"We carry the dead with us only until we die too"

"Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations...True, there will be something of us that will remain, a fading photograph, a lock of hair, a few fingerprints, a sprinkling of atoms in the air of the room where we breathed our last, yet none of this will be us, what we are and were, but only the dust of the dead."

 Winner of the Man Booker Prize and John Banville's 18th novel, The Sea is told in Max Morden's viewpoint.  Reeling from his wife's death, Max retreats to a cottage by the sea where he used to spend his summers.  It is there that we are taken in a journey through his recollections of his childhood summers with the Graces and the time before his wife's death.  The novel was poignant and honest and all praises for this book are well-deserved.

Twenty-One: Falling Man

Interesting Factoid?

There is a performance artist in the book that suspends himself upside down wearing a business attire reminiscent of a photograph by Richard Dew.  Don DeLillo claims that he did not know that the title of the photograph is also Falling Man

Impressions?

A couple of firsts with this book.  First novel I read that is related to 9/11 and my first Don DeLillo.  What can I say, it was an awesome first impression and I can’t wait to get started with both Underworld and White Noise.

Most Memorable lines?

“There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held.  It held the gaze of the world, she thought.  There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all.”       

“But does a man have to kill himself in order to count for something, be someone, find the way?”