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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
I have to admit, I really struggled to enjoy this book. I did not like the characters, or even the story that much; however, the writing did redeem the book somewhat. There were times I couldn't put the book down because the writing.
completely unlikeable but wonderful, compelling characters. Beautiful, mesmerizing writing. masterful. Now I want to read all of Iris Murdoch.
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I was drawn in by the evocative title, but I will admit I was a little leery due to the journal-style narrative. However, I loved this book. It felt so real both as a journal and a piece of fiction.
THE PLOT: Builds up slowly. I don’t want to say too much as part of the fun is watching the stakes get higher than you expected.
THE SETTING: Brilliant. The titular sea is as much a character as any other and foams and crashes, swallows up and retreats, parallel to the story being told. The creaking old house and small town with its possessive pub-goers and small neighbourhoods are realised perfectly.
THE CHARACTERS: Almost caricatures, but the dialogue was realistic and I found that they all advanced the plot well. There was nobody superfluous and each had a recognizable personality. All terrible people, really, which is also part of the fun.
It’s a meandering story, but highly recommended!
THE PLOT: Builds up slowly. I don’t want to say too much as part of the fun is watching the stakes get higher than you expected.
THE SETTING: Brilliant. The titular sea is as much a character as any other and foams and crashes, swallows up and retreats, parallel to the story being told. The creaking old house and small town with its possessive pub-goers and small neighbourhoods are realised perfectly.
THE CHARACTERS: Almost caricatures, but the dialogue was realistic and I found that they all advanced the plot well. There was nobody superfluous and each had a recognizable personality. All terrible people, really, which is also part of the fun.
It’s a meandering story, but highly recommended!
funny
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Well, well, well…if it isn’t me out here relating to one of the worst (ok, maybe not worst but CERTAINLY most annoying) characters in literature.
🌊
This book made me want to quit therapy. And not because I felt I no longer needed it, oh no, but because I went “oh this person is terrible, when is he gonna wake up?” and then the next minute was going “do I do that, though? Do I also believe that?” And THEN I was mentally working through the terror of either explaining that I identify with the-worst-dude-you-know or trying to hide that fact a-la the-worst-dude-you-know. And I went “maybe I just never go back?”
🌊
In honesty, I am floored by Iris Murdoch’s ability to speak to the unsavory bits of our character in a nuanced way. What is most impressive is that normally nuance in stories tends to extend to characters circumstances, environments, and lived experiences. Murdoch creates nuance just by exploring the breadth and depth of thoughts that happen in our minds. Our own capacities for to view our actions from a variety of perspectives, to create stories and mend them as we like. Our own way of how we create truth and completely distort it without even having to get out of bed first.
🌊
This book started SLOW. I was worried I was getting into another Tomorrowx3 situation where I would hate the entire ride but have something good to talk about at the end. That was not the case! While the beginning is slow and clunky and a bit boring, the story accelerates and you can feel it building and leading you somewhere even when the plot doesn’t necessitate that the story does.
🌊
The cast of characters were hilarious and left you with as many questions and as much exasperation as our narrator does. There were portions that were hard to read, there were parts where I rolled my eyes, and there were many sections where I went “but is that not true?”
🌊
This book will absolutely stick with me. Not only was it worth pushing through to get to the end where I can marinate on the story, but as I was reading it there were so many moments of joy or excitement over a revelation or emotion I didn’t know I could inspect in a certain way. This is a book that absolutely invites you to come as you are and then dares you to take a closer look at that as it reflects it back to you.
🌊
Quotes:
What I wrote before was written in water and deliberately so. This is for permanence, something which cannot help hoping to endure.
But this is the case. I have in fact very little sense of identity.
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.
Although I saw objectively that I had behaved badly, I felt practically no guilt […] Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.
“Lizzie’s right, you despise women.”
“No, not innocent, you are fundamentally vicious, but somehow immature.”
The complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.
“When I wake in the morning, I think first of death, do you?”
“We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.”
I wanted, in the time that was left to us, to console her as a god consoles. But I also wanted increasingly, and with a violence which almost burnt the tenderness away, to own her, to possess her body and soul.
“That’s what mad people do, see everything as evidence for what they want to believe.”
“I’ve felt half dead—yes—often. I think quite a lot of people do. But you can live on half dead and even have pleasures in your life.”
“I somehow made you come, like people are lured to destruction, not for any good but just for disaster and death. That’s what I’ve been making all my life, not a home, not a child, but just horrors.”
“God, the sickening brutality of men—the women who are left behind to make agonizing decisions alone.”
“Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather, it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons.”
Those who are caught in mental cages can often picture freedom, it just has no attractive power.
But I wanted to make what was terrible so much worse so as to be sure that it was fatal.
“I think it was your own illusions of power that fascinated people, not personal magnetism.”
“Such a quick, thoughtless destruction of the past must always be a matter of regret whatever the subsequent advantages.”
I swam about feeling the loneliness of the sea and that particular sensation which I now identified as a sense of death which it seemed to have always carried into my heart.
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Can one change oneself? I doubt it.
Funny:
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.
No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.
Of course actors regard audiences as enemies.
Part of my unease about my cousin consisted in a fear that he would succeed in life and I would fail. That, on top of the ponies, would have been too much.
Singing is of course a form of aggression.
I considered telephoning my London doctor and describing my symptoms, but decided not to since the symptoms would sound uninteresting and it was hard at the best of times to interest my London doctor.
challenging
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Soap opera plot + Nabokovian main character + magical realism nabs at least 4 stars. A few parts felt pretty repetitive though, even if that’s thematically fitting. Found some of the minor characters really grating as well.