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Ben MarcusBen Marcus's books The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women were considered "experimental" fiction because of his unconventional use of... Continue »
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8 Burnside Literature- A to Z
5 Burnside Featured Titles- Man Booker Prize Winners

The Sea

by John Banville

The Sea Cover

 

Awards

2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
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Staff Pick

Banville's fluid prose glides over the pages of The Sea, a rich story filled with heart and bittersweet longing. I pored over the luminescent descriptions of time and place and the beautiful characters that make up this world. Clearly the Man Booker was well deserved.
Recommended by Ann E., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Review:

"Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his wife's recent death-and his blighted life. 'The past beats inside me like a second heart,' observes Max Morden early on, and his return to the seaside resort where he lost his innocence gradually yields the objects of his nostalgia. Max's thoughts glide swiftly between the events of his wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when the Grace family-father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles-lived in a villa in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal 'chalet.' Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity of a photograph ('the mud shone blue as a new bruise'). As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem. Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"A peculiar and profound satisfaction comes from experiencing the prose of John Banville. Like some aged liquor, potent and malty, his writing demands to be imbibed in appreciative sips, little by little." The Independent on Sunday

Review:

"Unlike so many novels, I was forced to read with the dictionary at my side. The Sea satisfies because it gives the reader...a rigorous workout." Oregonian

Review:

"What The Sea offers in abundance is beautiful writing." Denver Post

Review:

"They say no critic can write great fiction, and certainly great critics have produced some conspicuously failed novels. But a great novelist can turn even a critic...into a compelling protagonist." Los Angeles Times

Review:

"[T]reacherously smart, and haunting...its story of a ravaged self in search of a reason to go on is cloaked in wave after wave of magnificent but hardly consoling prose." Boston Globe
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About the Author

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of thirteen previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 3 comments:
Heather Thayer, August 25, 2010 (view all comments by Heather Thayer)
Unbelievably self-absorbed and boring. The writing is self-consciously cloying -- "oh, look at me, I am trying for a Booker prize," with ten words where two would have done. The meaning is obscured by the overly stylized writing and superimposed Ominous Meaning. If there was a story (or a point), it was lost in all of the posturing and "oh look, I am poetic" meanderings. I sent sentences from this book to friends as a joke. I think the only reason this won the prize is that the Committee couldn't understand what it was reading, but it sounded important.
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SLK , January 2, 2010 (view all comments by SLK )
Best book of decade
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mgmpbd, January 1, 2010 (view all comments by mgmpbd)
In this extraordinary novel, widower Max Morden remarks on the omnipresence of the past, which beats inside him "like a second heart". Returning to the resort town of his youth unleashes a torrent of nostalgia which threatens to upend Max permanently. Maintaining a precious - and tenuous - grasp on the present, he vacillates between the twin sirens of remembrance and possibility:

"So what I foresaw for the future was in fact, if fact comes into it, a picture of what could only be an imagined past. I was, one might say, not so much anticipating the future as nostalgic for it...And suddenly now this strikes me as in some way significant."

Unfolding like a flower, this novel reveals itself in long, languorous, meditative stretches - thus revealing Max as something other than what we have come to believe. The novel's passages are lovely, and delivered in such a way as to make us all feel complicit in the fabrication of our own remembrances. Suffused with melancholy, the story glows with a golden light. This is an extraordinary tale filled with characters who feel both fleshy and dreamlike.

I read this a few years ago, and I can still feel its gentle tug; it has become very much a part of me, and has blurred the line between my own memories and those of the narrator. It feels real, lived in, yet exists in its own, silky literary groove. Along with Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", Banville's "The Sea" has entered my consciousness and remained there ever since. A transformative novel.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9781400097029
Author:
Banville, John
Publisher:
Vintage Books USA
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Authors
Subject:
Grief
Subject:
England
Subject:
Psychological fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Copyright:
2006
Edition Description:
Paperback
Series:
Vintage International
Publication Date:
20060831
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
195
Dimensions:
8.04x5.28x.55 in. .49 lbs.
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Related Aisles

The Sea Used Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
$5.95 In Stock
Product details 195 pages Vintage Books USA - English 9781400097029 Reviews:
"Staff Pick" by ,

Banville's fluid prose glides over the pages of The Sea, a rich story filled with heart and bittersweet longing. I pored over the luminescent descriptions of time and place and the beautiful characters that make up this world. Clearly the Man Booker was well deserved.

by Ann E.
"Publishers Weekly Review" by , "Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his wife's recent death-and his blighted life. 'The past beats inside me like a second heart,' observes Max Morden early on, and his return to the seaside resort where he lost his innocence gradually yields the objects of his nostalgia. Max's thoughts glide swiftly between the events of his wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when the Grace family-father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles-lived in a villa in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal 'chalet.' Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity of a photograph ('the mud shone blue as a new bruise'). As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem. Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review" by , "A peculiar and profound satisfaction comes from experiencing the prose of John Banville. Like some aged liquor, potent and malty, his writing demands to be imbibed in appreciative sips, little by little."
"Review" by , "Unlike so many novels, I was forced to read with the dictionary at my side. The Sea satisfies because it gives the reader...a rigorous workout."
"Review" by , "What The Sea offers in abundance is beautiful writing."
"Review" by , "They say no critic can write great fiction, and certainly great critics have produced some conspicuously failed novels. But a great novelist can turn even a critic...into a compelling protagonist."
"Review" by , "[T]reacherously smart, and haunting...its story of a ravaged self in search of a reason to go on is cloaked in wave after wave of magnificent but hardly consoling prose."
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