Friday, July 19, 2013

Book Review - The Sea, The Sea

How do you start to review a work of fiction that touches the deepest of deep gorges inside your mind so much so that you read and reread sentences, passages, pages to really understand them, make some sense out of ordinary situations made bizarre by the workings of human psyche, but are still left baffled....more confused than ever?

I mean the above as the best compliment I could give the author, Iris Murdoch. Sample this –

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

The book, written in first person, is a memoir of a fictional character, Charles Arrowby, who is a famous theatre director from London and has retired from his world of glamour to live a quiet life besides the sea writing his memoirs. So as we start reading, we are actually taken through the process of Charles preparing to write his story in his own words, and then the story itself, in the way he wants to unfold it. In between, we can also find the ramblings of Charles’ mind, analyzing what he has written so far!

So we get to know all that he is thinking, random thoughts about his past, present, future, about the people in his life, and most importantly, about his childhood first love, who he accidentally meets during his stay at the sea. Will she come back to him? Did she ever love him? Did he really ever love her or for all these years just kept this fantastic idea in his head that she was indeed his first love? Did her husband want to kill Charles? Who, if any, was Charles’ real soul mate? Should he have cared for her more? In short, some mind-boggling stuff. Feelings that cannot be fully expressed, told in words that defy definitions. Unrequited loves. Destroyed lives. Weird men and women. Twisted relationships. Spirituality. Internal Gods and Demons. Misplaced trust. Reckonings and disbelieves. Madness. Can one ever know true intentions?

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final; they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”

If you are confused in life, read this book. It will reassure you that most people also are.

If you are not confused in life, don’t read this book. It will surely confuse you, if you have the ability to understand emotions.

I plan to read it once again....maybe after a decade!