John Banville’s The Sea

In the never-ending quest to read the books that have sat unread on my bookshelf for several years, I picked up The Sea. Perhaps its soothing, green-toned cover drew me to it, or perhaps it was the fact it was on the top of the stack. In any case, I didn’t know quite know what to expect. The blurbs on the back cover raved about the writing, as blurbs tend to do, but they weren’t far off. When literary prose is
as captivating and intelligent as Banville’s, it hardly even matters what the storyline is. Take for example this line: “What are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?” This is the kind of sentence that stops to make you think, and it captures the melancholia that pervades this story about a man coping with a death by trying to find comfort in an uncomfortable past.


Banville, John. The Sea. New York: Vintage International, 2005.