|
Outstanding
|
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
An autumnal, elegiac novel whose desolate story is carried along by the sweet and stormy tides of its exquisite, sometimes too exquisite, prose.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Daily Telegraph Lewis Jones
[Banville's] best novel so far.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Publishers Weekly
This novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life. [7 Nov 2005, p. 54]
|
|
Outstanding
|
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran
Above all else, expect from The Sea a ceaseless tide of ravishing prose, the cadences of which are designed to slowly dissolve the shoreline separating the artificial exercise of recording felt experiences from the actual experiences themselves. [5 Nov 2005]
|
|
Outstanding
|
The Independent John Tague
[The Sea] confirms Banville's reputation as once of finest prose stylists working in English today and, in the sheer beauty of its achievement, is unlikely to be bettered by any other novel published this year.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Washington Post John Crowley
The power and strangeness and piercing beauty of its fragments... are a wonder.
|
|
Outstanding
|
USA Today Deirdre Donahue
The Sea offers an extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory. It's not a comfortable novel, but it is undeniably brilliant.
|
|
Outstanding
|
The Guardian Nicholas Lezard
Banville's book recalls such poised masters as Proust and Beckett (and, indeed, James) not because he wants you to know how well-read he is, but to invoke a kind of guarantee that he knows fiction has responsibilities to its subjects as well as its readers.
|
|
Favorable
|
The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty
This misshapen but affecting novel turns out to be about something even more familiar than the loss of innocence: it's about grief, the misery and confusion the narrator feels on losing his wife.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Nation Claire Messud
Banville's novel is remarkable in the end not for what it says, self-consciously, about life's great themes but for what it knows, and richly conveys, about what it is to be alive, while continuously experiencing loss.
|
|
Favorable
|
New York Review Of Books Gabriele Annan
Banville's prose can be lush to the point of overwritten. That is the price the reader has to pay for the overwhelmingly sensuous impact of sight, sound, and smell in it.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Independent Peter J. Conradi
[Banville] is prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase, so we read him slowly, relishing the stream of pleasures he affords.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Spectator Sebastian Smee
It is a brilliant, sensuous, discombobulating novel.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Guardian Finn Fordham
Literary allusions play hide and seek in this very literary novel.
|
|
Favorable
|
The Economist
Mr Banville's style affords the reader a voluptuous, unfashionable pleasure that grows with every re-reading of the book and casts the story with ease into second place.
|
|
Favorable
|
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
Has so many beautifully constructed sentences that every few pages something cries out to be underlined.
|
|
Favorable
|
Kirkus Reviews Bruce Allen
A beautifully composed narrative that shifts among multiple time frames and obsessive preoccupations.
|
|
Favorable
|
London Review Of Books Adam Phillips
In The Sea, Banville has written an utterly absorbing novel about the strange workings of grief, and the gratuitous dramas of memory.
|
|
Favorable
|
Los Angeles Times Jack Miles
An utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile. [6 Nov 2005]
|
|
Mixed
|
Daily Telegraph Tibor Fischer
There's lots of lovely language, but not much novel.
|
|
Mixed
|
Entertainment Weekly Mark Harris
Banville's craftsmanship and exactitude are always in evidence. But, for a novel that unfurls a virtual thesaurus of adjectives to describe the ocean and sky, The Sea is, ironically, a bit too dry and airless for its own good
|
|
Mixed
|
Village Voice Jessica Winter
Banville's famously torrid affair with his thesaurus has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters, whose fierce powers of observation and description are rendered poignantly meaningless by failings of moral temperament, but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
New York Observer David Thomson
Too much of The Sea is an elbow in the readerâs ribs, and a weird uneasiness on the part of the writer. [14 Nov. 2005, p. 31]
|
|
Unfavorable
|
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Robert MacFarlane
The Sea feels--disappointingly from such a gifted and interesting writer--tired and retried, and other near-anagrams indicating second-handedness.
|
|
Terrible
|
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
A stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale about an aging widower revisiting his past.
|
