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Search - The Sea
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The Sea Author: |
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Book Description:
From the award-winning author of The Untouchable ("Contemporary fiction gets no better than this."--Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review), an elegiac, deeply moving, and eminently accessible novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.
The voice we hear is that of Max, a middle-aged Englishman, a writer and self-described dilettante who has been supported by his wife's money. Now, after his wife's recent death, Max has gone back to the seaside town where he lived as a child -- a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his new life without her, and a return to the place where he encountered the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.
In a narrative that moves seamlessly back and forth in time, Max relives the childhood summer he met the Graces, a well-healed vacationing family who took him in and unwittingly introduced him to a world of feeling he'd never experienced before. The seductive mother, the imperious father, the twins Chloe and Myles--in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled -- each of them played a part in what Max still remembers as the "barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood."
Interwoven with this story are his memories of his past with his wife -- and of her long decline into illness -- and with moments, both significant and mundane, of his present life: with his grown daughter Claire who wants to pull him from his grief, and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying and where the past beats inside him "like a second heart." What he comes to understand about that past and the way it has shaped his state of heart and mind now is at the center of this emotionally powerful tale.
The Sea is a return for the author as well: to the vivid drama and narrative élan that were the hallmarks of The Untouchable. It is the best novel yet from this extraordinary writer.
The voice we hear is that of Max, a middle-aged Englishman, a writer and self-described dilettante who has been supported by his wife's money. Now, after his wife's recent death, Max has gone back to the seaside town where he lived as a child -- a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his new life without her, and a return to the place where he encountered the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.
In a narrative that moves seamlessly back and forth in time, Max relives the childhood summer he met the Graces, a well-healed vacationing family who took him in and unwittingly introduced him to a world of feeling he'd never experienced before. The seductive mother, the imperious father, the twins Chloe and Myles--in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled -- each of them played a part in what Max still remembers as the "barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood."
Interwoven with this story are his memories of his past with his wife -- and of her long decline into illness -- and with moments, both significant and mundane, of his present life: with his grown daughter Claire who wants to pull him from his grief, and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying and where the past beats inside him "like a second heart." What he comes to understand about that past and the way it has shaped his state of heart and mind now is at the center of this emotionally powerful tale.
The Sea is a return for the author as well: to the vivid drama and narrative élan that were the hallmarks of The Untouchable. It is the best novel yet from this extraordinary writer.
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Top Member Book Reviews
Eileen G. (
4 member(s) found this review helpful.
The language of this novel is so very rich, I found myself stopped dead in my reading tracks over and over. Incredible descriptions and words. This is fine literature at its best, the kind you read for the beauty of pure reading pleasure.
3 member(s) found this review helpful.
This novel was good but awfully slow going. I can't believe how LONG it took me to read considering it was less than 200 pages. The prose is beautiful and the insights into the human mind are striking, but almost the whole of the novel is being "inside the head' and tortured thoughts/memories of an middle aged, grief striken man. Suddenly in the last dozen pages there is a total surprise of an ending that leaves you feeling as if you spent weeks plodding through sand dunes and were suddenly thrown off a cliff. Amazing. Had it not been so beautifully written though, I would never have stuck with the long trudge through the lion's share of the book. I suppose the "tortured" slow read makes you feel what the main character is feeling...
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
Challenging reading--beautiful, polished writing. Luminous.
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Max Morden,a middle
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.
Read All Book Reviews of "The Sea"
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