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The Sea The Sea by John Banville


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
(My rating is actually 2.5 stars).

The Sea is a portrait of what happens to a person who lives in the past and becomes self-pitying. The present becomes full of bittersweet melancholy and unfairness which enables the person to slip backwards instead of forwards. They become dry, rambling, odd. People like this are hard to care for and about in real life, which is why it's hard to care about the main character Max or any of the characters in the novel as they're all seen through his eyes & emotions. I can see how some would take the writing as full of ego, even lofty, which it could be, though I wonder if writing this way was a deliberate act of setting the tone for Max and the novel...?

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