Volume 53, Number 4 · March 9, 2006
Suddenly, Last Summer
By Gabriele Annan
The Sea
by John Banville
Knopf, 195 pp., $23.00
John Banville is a former literary editor of The Irish Times, and the author of several distinguished works of fiction. His latest, The Sea, has a lot in common with a novel he published five years ago and called Eclipse. Both have a first-person narrator who returns to a seaside resort he knew and loved as a child. The actor hero of Eclipse goes there to get over a nervous breakdown, and Max, the 'I' of The Sea, goes to get over the death of his much-loved wife, Anna. Meanwhile Max works in a dilatory way at his biography of Bonnard, which 'has got no farther than half of a putative first chapter and a notebook filled with derivative and half-baked would-be aperçus.' The seaside with its moody weather, its boarding houses, and its nostalgia figures in both stories.
Review, 2568 words
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