Iris MurdochThe Sea, the Sea: Booker Prize Winner (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Even though I gave this five stars, that does not mean that everyone will like this book.You are more likely to enjoy this book if you can enjoy a book with long, wandering descriptions, stream of consciousness such as Ulysses, or a meandering through someone else's life,. . I think that older people will understand the book better than younger people.If you need a plot, excitement, or need to understand what is going on at all times, this is not the book for you.I had to interrupt my reading of this book several times. I read it on Kindle and highlighted, not the great passages, but items that seemed significant in terms of understanding the characters and what was going on. In fact, after reading about 100 pages, I went back and skimmed/highlighted. This was helpful, especially since my reading was interrupted. I read the last 10% after a break of almost 5 months and was able to pick right up on the story. It seems that this would be a good way to read the book: read a bit and put it aside, then go back and read a bit more, or flip through the earlier parts and re read. If you are the type of person who thinks about life, and meaning, then you will enjoy this. I don't think I would have enjoyed this when I was younger, although, who knows? I have gone back and read many books that I read in my 20s and they seem to be different books. Maybe this book would be the same: one book for a young person and another for an older person. If a young person can get through it, it might be very educational and even helpful- not as a moral guide, but to put perspective on one's own life as it is lived.I'm going to make a stab at saying what this book is about. There are several summaries of the "plot". The interesting thing is that many of them vary except in the basic outlines. That is because one's reaction to this book is going to vary according to the level at which one reads it. I have only a superficial acquaintance with philosophy or mythology and several other areas of knowledge. I sense that there are many levels of understanding this book and no one will have access to all of them. What I do have is a broad experience of life, so that is what I was able to understand in this book.What I think is going on here is that Charles is talking about parts of his life, with an emphasis on his obsession with Hartley, a woman whom he loved as a young man, and whom he may still love. That is the superficial story. Meanwhile, other people come and go in his life. Many of them are also obsessed, often with him. Sometimes they are obsessed with other aspects of life: the theater, Buddhism, patriotism. Each time they come into his life, he thinks differently about them and often they are thinking differently about him. Unlike many novels, in this book, many of the "minor" characters have a character arc. The the arc is not like one that is satisfying in a Hollywood movie, it is an arc that is more closely aligned with the arc of one's life. It can be satisfying, or surprising, or stupid.As different things happen in his life, he reflects upon his relationship with Hartley differently,which serves to inform us,not so much about Hartley, as about the lead character and his own development. In the same way, the sea is not an objective inanimate object, but Charles' relationship with the sea reflects his mood and his thoughts. Charles also has many relationships with others. They start out at one point and continue to grow and develop in their own, separate lives. As they develop, they relate to him differently and he also changes his opinion about them, sometimes based on a re-thinking of past events, and sometimes in reaction to changes in that person. In the end, perhaps there is an answer, or perhaps it is random and doesn't make a neat story-like life.Nabokov once said something along the lines of that one needs to read a novel at least twice to truly understand it. This is one of the books that will bear re-reading and will probably give gifts on a second, third, or even fifth reading. It is great literature, and a great experience, but not for everyone.

Iris Murdoch's 1978 Booker Prize winning book is the fictional diary of Charles Arrowby, a famous director of the theater in England, who has retired to a house on the sea. We are immediately drawn into the book by his voice, which is eloquent and energetic, and his (Murdoch's) gift for description, especially the sea in its different elements and phases. In fact, Charles is to describe the sea many times in this book's pages, and they never get old. But we learn very quickly that Charles is an arrogant man, very selfish. As he lists the women he has loved and discarded, the relationships he has destroyed with little evident guilt, we begin to wonder if there isn't something clinically wrong with the man. As the story progresses, we see almost all of those women come back into the picture in some way; he too finds out quickly that his plan to flee his life in London has failed. And as they come back, we see his narcissistic manipulations in action, as when, for example, he toys with a young former lover who has settled on a man, but still pines for Charles.But no one re-emergence in Charles's life on the sea is an instructive or as dramatic as when he runs into his first love, Hartley, who left him forty year before. She dropped out of sight then, without explanation, and this act seems to have informed his future behavior in many ways. Her presence in this new village sets off an obsession in Charles that will provide the majority of the drama in the book, and lead him to a sort of redemption at the end. But he has to exhaust his manipulative skills and almost die to get there.Murdoch's writing here is impeccable. She draws an intriguing character in Charles, and puts him a beautifully and vividly rendered environment. Though Charles is not a likeable character, we almost do like him because of Murdoch's voice. She not only gives him a mesmerizing eloquence, but a gruff sense of humor that will make the reader laugh out loud at times. Though the pages are taken up with lots of detail and internal thought, there is surprisingly plenty of suspense to keep the pages moving. And there are big themes aplenty to chew on. Love, jealousy, vanity, memory-- the world we create within our minds to get through our lives. This is a book you will want to read twice for its content. It's a book you can read twice for its beauty.

One of the best of Iris Murdoch

Auch wenn der Protagonist heute eher ein Schreckbild darstellt, gefällt die gekonnte ironische Brechung, die Vielschichtigkeit der Deutungsebenen. Ein großer Roman.

Arrived on time. Good quality.

Long, batshit crazy and shimmering with amazing lines and descriptions, this is an almighty slab of writing which is worth submersing yourself in. It's of its time but timeless, tedious but compelling, frightening and banal, often in the same paragraph. You have to be happy we live in a world where people publish things like this and, of course, where people write like this.I should just add that as a satire of self-important, pompous showbiz people, it's also really, really funny and fairly harsh.

It's cheaperInterestingThanks to our university syllabus for prescribing this book