Review of John Banville’s The Sea

If ever a book didn’t need another review, I suppose it’s this one. Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2005, how can I have anything to add to what others have already said? Well, here’s my attempt….

This was a difficult book to read. Far more challenging than SNOW, Banville’s 2020 mystery involving the death of a clergyman (Not a spoiler. Happens on page 1.). The sentences are long, highly wrought, replete with beautiful, original imagery, and oftentimes arcane vocabulary. I managed to get through it though, and was surprised, in the end, to find a twist or two. It’s really a book about memory, and family, and those we love, as well as those we fear and trust and mistrust. It’s about a young boy growing up in coastal Ireland, his early acquaintances and experiences. It’s a coming-of-age novel of sorts. It’s also a book about an older man—by fifty years, the 60-ish year-old man the young boy has become, along with the baggage he’s acquired over the years. It’s about his ambivalent feelings towards himself and those he loves, and, especially, towards the veracity of his own memory. It’s about how one thing leads to another, and how small—or not so small—things lead to horrific eventualities. It’s definitely a book worth reading. It’s sad, contemplative and important. It prompts us to look at our own lives and question their meanings, their values, their functions, their points. It asks us, in the end, whether the beauty we experience in this world is worth its concomitant pain. I’d like to read this book again sometime, to see if I react to it differently. It definitely moved me and made me question many things about myself. 

I realize what I’ve written above is vague, and want to add a couple of footnotes. So, to that end, if you haven’t read the book already, this is a SPOILER alert. Max, the main character, is grappling with his wife, Anna’s, recent illness and death. At the same time, he’s trying to manage his relationship with his daughter and with related consequences of his wife’s death, the main one being whether or not to sell the summer home he inherited from his parents and where he spent much of his time as a child as well as an adult. Mixed in with all this are reflections about his parents, about how he felt about them and how they felt towards each other. And, more importantly, reflection about childhood friends he made while vacationing there, Miles and Chloe Grace, their parents and support staff. It’s quite convoluted, really, and a miasma of sorts because Banville’s main character (the narrator) freely roams from what he (I think) calls the absolute present time (his stay at the Cedars) and the recent past (Anna’s death) and the remote past–his childhood, his adolescence, during which he spend time with Chloe and Miles Grace, and, significantly their parents. It’s a sad, tragic tale very much worth reading.

Thank you, John Banville, for writing such a brave, interesting, beautiful and important work.

Quitting Social Media

Hello, Everyone! Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy with family, writing, and moving! But here’s a great article I read today–I think you’ll like it, too!

Source: Quitting Social Media

 

Review of I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers

One of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, I Saw a Man is thematic, thoughtful and literary without being pretentious. A bit of a mystery with a soupcon of murder, the novel opens with an obscure poem by Hughes Mearns:

“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away …”

A charming, but seemingly meaningless, ditty, it is a clue to the deeper, more perturbing issues in I Saw a Man—issues of guilt and responsibility, remorse and blame, sadness and forgiveness, accident and intention. In short, the novel with a deceptively simple title and epigraph is anything but simple.

In the opening pages of I Saw a Man aspiring novelist, Michael Turner, finds his true love in an international journalist named Caroline. Settling in a remote corner of Wales to escape their frenetic pre-marital lifestyles, their idyllic married life is tragically cut short when Caroline takes a risky assignment in Afghanistan. The inciting incident of the novel, it leads Michael on a path through anger and grief before finally resolving in a sort of clouded empathy as he returns to his birth city and establishes a new life. But what happens between points A &B is a series of highly unanticipated events, all of which contribute to the novel’s main theme.

Beautifully written with an economy of backstory and description, the novel is a classic peeling-an-onion style narrative, wherein widower Michael Turner reveals the details of his past in bits and pieces that accrue more and more meaning as the novel progresses. The setting of the story, a luxurious heath in south London, plays a prominent role in the novel, too, informing its mood and events.  A second literary technique Sheers uses to great advantage in the novel is mirroring, whereby seemingly disparate and unrelated events parallel one another, drawing readers back time and again to the novel’s central issue of culpability.

