Sea, Sea (by Alice Murdoch)
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About This Novel
It won the 1978 Booker Prize, the highest award for English literature, beating Kingsley Amis and Penelope Fitzgerald's novel by a true artist. She is a British post-war female writer as famous as Doris Lessing, a lover hurt by Canetti, and Sontag's philosophy teacher. She was slandered and hated, and she worked hard for literature. A provocative text in the same vein as "Cutting the Audience", it uses the accusations and confessions of a theater director in his later years to aim at a subversive rewriting of Shakespeare's magical drama "The Tempest". Taiwanese novelist Luo Yijun highly recommends this contemporary British novel that left Harold Bloom in awe. "The Sea, The Sea" is the 1978 Booker Prize-winning work. The novel tells the story of sixty-year-old Charles Arrowby, a director, playwright and actor who is a highly admired idol in the British theater world. When he was ready to retire from his glamorous world in London, "vowing to renounce magic and become a hermit," he chose to return to live by the sea. He hoped, at least, to escape "those women"... But unexpectedly, he met his first love from the past, and Charles' cousin James, who believed in Buddhism, also came to the seaside. The peaceful life he originally expected to live completely changed. Not only was he horrified when he saw a monster rising from the waves, but he also found that although he wanted to live in isolation, he was surrounded by his own fantasies and delusions and was deeply troubled. The novel is majestic, complex and exquisite, fully demonstrating the contradictory motivations of the main characters: vanity and jealousy of human nature, as well as selfishness and callousness under the disguise of society.
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