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Summary and Reviews of The Sea by John Banville

The Sea by John Banville

The Sea

by John Banville
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Nov 1, 2005, 195 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2006, 208 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize.

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.

Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize.

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    Booker Prize
    2005

Reviews

Media Reviews

The Washington Post - John Crowley
Banville's achievement seems remarkable to me. Banville appears to be fining down his writing to the central impulse of all his mature work, which he stated long ago in the extravagant Gothic tale Birchwood : "We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. The first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.

Booklist - Brad Hooper
Starred Review. Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize for Fiction, Irishman Banville's new book does more than simply explore a life. It explores life.

Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert
The novel is written in a complex, luminous prose that might strike some as occasionally overblown ... The result? A breathtaking but sometimes frustrating novel. Highly recommended.

Publishers Weekly
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.

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Beyond the Book



The Booker Prize was established by the Booker McConnell company in 1969, and is  considered to be one of most important literary awards in the UK, if not the most important. In recent years it has been sponsored by the Man Group, an investment company, and thus is officially known as The Man Booker Prize, but is more often referred to simply as 'The Booker'.

Pierre Bonnard: Max has a tendency to muse over the paintings of Pierre Bonnard and in particular Bonnard's paintings ...

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Read-Alikes

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