{"product_id":"the-sea-isbn-9781400097029","title":"The Sea","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eBOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER \u003cb\u003e• An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory\" (\u003ci\u003eUSA Today) \u003c\/i\u003eabout a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife.  \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back  to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the  recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces,  the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love  and death for the first time. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat Max comes to understand about the past, and about  its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written  novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.“Remarkable. . . . The power and strangeness and piercing beauty of [\u003ci\u003eThe Sea\u003c\/i\u003e is]  a wonder.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“With his fastidious wit and exquisite  style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Sea\u003c\/i\u003e [is] his best novel so  far.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A gem.  . . . [The sea] is a presence on every page, its ceaseless undulations echoing constantly  in the cadences of the prose. This novel shouldn't simply be read. It needs to be  heard, for its sound is intoxicating. . . . A winning work of art.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia  Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Sea\u003c\/i\u003e offers an extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory. . . . Undeniably brilliant.” \u003ci\u003e—USA Today\u003c\/i\u003eJohn Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of thirteen previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.IThey departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under  a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to  unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for  years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the  dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far  end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought  it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day.  The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of  that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly  agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves  were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No  sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.    The name of the house is the Cedars, as of old. A bristling clump of those  trees, monkey-brown with a tarry reek, their trunks nightmarishly tangled,  still grows at the left side, facing across an untidy lawn to the big  curved window of what used to be the living room but which Miss Vavasour  prefers to call, in landladyese, the lounge. The front door is at the  opposite side, opening on to a square of oil-stained gravel behind the  iron gate that is still painted green, though rust has reduced its struts  to a tremulous filigree. I am amazed at how little has changed in the more  than fifty years that have gone by since I was last here. Amazed, and  disappointed, I would go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are  obscure to me, since why should I desire change, I who have come back to  live amidst the rubble of the past? I wonder why the house was built like  that, sideways-on, turning a pebble-dashed windowless white end-wall to  the road; perhaps in former times, before the railway, the road ran in a  different orientation altogether, passing directly in front of the front  door, anything is possible. Miss V. is vague on dates but thinks a cottage  was first put up here early in the last century, I mean the century before  last, I am losing track of the millennia, and then was added on to  haphazardly over the years. That would account for the jumbled look of the  place, with small rooms giving on to bigger ones, and windows facing blank  walls, and low ceilings throughout. The pitchpine floors sound a nautical  note, as does my spindle-backed swivel chair. I imagine an old seafarer  dozing by the fire, landlubbered at last, and the winter gale rattling the  window frames. Oh, to be him. To have been him.When I was here all those years ago, in the time of the gods, the Cedars  was a summer house, for rent by the fortnight or the month. During all of  June each year a rich doctor and his large, raucous family infested it—we  did not like the doctor’s loud-voiced children, they laughed at us and  threw stones from behind the unbreachable barrier of the gate—and after  them a mysterious middle-aged couple came, who spoke to no one, and grimly  walked their sausage dog in silence at the same time every morning down  Station Road to the strand. August was the most interesting month at the  Cedars, for us. The tenants then were different each year, people from  England or the Continent, the odd pair of honeymooners whom we would try  to spy on, and once even a fit-up troupe of itinerant theatre people who  were putting on an afternoon show in the village’s galvanised-tin cinema.  And then, that year, came the family Grace.The first thing I saw of them was their motor car, parked on the gravel  inside the gate. It was a low-slung, scarred and battered black model with  beige leather seats and a big spoked polished wood steering wheel. Books  with bleached and dog-eared covers were thrown carelessly on the shelf  under the sportily raked back window, and there was a touring map of  France, much used. The front door of the house stood wide open, and I  could hear voices inside, downstairs, and from upstairs the sound of bare  feet running on floorboards and   a girl laughing. I had paused by the gate, frankly eavesdropping, and now suddenly a man with a drink in his hand   came out of the house. He was short and top-heavy, all shoulders and chest  and big round head, with close-cut, crinkled, glittering-black hair with  flecks of premature grey in it and   a pointed black beard likewise flecked. He wore a loose green shirt  unbuttoned and khaki shorts and was barefoot. His   skin was so deeply tanned by the sun it had a purplish sheen. Even his  feet, I noticed, were brown on the insteps; the majority of fathers in my  