"The Sea"

[fiefoe]

Three months is shorter than I expected to get in the right mood for this elegiac novel by John Banville.

<'my private ceremony of remembering'>

• He did not do it in the way that adults usually did, at once arch and ingratiating. No, this was a comradely, a conspiratorial wink, masonic, almost, as if this moment that we, two strangers, adult and boy, had shared, although outwardly without significance, without content, even, nevertheless had meaning.
• How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant?
• She was first a silhouette, with the sun behind her making a shining helmet of her short-cropped hair.
• A creature with so many mounds and scoops of flesh to carry should not cavort like this, she will damage something inside her, some tender arrangement of adipose tissue and pearly cartilage.
• I fix on the secret shadow under her armpit, plum-blue, the tint of my humid fantasies for nights to come.
• Only they were in my way, obscuring my view of the future. In time I would be able to see right through them, my transparent parents.
• He splashed water in her face and seized her wrists and wading backwards hauled her through the water. She shut her eyes tight and shrieked at him furiously to stop. I watched these edgy larks in a paroxysm of disgust.