21.2.11

Norm Geras offers a fair and evenhanded review of John Banville's The Sea:

Then there is the narrator's tic, 'Let me linger here with her a little while', and 'I always see us arriving, pausing together on the threshhold...', and 'Suddenly I am thinking of her hair...', 'A bicycle, yes, I see a bicycle asprawl...', 'I see the game as a series of vivid tableaux', 'I can still see the gorse, I can smell the buttery perfume of its blossoms', 'I can see us there...', 'I see this one as a tableau'. All right, already! One gets that it is remembering and that the person doing the remembering is you, the narrator, and no one else. Spare me another 'I see...' And spare me also this: 'By the way, that dog. I never saw it again. Whose can it have been?' Well, honestly, whose? And this: 'The café. In the café. In the café we.' And this: 'That train had pulled out of the station and by now was already somewhere else, somewhere else entirely.' What, only entirely? Not worth a double 'utterly'?


This more or less squares with my impression of the book (the link has a good helping of embarrassing lines, beyond these). If anything, I'm impressed with Norm's dedication: I gave up after about thirty pages.

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