The Sea by John Banville

3.5 Stars

Two catalysts, one man, one place.

"Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend."

I'm not sure why this took so long for me to read since it isn't particularly lengthy. The writing is highly descriptive, evocative, so much so that I often found my mind spinning off into its own memories of the sand, air, and life during the flashpoint of adolescence. I couldn't stick with the story because as soon as another image was laid down by Banville I swirled into mine. It wasn't competitive, but the prose certainly created this connection, a loop back in time. Very weird, and I found myself remembering things I thought I'd forgotten--like a name I couldn't recall and suddenly as I put the story aside and started drifting to sleep it was there.

I'm not sure the value in this book for me was the story, but rather the rekindling of the past. I'm trying to recall the last time I had an experience like this while reading and I can't think of one. I often have brief forays into alternate thoughts or timelines, but never so often--every few pages here. Is it the book or me? Don't know.

"Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things--new experiences, new emotions--and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self."

A man returns to his family's holiday cottage by the sea to remember after losing a segment of his life. And what happens is this tandem story line of the far past and the recent past being told over the rickety and out of sync interaction with the past place. He's stepping back in time and it doesn't quite fit what he remembered, which is often how we experience places we haven't seen in ages. It is in the last pages, 10%, that the tale finally unravels completely and the connection speculated becomes evident.

"That was the pact we made, that we would relieve each other of the burden of being the people everyone else told us we were."