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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
Charles Arrowby retires from a lifetime in the London theatre to a cottage by the sea, intending to write a memoir undisturbed by all the reprobates he once associated with, but has now come to disdain. Who would think such a thoroughly detestable man could be so compelling? The book’s early section—Arrowby’s “Prehistory”—is full of the joys of retirement: his delight in food, his little cottage, and the ever-changing sea, all told in his arch voice. But an unexpected encounter in the village upends his plans for happy solitude, and reawakens an obsession that changes his plans in late life. Murdoch’s writing, in the first person, put the reader behind the eyes of this narcissist—a “tartar,” as he calls himself, used to manipulating everyone around him. He finds, however, that in old age his old tricks don’t work as well and he’s in for a reckoning. ‘The Sea, The Sea’ affirms the human ability to change and learn and the strength of friendship, even if its first person narrative sometimes fails to truly bring to life the suffering Arrowby causes to those around him.
înclin mai mult înspre 3.5
Hartley e una dintre cele mai dezamăgitoare personaje feminine despre care mi-a fost dat să citesc.
Hartley e una dintre cele mai dezamăgitoare personaje feminine despre care mi-a fost dat să citesc.
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
yikes. This was a slow builder, a generally tough read and filled with characters that had little to offer at first, in terms of likability. However there are reasons why Ms. Murdoch is a three time Booker Prize winner [edit: actually short listed 4 times, only a winner once] and those reasons do shine through as we journey through the more unpleasant sides of the main characters personality flaws and rampant paranoia knocked back with healthy blasts of jealously and chasers of spiteful manipulation as he tries nearly always in vain to control the people he supposedly loves or somewhat cares about shuffling them around in his own little dance macabre of vanity. There is more than ample meat on this book's serving of themes related to life, the human condition, what we are, what defines us both to others and to ourselves, sometimes this is picked up in conversations or long discussions in the narrators head of his motives (such that he understands them or we trust them as told) or it is inferred by the many twist in the plot as we seem to bounce from one escapade, tragedy or love battle to another in rapid almost over exaggerated slap stick style succession.
Sadly though, I'm not sure I'm going to reach for another book by Murdoch, at least any time soon. In fact I may need a nice little crime fiction novel, or maybe the Hunger Games to reset my book mind to a level place again. I gave it 5 stars not because I enjoyed it, but because it deserved it.
Sadly though, I'm not sure I'm going to reach for another book by Murdoch, at least any time soon. In fact I may need a nice little crime fiction novel, or maybe the Hunger Games to reset my book mind to a level place again. I gave it 5 stars not because I enjoyed it, but because it deserved it.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
While reading this Booker Prize-winning novel, my first and last by the British grande dame Iris Murdoch, I curiously thought often of the concept of umwelten. Explained in a much-more enjoyable book I was simultaneously reading, An Immense World (by Ed Yong), umwelten is that sensory world that is particular to a particular species of animal, dependent on what senses that animal has to experience the world. Each animal experiences a specific unique slice of the world.
While it might be thrilling and magical to experience the world as other creatures do--think of the hero in T.H. White's The Once and Future King--it might also drive us mad. In novels told in the first person, as The Sea, the Sea is, the reader spends the length of narrative inside the narrator Charles Arrowby's head, or if you will, umwelten, and, in this 495-page account by a misogynist, self-absorbed egotist, that is a maddening place to be.
In fiction a gifted author can do anything, even producing a highly riveting account of a simple cell organism that devoid of all but the most basic of senses experiences the tiniest possible sliver of reality. All to say that my violent objection to this book is not to argue that the documented thoughts of an unrepentant narcissist are not possibly the fodder of good literature. I simply point out that if I perceived that you were about to start this book I would jump forward, tear it from your hands, and unheeding your protests, I would run to throw it off the nearest cliff.
Of course, it is a mystery I do not care to explain that, despite my inner screaming as I read the book, I still finished it.
While it might be thrilling and magical to experience the world as other creatures do--think of the hero in T.H. White's The Once and Future King--it might also drive us mad. In novels told in the first person, as The Sea, the Sea is, the reader spends the length of narrative inside the narrator Charles Arrowby's head, or if you will, umwelten, and, in this 495-page account by a misogynist, self-absorbed egotist, that is a maddening place to be.
In fiction a gifted author can do anything, even producing a highly riveting account of a simple cell organism that devoid of all but the most basic of senses experiences the tiniest possible sliver of reality. All to say that my violent objection to this book is not to argue that the documented thoughts of an unrepentant narcissist are not possibly the fodder of good literature. I simply point out that if I perceived that you were about to start this book I would jump forward, tear it from your hands, and unheeding your protests, I would run to throw it off the nearest cliff.
Of course, it is a mystery I do not care to explain that, despite my inner screaming as I read the book, I still finished it.