The Sea, the Sea

5 Jungian Stars. 2015 Gold Award - Tie (First Favorite Read) Over the weekend I was sitting with a friend, having a tea and we were reading. She said, "How is the Murdoch book?" I looked up and without pausing or thinking and said "Simply wondrous". She tilted her head in her adorable way and said "Whatsitabout?"I took a moment, sighed and exclaimed, "Everything"This book is a psycho-spiritual masterpiece of the highest caliber. I decided to sit down and come up with a laundry list of what it is [...]

”Even a middling novelist can tell quite a lot of truth. His humble medium is on the side of truth. Whereas the theatre, even at its most ‘realistic’, is connected with the level at which, and the methods by which, we tell our everyday lies. This is the sense in which ‘ordinary’ theatre resembles life, and dramatists are disgraceful liars unless they are very good. On the other hand, in a purely formal sense the theatre is the nearest to poetry of all the arts. I used to think that if [...]

This book earned the author the Booker Prize in 1978. It’s a powerful book. I had seen it forever at library sales and for years I thought I should read it. Finally, I did, and I wish I had read it earlier. I’m giving it a rating of 5 and adding it to my favorites.The main character is a recently retired actor/playwright/theater director. He was a so-so actor, a better playwright, but a masterful director. In the last endeavor he achieved his fame and made his money. The main character is an [...]

Ah the sea, that wonderful spectacle bringing joy to countless many, whether swimming, diving, surfing, fishing, boating, splashing about in waist high water or just simply strolling along the shoreline whist the tide tickles your feet. But for some they won't go anywhere near it, all thanks to a certain Steven Spielberg film. For Iris Murdoch's fictional character Charles Arrowby, getting munched on by a shark is not likely and the last thing on his mind, after all, this is the British coast we [...]

An extraordinary novel, at once page-turner and philosophic, comic and melodramatic, one of the best that I've read. Murdoch is remarkably skilled at inhabiting the minds of her protagonists, and Charles Arrowby, a late-middle-aged, bumbling, morally dubious, veteran of theater, is a wondrous creation. The first 100 pages of this novel shouldn't work, as Charles, in journal form, moves to Shruff's end and inhabits a lonely house by the sea, wanders around town, experiences visions that he blames [...]

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.Iris MurdochOh boy. This is deep, dudes. Far out and deeply deep, dudettes.Rather than trying my unworthy hand at a thorough analysis of a psychologically complex 500 page novel, I shall lay track for a few grooves.Dig it.Near the beginning, I thought it might be a romance. No way, man. More like a real Mystery of Mental and Emotional Health and Well-being.What is love? How is the idea or thought of it, especially young love, affected by the passa [...]

The Sea the Sea by Iris Murdoch, is her 20th novel, which won the Booker prize in 1978. The author famously was an academic; a professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, who also wrote novels with a philosophical focus.The novel is in the form of a journal. The viewpoint character throughout is a famous actor and director, Charles Arrowby. The impression we gain immediately is that he is a solitary, rather arrogant and egotistical individual. In the novel he has decided to retire to "Shruff E [...]

Here's the first thing I love about The Sea, The Sea: its title. Isn't it wonderful? Imagine how boring it would have looked on a shelf if it had just been called "The Sea." But with that profoundly simple decision to repeat itself, it suddenly drips horror and madness and obsession. It's just brilliant. Almost makes me wish Emily Bronte had called her book "The Moor, The Moor."And then Murdoch plays this terrific game with the opening sentence: The sea which lies before me as I write glows rath [...]

I struggled with this for a while, mainly because I was so irritated by Charles Arrowby, the main character and unreliable narrator. Arrowby is a retired actor, director and playwright who has moved to a remote cottage by the sea and is tentatively writing his memoirs. Whole successions of characters, many of them former lovers, arrive and depart and Charles encounters his first love Hartley who has also retired to the area with her husband. Like many of Murdoch’s characters Arrowby is not ver [...]

This is a five-hundred page diary of a madman. Vain, heartless, jealous, rude; all of these, and more, apply to Charles Arrowby, the central character of the novel. Charles is a retired actor who has left London and bought a house (Shruff End) hard by the sea, where he intends to write a memoir of his career, his life and loves. Low and behold he runs into his childhood sweetheart, Hartley, who lives nearby, and his little self-centered world runs completely off the tracks. He sets about trying [...]

