The Sea - Tak's Reading Room

Paperback, 200 pages

Published Feb. 3, 2005 by Picador.

ISBN:: 978-0-330-43625-0

(1 review)

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma.

The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins (silent, expressionless Myles, and fiery, seductively poised and forthright Chloe), who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensured would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.

Written in Banville's precise and hauntingly beautiful prose, The Sea is both a reconciliation with loss and an extraordinary meditation on identity and remembrance. Utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, it is unquestionably …

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma.

The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins (silent, expressionless Myles, and fiery, seductively poised and forthright Chloe), who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensured would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.

Written in Banville's precise and hauntingly beautiful prose, The Sea is both a reconciliation with loss and an extraordinary meditation on identity and remembrance. Utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, it is unquestionably one of the finest works yet from a sublime master of language.

5 editions

Utsob Roy reviewed The sea by John Banville

Review of 'The sea' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Every book doesn't impress on the same place although we take it for granted that they impress upon our feelings. The impression of a book on me is often physical. Some books make my brain fuzzy, some are like deep wounds in my groin, and some are like empty little pockets in my chest. The Sea took my body and broke every bone of it, pulled every muscle.

Since it is a novel, the first question you may ask is, "What is the story?" Well, it doesn't matter. Stories happen all the time and every story is as old as time. Who, and most importantly, how the story is being told is what modern literature is concerned about. When Max, the story-teller here, a self-made man, often vain, mostly sensitive, an intellectual born and brought up in the lower segments of the society tells his story candidly, yet always trying …

Every book doesn't impress on the same place although we take it for granted that they impress upon our feelings. The impression of a book on me is often physical. Some books make my brain fuzzy, some are like deep wounds in my groin, and some are like empty little pockets in my chest. The Sea took my body and broke every bone of it, pulled every muscle.

Since it is a novel, the first question you may ask is, "What is the story?" Well, it doesn't matter. Stories happen all the time and every story is as old as time. Who, and most importantly, how the story is being told is what modern literature is concerned about. When Max, the story-teller here, a self-made man, often vain, mostly sensitive, an intellectual born and brought up in the lower segments of the society tells his story candidly, yet always trying to justify his actions, losses and laughs re-interpreted with the hindsight of a well-aged man, but not entirely coherent— that is not a story anymore. That is life. And life in its most raw form cannot be judged but only be accepted. This acceptance comes with a deep complex sensation, not love, not pity, not hope definitely, but like you're drowning, in the sea.

Lists

Man Booker Prize