experience were fish-belly white below the collar-line. He set his  tumbler—ice-blue gin and ice cubes and a lemon slice—at a perilous angle  on the roof of the car and opened the passenger door and leaned inside to  rummage for something under the dashboard. In the unseen upstairs of the  house the girl laughed again and gave a wild, warbling cry of mock-panic,  and again there was the sound of scampering feet. They were playing chase,  she and the voiceless other. The man straightened and took his glass of  gin from the roof and slammed the car door. Whatever it was he had been  searching for he had not found. As he turned back to the house his eye  caught mine and he winked. He did not do it in the way that adults usually  did, at once arch and ingratiating. No, this was a comradely, a  conspiratorial wink, masonic, almost, as if this moment that we, two  strangers, adult and boy, had shared, although outwardly without  significance, without content, even, nevertheless had meaning. His eyes  were an extraordinary pale transparent shade of blue. He went back inside  then, already talking before he was through the door. “Damned thing,” he  said, “seems to be . . .” and was gone. I lingered a moment, scanning the  upstairs windows. No face appeared there.That, then, was my first encounter with the Graces: the girl’s voice  coming down from on high, the running footsteps, and the man here below  with the blue eyes giving me that wink, jaunty, intimate and faintly  satanic.Just now I caught myself at it again, that thin, wintry whistling through  the front teeth that I have begun to do recently. \u003ci\u003eDeedle deedle deedle\u003c\/i\u003e, it  goes, like a dentist’s drill. My father used to whistle like that, am I  turning into him? In the room across the corridor Colonel Blunden is  playing the wireless. He favours the afternoon talk programmes, the ones  in which irate members of the public call up to complain about villainous  politicians and the price of drink and other perennial irritants.  “Company,” he says shortly, and clears his throat, looking a little  abashed, his protuberant, parboiled eyes avoiding mine, even though I have  issued no challenge. Does he lie on the bed while he listens? Hard to  picture him there in his thick grey woollen socks, twiddling his toes, his  tie off and shirt collar agape and hands clasped behind that stringy old  neck of his. Out of his room he is vertical man itself, from   the soles of his much-mended glossy brown brogues to the tip of his  conical skull. He has his hair cut every Saturday morning by the village  barber, short-back-and-sides, no quarter given, only a hawkish stiff grey  crest left on top. His long-lobed leathery ears stick out, they look as if  they had been dried and smoked; the whites of his eyes too have a smoky   yellow tinge. I can hear the buzz of voices on his wireless but cannot  make out what they say. I may go mad here. \u003ci\u003eDeedle deedle.\u003c\/i\u003e    Later that day, the day the Graces came, or the following one, or the one  following that, I saw the black car again, recognised it at once as it  went bounding over the little humpbacked bridge that spanned the railway  line. It is still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things  endure, while the living lapse. The car was heading out of the village in  the direction of the town, I shall call it Ballymore, a dozen miles away.  The town is Ballymore, this village is Ballyless, ridiculously, perhaps,  but I do not care. The man with the beard who had winked at me was at the  wheel, saying something and laughing, his head thrown back. Beside him a  woman sat with an elbow out of the rolled-down window, her head back too,  pale hair shaking in the gusts from the window, but she was not laughing  only smiling, that smile she reserved for him, sceptical, tolerant,  languidly amused. She wore a white blouse and sunglasses with white  plastic rims and was smoking a cigarette. Where am I, lurking in what  place of vantage? I do not see myself. They were gone in a moment, the  car’s sashaying back-end scooting around a bend in the road with a spurt  of exhaust smoke. Tall grasses in the ditch, blond like the woman’s hair,  shivered briefly and returned to their former dreaming stillness.I walked down Station Road in the sunlit emptiness of afternoon. The beach  at the foot of the hill was a fawn shimmer under indigo. At the seaside  all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines  pressed between earth and sky. I approached the Cedars circumspectly. How  is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura  of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not  some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a  revenant? So many unanswerables, this the least of them. As I approached I  heard a regular rusty screeching sound. A boy of my age was draped on the  green gate, his arms hanging limply down from the top bar, propelling  himself with one foot slowly back and forth in a quarter circle over the  gravel. He had the same straw-pale hair as the woman in the car and the  man’s unmistakable azure eyes. As I walked slowly past, and indeed I may  even have paused, or faltered, rather, he stuck the toe of his plimsoll  into the gravel to stop the swinging gate and looked at me with an  expression of hostile enquiry. It was the way we all looked at each other,  we children, on first encounter. Behind him I could see all the way down  the narrow garden at the back of the house to the diagonal row of trees  skirting the railway line—they are gone now, those trees, cut down to make  way for a row of pastel-coloured bungalows like dolls’ houses—and beyond,  even, inland, to where the fields rose and there were cows, and tiny  bright bursts of yellow that were gorse bushes, and a solitary distant  spire, and then the sky, with scrolled white clouds. Suddenly,  startlingly, the boy pulled a grotesque face at me, crossing his eyes and  letting his tongue loll on his lower lip. I walked on, conscious of his  mocking eye following me.A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305498890469,"sku":"NP9781400097029","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400097029.jpg?v=1767741372","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-sea-isbn-9781400097029","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}