I’m fairly certain no one writes, or ever has written, exactly like Iris Murdoch. Reading her prose is like listening to Frank Sinatra sing--you might have heard the song before, but never like that. In the first 200 pages of this book, I could not decide where it was going. Charles seemed an egocentric misogynist, not worthy of the interest I was showing in him. The plot seemed desperately thin and a bit all over the place, but the writing was exquisite, the descriptions were musical, and the [...]

I found this both repelling and compulsive, and the more repulsed I became the less capable I seemed of putting it down. I was hooked just several pages in, enamored with the elegant, elegiac tone of Charles Arrowby's attempts at composing a memoir/diary after exiling himself to a remote seaside home to live in monastic isolation. Via Arrowby, Murdoch's prose takes on a sea-like quality, the ebb-and-flow of memories and musings churning together present and past to the point where the edges of r [...]

Luna Punch By Alexander Janssonتشارلز آروبي ممثل انكليزي مسرحي مشهور، قرر أن يتقاعد حين بلغ الستين من عمره في بيت عتيق و ناء على شط البحر، و طفق يكتب مذكراته و لكن مشروعه في الانعزال تهشم حين التقى في تلك القرية بحبه القديم هارتلي التي هربت منه قبل أربعين عاما، ليستيقظ الشغف القديم شغف تحو� [...]

Introduction--The Sea, The Sea

Iris Murdoch nasceu em Dublin em 1919. Filósofa, poeta, dramaturga e romancista, morreu aos 79 anos com a mente destruída pelo monstro Alzheimer.O Mar, O Mar - vencedor do Man Booker Prize em 1978 - conta a história de Charles Arrowby, ator e encenador, que aos sessenta anos decide abandonar o teatro, mudar-se para uma aldeia inglesa e comprar uma casa (com uma torre Martello) junto ao mar. Aqui pensa desfrutar de tranquilidade para escrever as suas memórias, comer bem e tomar banhos de mar. [...]

A fabulous investigation into ego and vanity and sexual stalking. Charles Arrowby, a theatre director, retires to a tower by the sea in order to be close to his childhood sweetheart. The novel is narrated by Arrowby himself, who has decided to write his memoirs. Murdoch has created a brilliant unreliable narrator in Arrowby and we, as readers, are forever straining to read between his lines. When he sets out to destroy the marriage of his childhood sweetheart the novel takes on the allure of a t [...]

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First Impression:As my GR friend Jean said this is a weird book. Why is it weird?1. It is not a typical fiction. It tries to bridge both fiction and biography together. The novel begins with the intention of the main character - writing a memoir. It continues in this stream and suddenly the memoir takes the turn of fictional events and the reader gets enclosed in it. And the end, when the fiction part seems to be ending the memoir part comes up again and acts as the concluding part. The writer t [...]

Truth be told, I was scared of the book. Scared of its length, scared I might not like it enough to finish it (I'm very frustrated when I can't finish books - I always feel it's my fault).Thank goodness Murdoch really knows how to write, I actually loved reading "The Bell" a couple of years ago and I promised myself I'd keep on reading Murdoch. But I never knew which one to continue with, and, yes, I was scared of their length :). And I chose this one because it was mentioned in a really nice in [...]

Definitely not my cup of tea. The ramblings of a completely self-absorbed, delusional and unbearably verbose person left me absolutely indifferent. I forced myself to finish it, because I'm a sucker for self-punishment, and also because I hoped for an unimaginable twist at the finish line that would make it all worth it, but I was left none the wiser, if you don't count the bizarre self-inflicted death (not suicide though) that came out of the blue. I suppose the author should be considered very [...]

Back in the 80s, both my wife and I read a number of Iris Murdoch novels. We always enjoyed them, but looking back, they're not exactly the kind of novels you remember much about. They were all similar. Usually they involved several friends (academics or artists or both) thrown together over something, some cheating, love, jealousy, funny dialogue, and usually a tragedy to cap things off. Books I recall liking the best: The Black Prince, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and The Bell. The Bell (an ear [...]