If this review seems obscure, it is because I Saw a Man is the sort of novel that invites (and deserves) scrutiny. It is opaque in a good way, rich in depth and dimension. What I admire most, however, is how Sheers subtly highlights the larger issues of the novel without bludgeoning us with them. Beyond the culpability of the main characters, for example, is the larger question of authenticity. Unlike them, we may not have caused another’s misfortune, but surely we, too, have indirectly fostered hurts and pain—small but significant partial deaths—in our lifetimes. It is part of being human. No matter how much we aspire to truth, beauty and goodness, we inevitably face situations in which we are less than honest, irresponsible if not entirely guilty, hurtful by default, if you will.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is Michael’s description of himself as an aspiring fiction-writer. Here again we experience the reflexive nature of Sheers’ novel—he is writing a novel about a character who wants to do just that—write a novel. Again, think of peeling-an-onion or a Chinese box. As a failed novelist, Michael finds his niche in writing non-fictional, intimate portrayals of people he meets. Here Sheers blurs the line between fiction and reality—an inherent flaw of biography—because of the categorical impossibility of ever truly knowing another human being. The irony is that even as Michael acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the exact content of his subject’s each and every conversation, his subject may have had, he still believes there is a measure of truth the writer is able to convey by virtue of his proximity to his subject, a proximity he seeks to actualize by removing himself, the observing party, from the final product, the biography. Thus Sheers’ protagonist inserts himself into other people’s lives in order to discover their truths, then promptly “disappears himself” from the finished work in order to more fully realize his subject’s unadulterated reality.

Michael exercises this technique in early in the novel in his summary of “Neighborhoods,” a study of two brothers whose contrasting lives continue to diverge from one another even after the book is finished. A second book he’s written is about a scientist who seeks to identify the exact nature of empathy by theorizing there are certain cells in the brain that actually “mirror” other people’s experiences, thus allowing them to understand and empathize with each other. Sheers’ novel exhibits this same type of mirroring or repetition as Michael seeks his own truth and struggles to become as authentic a human being as possible.

If this discussion has taken a metaphysical turn, it’s because I Saw a Man is ‘meta’ in nature. Like many great works, its form equals content, the meaning of the novel and its telling feeding one another in an endless loop. I’ve purposely avoided specificity to allow the reader to discover the novel’s meaning for himself.

Overall, I Saw a Man is a modern masterpiece, much like The Goldfinch or All the Light We Cannot See. Like Donna Tart and Anthony Doerr, Own Sheers is one of those writers whose work resonates far beyond the confines of its covers. I honestly can’t imagine—and can’t wait to see—what Sheers writes next.

Goodbye, Summer!

Dear Readers,

Sorry I’ve been away. This has been a busy summer, and I’ve been devoting my energy to One Charming Cat (January 2016).

But here’s my question for the day . . . what is the value of light verse?

In the meantime, here’s one last nod to summer . . .

Swimmin’ Pool

Swimmin’ pool, swimmin’ pool
I’m your local swimmin’ fool.
See your sparkle, see your blue
ain’t nothing comin’ ’tween me ’n you.

Swimmin’ pool, swimmin’ pool,
hot dogs, June bugs, summer school.
Feel your water, feel your ice—
Ooooooh—don’t that feel nice!

Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part 2

Greetings, friends, readers, and fellow writers.  Just wanted to let you know I’m still trying to publish my picture books on amazon’s createspace.  So far, I’ve exported the files from my IPAD–where I created them as epub files on Apple’s Book Creator–to my I MAC.  At first I exported them as PDFs, but this didn’t work well because once I imported the files to createspace, the images turned out to be less than the 300 DPI CS recommends.  So I asked my son to help me increase the resolution on my books.  He was able to do this, but I’m not sure how.  I think he used Adobe Acrobat Professional to convert the raw epub files into PDFs that were higher quality (more DPI) than the PDFs I’d exported directly from BookCreator on my IPAD.

The first book–Isabel Plum: Ichthyologist–looks good now, but it has a couple of mistakes/typos/misaligned words I have to fix.  Problem is I don’t know where to fix them.  Surely not on the PDFs (they’re inalterable, right?).  So I need to find the raw epub file he uploaded to adobe acrobat before converting it to a PDF.  Sure, I know where the epub file is, but does this mean I fix the original, resend it to my Macbook and then ask my son to reconvert the whole thing to a new PDF using adobe acrobat to produce good quality (at least 300 DPI) images?

I hope this makes sense to you, fellow readers and writers.  If it does, you probably know more about these technical issues than I do.  I just hope that by writing about my difficulties those of you with similar problems will feel encouraged.  I’m NOT gonna give up.  I’m not.  I just wish this stuff weren’t so hard.  I want to get back to writing, to illustrating, to actually completing my books.

Goodbye for now–and happy weekend.