The Sea | John Banville | Read the Book; Wanted to Hear the Voice

book: The Sea | John Banville

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The Sea

	The Sea John Banville Random House Audio, 2006 average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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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.

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Read the Book; Wanted to Hear the Voice

I liked the lyrical quality of the book so much, I also bought it in audio form so I could actually hear an Irish voice tell the story. I found that, when I read the book, there were passages that Banville wrote that were so beuatifully written that I had to close the book and think about what he had just said before continuing on. Every line written by the author (well deserving of the Man Booker Prize, I might add) is beautiful and hearing it told reinforced for me what a superb author he is.

The story itself is interesting, in a subtle, way. If you like language and stories about getting older and the memories one recalls of one's youth, then this is a story that could very well interest you.

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