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Title details for The Sea by John Banville - Wait list

The Sea

by John Banville
John Lee
Audiobook
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    August 15, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415947654
      • File size: 197024 KB
      • Duration: 06:50:27

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      John Lee has his work cut out, presenting this restrained and beautifully written novel, which won the Booker Prize in spite of an elegiac pace and almost complete absence of action except in memory. He gives us the inner life of Max Morden as he returns, after the death of his wife, Annie, from cancer, to a seaside village where he spent childhood summers. Max takes a room in a house once rented by the Grace family, who entranced him when he was young, and keeps company with The Little Corporal, his bottle of Napoleon Brandy, as he remembers the complicated loves of his childhood and his marriage. Lee's beautifully accented, fully felt performance brings warmth and color to what could be a bleak portrait. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 7, 2005
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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