![]() ![]() How glad I am that I stayed with The Sea to its last transcendent sentences. Other times – increasingly, the more I read – it was like this novel was actively nourishing me. Reading The Sea, I was at times as frustrated as a child forced to eat her spinach. Moving between past and present, it has a rolling quality, the prose ebbing and swelling with emotion. The Sea is a meditative novel about grief, narrated by an ageing art historian. ![]() “The past beats inside me like a second heart.” The Sea, by contrast, did not go down easily, despite Banville’s breathtakingly beautiful sentences. ![]() Ryan’s novel was deeply emotive and easy to read – the stories of three men, threaded together by a shared humanity. ![]() I read both of these novels in recent weeks. John Banville’s The Sea is a green smoothie, a book where every sentence is undeniably good but the pages are hard to get through. Donal Ryan’s latest novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, is a single malt whiskey, short and potent, infused with a warmth I felt in my body. For reasons mysterious to me I often think of books as drinks. ![]()
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