting too maudlin, and there's an occasional descriptive epiphany that's entirely worthy of the Bonnard paintings the narrator is meant to be writing about. A book that skates on pretty thin ice, in all sorts of ways, but manages to get away with it, somehow. Because Banville is obviously very good at this sort of thing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After his wife's death a middle-aged Irishman returns to a seaside town, where he spent his childhood summers. He reflects on his past and how these summers shaped him. Not much plot here but these ruminations of love and loss are beautifully articulated.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Sea by John Banville is a novel about love and loss, as the main character, Max Morden tries to come to terms with his wife’s death from cancer by retreating into his memories of his past, in particular, his childhood vacations at the seaside. Taking this a step further, he returns to the seaside boarding house where an event that affected him greatly took place. The reader does not discover what this event was until near the end of the book.There isn’t much of a story to this novel, rather it appears to be a series of reflections on mortality, grief, death and childhood memory. The author evokes a quiet, haunting atmosphere in which to set his beautiful writing. He also cleverly uses the power of scent as a trigger to many of the character’s memories. The flawed main character is not particularly likeable as he constantly questions his motives, finds solace in a bottle, and seems to revel in his melancholy and regret. The Sea is not a story to be read for entertainment but rather one to admire for it’s luminous wording and to reflect upon the complex patterns that Banville presents with these words.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Sea is a slim book. The final, single-sentence paragraph closes full stop on page 195. Slim, but not brief. Within its covers is an entire world, a world of one man’s memories of two deaths—one at the beginning of his life and the other in his old age. The book takes the form of a sort of memoir written by Max Morden, as he weaves the events leading up to the childhood tragedy into the recent tragedy of his wife’s year long ordeal with cancer and her final demise, one emotively interpreting the other. Though Max’s thoughts seem to wander haphazardly through his memories, the book is actually very tightly focused. The wandering done is between a few particular places, between a few particular times, with a few particular people, and the entire story orbits around his grief and his questions of self and other.Max’s narrative is, ultimately, about himself and his understanding of his character, his personality, his limitations, his loss. Because of this, there are only a few character portraits to develop. This is no Dickens or Dostoevsky. This is a single consciousness surrounded by the bare essential of “others”. Indeed, the others who reside in Max’s present are mere ghosts compared to the presence of the cast of his memory. But even those remembered ones are far off, unknowable, untouchable. They are gods—he names them so in the very first sentence of the book. They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. Max is the only person we ever really come to know, and that only so far as he allows.Max, we learn, is a bit of a dilettante. Ostensibly an intellectual writer on art, the aging man has been frittering away his time playing at writing a study on the artist Pierre Bonnard—“A very great painter, in my estimation, about whom, as I long ago came to realise, I have nothing of any originality to say.” He is a man who perhaps had great dreams—ever striving to put behind him the embarrassment of his low brow upbringing—but he has long since realize that his is “free, fatally free, of what might be called the curse of perpetuance.” His work ends. It will not survive long beyond his death—what of him will last? Nothing.Max is painfully aware of his own mediocrity and detests it. He is not the great man he would be. His loves were no great loves. His desires were not sublime. In him passion and zeal were only masks of anxiety. He is—dreadful to himself—bourgeois. He is not particularly likable, though I would argue he is no worse than most of us. He is not idealized—Banville is clear about this, that he finds the superhuman heros of fiction uninteresting. Max Morden is like the rest of us, and therefore while not pretty, his life and thoughts are relevant. They offer us an opportunity to peer into the dark spaces within, to shine some brief light on the pitch black of our closely guarded inner selves. And that quality characterizes the book as a whole. This is not a book that transports us away from the realities of our life—it instead offers us the space, the opportunity, to go inward, to see ourselves as we are, in weakness and failing. That is its genius.The Sea does not offer a final, comforting affirmation. It does not condescend to teach us by way of some tidy moral couched in beautiful prose. It is a portrait of a very common sort of man in a state of grief towards the end of his life. Max Morden is revealed to us without judgment—The Sea gives color, tone, and texture to the man and his ruminations about his life. In this way it is painterly—as if to point it out, Max makes frequent reference to paintings, particularly those of Bonnard. But where Bonnard idealized his subjects, Banville contrasts the idealized subject to the subject in context, bringing greater contrast and poignancy to the reality behind the painting.Banville handles all of this weightiness masterfully. In other hands such honesty could become a bludgeon that effectively beats the reader into darkness of spirit. But Banville’s excellent imagery, the beauty of his lines lifts the book up. It is like a sad song sung beautifully, and in that glimpse of beauty there is life and the possibility of hope. The Sea.excerpted from my blog post, I would not swim again...
