I’ve just finished reading this book, The Sea, by John Banville. I didn’t read it for a class, or a book club. I read it for myself, a rare achievement for me these days.
I’d never heard of it before. But when my friend Jennie-Rebecca was visiting last spring, and she and her husband and I and my husband were out to dinner, where we discussed parenthood and whether or not one can afford it and the validity and implications of astrological signs, we must also at some point have discussed books.
I like to discuss books with Jennie-Rebecca– or I think I would like to (our visits, being rare, tend toward spiralling-types of conversations wherein we touch on many topics and, prodded by eagerness to discuss, move toward other ones and in the end leave them all, and each other, somewhat dissatisfied), as she knows books (she recently finished a PhD in literature, don’t you know), and we share a common taste (modernism, “that roach,” she once called it with, I thought, a clever nod to Kafka) in books.
I’m not really certain that we did discuss books that evening at our favorite restaurant, but at some point she tore off a little slip of paper and wrote “The Sea John Banville” on it and handed it to me. I kept the slip of paper and pondered whether or not to pronounce “Banville” with a French accent and, months later, ordered it from Amazon (a surprising and impulsive and, I’ve decided, Decidedly Helpful thing to do) and just finished reading it just now.
Oh My. Here is a reflection on death and a study in remembering, a detached and simultaneously visceral awareness of the corporal self, an evocation of the gods and a despairing shriek to a silent God. I have my list of vocabulary words (of course) and innumerable dog-eared pages. Here is how memory works–do you want to know?– here on these pages: memories come at you like the sea, “at the margin of which the small waves (break) in a listless line, over and over, like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress.”
Banville’s descriptions are stunning, his narrator’s grief and grotesque humanity repulse and comfort. His story spirals like memory from the present to the past to the far distant past to the present and back again, and you follow the arc of his narrative coccooned in his marvelous prose, confronted with the appalling ugliness of our nature and the detached and insistent beauty of the natural world. At one point, the narrator invites a stranger into his grief; he tells her that his wife has died:
She gave a shrug denoting sympathy, lifting one shoulder and her mouth at one side. “That’s a pity,” she said in a plain, flat tone. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She did not seem to mean it, somehow. The autumn sun fell slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the sea. Honestly, this world.
Books like these remind me of why it is I love books. They leave me wondering what it all meant and knowing at the same time, somehow, too. They teach me vocabulary, to be sure (“mephitic,” anyone?) and they remind me that I want to write and to say it all and say nothing– to leave the reader looking at a pot of burnished blossoms, knowing that they mean nothing and also, very decidedly, yes.
The Everyday is so insistent, isn’t it? The days pass under the tyranny of the urgent. We go, as a friend recently said, from pillar to post, driven by the needs of the next thing. So this is what art is for– a stillness, an evocation to quiet, time to be rather than do. Reading sets my body at rest and my mind at work and, any day now– maybe today– I will pick up my pen.
Thank you, JR, and you also, Mr. Banville, for this book.
