"What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence
through the autumn dark."
Nevermind the gaudy cover. A friend of mine who knows about my love affair with the English language borrowed me this book because "[Banville] writes wonderful English". After reading The Sea, I couldn't agree more. The novel is almost like prose poetry. The language is simple but filled with striking observations about colours, wrinkles, and loss. There's a painful honesty to some of his observations: a terminally ill woman says to his husband - I paraphrase - "It must be difficult now that you're not allowed to hate me anymore. It's alright, I always hated you a little bit as well." I believe the same paradox of hating someone and yet not being able to imagine a life without them is more common than we like to admit.
As a young reader, the novel felt simultaneously very foreign and scarily familiar. The viewpoint is completely different, but at the same time Banville is writing about things I have only slowly started processing. Loss will happen, but it's difficult for a twenty-something to fully understand it. For me, the novel made me see my grandparents in a different light; for others, I'm sure it'll do different things.
The novel is beautifully melancholy, but it's not hopeless. In a way it gave me a feeling similar to the one I get at cemeteries (which are, for the record, another one of my favourite things): the novel wasn't about death, but about life. It is about how people remain in our memory like caramel-sticky fingerprints. I think Banville actually talks about it, about people literally carrying their ancestors on their backs for a time. And that is baggage I will gladly bear.
Even if you don't normally like sad stories, read The Sea for the sheer beauty of the language.
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