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    whine, whine, complain, snivel, and then, at the last chapter, GET TO THE POINT!!!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dit is een twijfelgeval. Een merkwaardig en intrigerend boek op zijn minst, maar ik weet niet of ik er wel echt van hou. Taal en stijl zijn heel uitgepuurd, po?tisch bijna; ik vermoed zelfs dat het boek het best tot zijn recht komt als je het luidop leest, prachtig gewoon. Maar daarachter gaat een weerbarstig verhaal schuil en een ingenieuze constructie waarvan ik niet goed weet wat te denken. De vertellende ik-figuur, Max Morden, een oudere man is net zijn vrouw verloren aan kanker en ontvlucht de wereld, terug naar een plaats aan de kust waar hij regelmatig de zomervakanties van zijn jeugd doorbracht. Daar kwam hij in de ban van de duidelijk sociaal veel hoger geplaatste familie Grace ? de goden noemt hij hen ? en samen met een dramatisch voorval zal die ervaring hem voor het leven tekenen. De zeer lange monoloog van Norden springt voortdurend door de tijd en geeft maar mondjesmaat informatie vrij. Max blijkt een erg mensenschuwe en nurkse man, die kwaad is op zijn vrouw die hem achterliet en die dus ook nooit zijn jeugdtrauma te boven kwam. Aan de zee (in het Ierse Ballyless) komt hij de draad van dat verleden weer oppikken. Ingenieus opgebouwd dus, maar op geen enkel moment werd ik aangegrepen door het verhaal, het voelde iets te gekunsteld aan. Bovendien deden het amechtige smachten naar een paradijselijk verleden en de beate bewondering voor de Grace-familie me wel heel erg sterk aan gelijkaardige romans denken (?Le Grand Meaulnes? van Alain-Fournier, en ook ?De tuin van de Finzi-Contini?s? van Giorgio Bassani). Ondanks de vooral stilistische verdiensten heeft Banville in dit boek zijn hand een beetje overspeeld. Maar ik herhaal het, het blijft een twijfelgeval.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dit is een twijfelgeval. Een merkwaardig en intrigerend boek op zijn minst, maar ik weet niet of ik er wel echt van hou. Taal en stijl zijn heel uitgepuurd, poëtisch bijna; ik vermoed zelfs dat het boek het best tot zijn recht komt als je het luidop leest, prachtig gewoon. Maar daarachter gaat een weerbarstig verhaal schuil en een ingenieuze constructie waarvan ik niet goed weet wat te denken. De vertellende ik-figuur, Max Morden, een oudere man is net zijn vrouw verloren aan kanker en ontvlucht de wereld, terug naar een plaats aan de kust waar hij regelmatig de zomervakanties van zijn jeugd doorbracht. Daar kwam hij in de ban van de duidelijk sociaal veel hoger geplaatste familie Grace – de goden noemt hij hen – en samen met een dramatisch voorval zal die ervaring hem voor het leven tekenen. De zeer lange monoloog van Norden springt voortdurend door de tijd en geeft maar mondjesmaat informatie vrij. Max blijkt een erg mensenschuwe en nurkse man, die kwaad is op zijn vrouw die hem achterliet en die dus ook nooit zijn jeugdtrauma te boven kwam. Aan de zee (in het Ierse Ballyless) komt hij de draad van dat verleden weer oppikken. Ingenieus opgebouwd dus, maar op geen enkel moment werd ik aangegrepen door het verhaal, het voelde iets te gekunsteld aan. Bovendien deden het amechtige smachten naar een paradijselijk verleden en de beate bewondering voor de Grace-familie me wel heel erg sterk aan gelijkaardige romans denken (“Le Grand Meaulnes” van Alain-Fournier, en ook “De tuin van de Finzi-Contini’s” van Giorgio Bassani). Ondanks de vooral stilistische verdiensten heeft Banville in dit boek zijn hand een beetje overspeeld. Maar ik herhaal het, het blijft een twijfelgeval.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Sea is told in first person by one Max Morden, an aging art critic/historian who, after the death of his wife Anna, returns to the place by the sea where he spent his childhood summers.  It is here that he reflects on the people and incidents that shaped his life.  We as readers join him as he reveals his thoughts on life, love, death, and the experiences of childhood that can take a lifetime to understand.  Max tells of his summers when his parents rented a "chalet" - more or less a shack and on the lowest rung of the village pecking order.  Higher up in that order was Cedars, a house that was rented out by the week or by the month.  Max's involvement with Cedars begins when he meets the Grace family - parents Carlo and Connie, teenager Rose, and twins Chloe and Myles.  It is with this family that Max becomes aware of adult feelings of lust and love, beginning with his infatuation with Connie Grace and eventually transferring to Chloe.  "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." (pg. 108)Max intersperses his childhood experiences with adult experiences  from his relationship with his wife Anna, as they come to grips with mortality via her battle with cancer:"The truth is, it has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present.  In the ashen weeks of daytime dread and nightly terror before Anna was forced at last to acknowledge the inevitability of Mr. Todd and his prods and potions, I seemed to inhabit a twilit netherworld in which it was scarcely possible to distinguish dream from waking, since both waking and dreaming had the same penetrable, darkly velutinous texture, and in which I was wafted this way and that in a state of feverish lethargy, as if it were I and not Anna who was destined soon to be another one among the already so numerous shades...On all sides there were portents of mortality.  I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost.  My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of secrets and it quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand...Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it." (pgs. 71-72)Max's story is not necessarily dependent upon plot nor place, so if you enjoy plot-driven stories you might find this a little tedious.   Instead, the dramatic force of the story lies in the emotions derived by Max from his experiences by the sea, both at Cedars and at home with Anna, and his recounting of them as an older adult looking back at his life.I urge you to read this book.   Banville's writing is breathtakingly beautiful.  The book is only 195 pages, but it took me as long to read it as a 300+ page novel.   I wanted to savor every sentence.