Novel by John Banville, The Sea.

John Banville finally won the Man Booker prize in 2005 with this beautifully crafted and brief novel (nearly a novella) about the pleasures and sorrows associated with the play of language, memory and secrecy. Although Banville is often considered a literary descendant of Nabokov, with his love of rich mellifluous language and obscure diction, he might be more comfrotably compared to other great Irish writers such as James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen, who also share Banville's evident pleasure at (and grace with) the pliancy and luxury of words. THE SEA might be an expected, yet disappointing choice for winning Banville the Booker, given that its plot so closely apes the structure of one of the most crowdpleasing of all narrative arcs of highbrow fiction from the last forty years. Here yet again, a disappointed elderly narrator looks back to the magical encounter in childhood that forever fired the imagination but also implicated him (or her) in guilt when it led inevitably to a terrible and deadly error. Banville's is an odder variant of this formula -- which goes at least as far back as L. P. Hartley's THE GO-BETWEEN, and was recently repeated in Ian McEwan's much loved ATONEMENT -- in the fundamental dislikeability of all his major characters, a Banville trademark. This causes the stakes of the life-changing incident, and its effect upon the narrator, to seem much less shattering than in Hartley's or McEwan's novels; the repetition of the formula also makes this novel seem much less fresh than in Banville's other works (which often are similarly concerned with the encounters between cruelty and innocence). But Banville is always worth reading if only for his grace with language and with narrative construction: THE SEA is, as usual, beautifully crafted in every formal sense.

Product Description

This book argues that Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past had a profound impact on the content and structure of her novels.

It analyses Woolf's reading and writing practices via her essays, diaries and reading notebooks in order to provide a framework for examining her response to the literary past. It presents chronological studies of eight novels, exploring how Woolf's intensive reading surfaced in her fiction. The book sheds light on Woolf's varied and intricate use of literary allusions; examines ways in which Woolf revisited and revised plots and tropes from earlier fiction; and looks at how she used parody as a means both of critical comment and homage.

Key Features

*Dedicated to Procopiuc24

The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by J. D. Salinger. First published in the United States in 1951, the novel has been a frequently challenged book in its home country for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst.

Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel by Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding. It discusses how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British school-boys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 70 on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged Books of 1990–2000.[1] The novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present