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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9781400097029
ISBN number: 1400097029
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 208
Printing Date: August 15, 2006
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: August 15, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 12375
Studio: Vintage
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In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the very first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel — among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.
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Rated by buyers 
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The story of The Sea matters less than the way it is told. Max Morden, a recent widower, takes up residence at a seaside inn that played host to a transformative summer of his childhood. Now, he spends his time drinking and reflecting upon his wife's illness and that summer long ago. Using the sea as both metaphor and setting, Banville deftly handles the universal nature of loss.
Banville writes not about but through his narrator, an art historian, and the language of The Sea reflects its protagonist's linguistic background. Every third page, I had to look up an obscure art or ocean word, such as craquelure or groyne, which would be casually tossed in as a descriptor. In fact, I eventually took to reading the novel while sitting under my laptop and an open page of dictionary.reference.com.
The prose of The Sea will draw in any reader, such as myself, who loves to linger over a poetic phrase. Many of the sentences in the novel are like sumptuous packages, and they often present the reader a depth of wisdom. Take, for example, this observation: "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."
Banville finds the fine balance between that exploration of the child and a revelation of the adult self. Occassionally reminiscent of high modernist stream-of-consciousness, The Sea considers the connection between all moments of life, with its tides and undertows of thought and understanding. I definitely recommend this quick and rewarding read and will set to diving through Banville's other works in the near future.
Rated by buyers 
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Banville's novels that I have read are all about alcoholic old men full of self-hatred. The Sea is another item in this genre.
The narrator in The Sea, Max, is a half-hearted art historian whose wife has recently died of cancer. The most intensely and empathetically described events in this novel are of Max's and Anna's cancer episodes. Anna's disease and lingering death are not easy, and are touchingly described in bits and pieces of Max's recollection. Anyone who has been through the "cancer-wringer" with a loved one will find themselves weeping again.
After the death of Anna, Max has returned to a beach resort where he spent his youthful summers. This return Max recognizes as a self-imprisonment. He reminisces in absurd detail about his attempts there to frolic with the Grace family when he was eleven or twelve years old. Ultimately disaster strikes the troubled and bizarre Grace family, but how this affects Max is difficult to fathom--both for him and the reader. There is little plot or story to this short novel, but there are vastly many overcooked ruminations about multitudinous subjects--none of which seem to add up to much, or to be particularly interesting; just like Max's life.
Actually, self-loathing, or self-hatred seem too heroic to describe Max's tepid contempt for himself. He can't even manage a decent self-destructive moment. Max is a weak, helpless, failed individual whose only entertainment is to dwell on minutiae of the past. And why is Max writing this memoir anyway? The reader never learns. In any case, as self-described, Max is a failed art historian who has been living on Anna's inherited wealth. Evidently Max has accomplished nothing of value. Love and connection to other people, even his daughter, seem to elude him.
I wonder what the florid and difficult writing that is typical of Banville mean and how it is connected to Max's self-contempt. What kind of man writes using many words that he is sure his readers will not know or be able to define? Does he expect the reader to turn to the dictionary and look up these bizarre words? Does he expect the reader to feel inferior? On the contrary I get the sense that the narrator, or maybe it is Banville himself, feels deeply inferior and using big, obscure words and la-de-da literary allusions is a way of hiding from himself if only thinly his own inability to live.
The only thing powerful and real for Max are his grief over the death of Anna and his solipsistic recollections of his summer with the Graces. These are also powerfully evoked for the reader, and thus this novel is a wringer for the reader. But do we always want the easy and pleasant? How are we to confront our own demons if we always flee them in mere entertainment?
Rated by buyers -
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 just died of a lingering illness. 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 momentous events.
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), 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--and I felt a connection with Max that I have never felt before in any of Banville's previous novels. I loved this novel. Mary Whipple
Shroud
Eclipse: A Novel
The Untouchable
Ghosts
Rated by buyers 
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John Banville has a great ear for prose, both his own and others (in his outstanding literary criticism). However.
Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote SHOULD be insufferable. But they are not. Unlike Banville's narrators, who truly ARE insufferable. I did like The Untouchable. The Sea is saved somewhat by the last ten pages or so. But this (very short) book nonetheless begins to get unbearable about halfway through -- many, many descriptions of light glinting off water, many, many sinister hints and diabolical erudition from the narrator, etc., etc.
Rated by buyers -
Yes, it's beautifully written prose. Each sentence crafted by an artist. I suppose that's the fuel behind its winning the Man Booker prize. But can you really enjoy reading it when you need to consult a dictionary for every other sentence? This book seems more like an exercise in creating "texture" rather than plot. I've never seen so many obscure words spread around, and for what purpose? About as much fun reading as it is to watch a modern-day spelling bee.
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