This 1978 Booker winner manages to feel both completely contrived and compulsively readable. With protagonist Charles Arrowby, a famous theatre director, playwright and actor who retires to live at the seaside, Iris Murdoch created a fascinating, self-centered, narcissistic character who is completely caught up in his own perceptions and way of thinking. Narrated from Arrowby's point of view in a memoir-like style, we experience his ruthless, funny, and self-righteous actions and justifications [...]

This is another one for the "What were they thinking?!?" shelf. Doubly so, in fact. It's not just another lapse by the Booker selection committee, whose judgements we already know to take with a large grain of salt. But to be let down so abominably by Dame Iris, someone we know is capable of writing interestingly, though sometimes at the expense of prolixity. Regrettably, in "The Sea, The Sea" we see her giving free rein to her multiple vices, with little of the compensatory acuity that is there [...]

الدروس المستفادة من هذه الرواية:١- الزواج يدمر حياتك٢- التقاعد يدمر حياتكوهي رواية مهمة جدا لمن يرغب بالشفاء من الحب الأول.اعتقد ان اسم منزل (شراف إند) الذي تدور الاحداث فيه مرادف ل (بيت المجانين) في ترجمة ما.واذا انتقلنا للمراجعة الجادة فهي تبدأ هنا:أنها رواية جميلة جدا اذا اس [...]

I bought this book from Booksale Baguio in April 2009 for P30. After reading the book, I thought I would not mind paying P800.00 to read such a wonderful novel. This is included in the 501 Must Read Books and a finalist in Man Booker Prize.I like the way Dame Iris Murdoch developed her characters and the way she introduced them in the plot. I read this in 5 working days (Monday to Friday) and did most of the readings a home (some in the gym while resting). In the morning, I put the book by my si [...]

Iris Murdoch war lange Zeit fast in Vergessenheit geraten, nun veröffentlicht der Piper Verlag ihre wichtigsten Werke in einer Neuauflage. Und was für eine sensationelle Wiederentdeckung!Es ist schwer zu beschreiben, was Das Meer, Das Meer nun eigentlich ist, denn es besteht aus so vielen Elementen: eine verlorene und vermeintlich wiedergefundene Liebe; seltsame, beinahe unerklärliche Ereignisse; eine Entführung; ein unerwartetes und unglaublich komisches Zusammentreffen; Einsamkeit im Alter [...]

Murdoch´s characters are never likable people, they are usually, childish, selfish, obsessive and awful and you can hardly like them at all. But that is what makes her novels so fun. She always knows how to tangle you up in their troubles, lies, betrayals, and tragedies, their ambivalence and doubt,and she gets me at every turn. Charles Arrowby, the main character in this book is no better than any of them. He is en egotist who is impossible to sympathize with because his troubles seem so banal [...]

From BBC Radio 4 - Drama:Jeremy Irons stars Iris Murdoch's 1978 Booker prize winning novel, dramatised by Robin Brooks - as part of the Iris Murdoch season on BBC Radio 4.Episode 1 (of 2):Charles Arrowby, a distinguished theatre-director, decides to retire to a remote house by the sea in order to write his memoirs.Episode 2 (of 2):Charles Arrowby, a distinguished theatre director, has retired to a remote house by the sea. After encountering his adolescent love, he sets out on a mission to reclai [...]

(view spoiler)[Bettie's Books (hide spoiler)]Description:The sea: turbulent and leaden, transparent and opaque, magician and mother When Charles Arrowby, over sixty, a demi god of the theatre -- director, playwright and actor -- retires from his glittering London world in order to 'abjure magic and become a hermit', it is to the sea that he turns. He hopes at least to escape from 'the woman' -- but unexpectedly meets one whom he loved long ago. His buddhist cousin, James, also arrives. he is men [...]

I was wary about reading Murdoch again after Under the Net, which I didn’t enjoy at all. This one had everything that I love in life and don’t often find united in a novel: elaborate planning for simple tasty lunches; the English seaside; ludicrous and highly improbable action (a sea monster? Can anything more awesome possibly show up in a heretofore realist novel?); and a lot of thought about how to be good and how to love.One of my favorite things about this novel was the narrator’s kvet [...]