The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (English) Paperback Book

Description: The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Back Cover Charles Arrowby, leading light of Englands theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated house by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. But a series of strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-conspire to disrupt his plans. Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charless confrontation with the tidal rips of love and forgiveness is one of Murdochs most affecting tales and lays bare "the truth of untruth"-the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises that we present to the world. Author Biography Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She is the author of 26 novels and several works of philosophy. She died in 1999. Review Quote Winner of the Booker Prize "Sublime [and] profound . . . She takes great care to imbue the house, the sea, the surroundings--everything--with depth and significance . . . exhilarating." -- The Guardian Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide INTRODUCTION "We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value." --Iris Murdoch , The Sea, The Sea Around this barb of (unheeded) reflection swirls the rich maelstrom of fantasies, plots, delusions, mind games, and awakenings that makes up Iris Murdochs popular 1978 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, The Sea . As both a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch always concerned herself in some way or another with the struggle to develop moral goodness and the concomitant effort to vanquish obsessive self-regard. In The Sea, The Sea , she dramatizes this characteristic moral concern to great effect on a stage crowded with self-absorbed artistic Londoners out of their element in a small seaside village. As she explores the potent mixture of power, illusion, and self-delusion in retired actor, playwright, and theater director Charles Arrowby, Murdoch weaves a rich tapestry of startling events: old love affairs revive and die again, friendships sour into attempted murder, hallucinations (or are they?) portend ominous happenings, and the drowning embrace of the sea waits restlessly in the background. As Charles negotiates the turbulent swirl of events, an intricate portrait develops of a man bewitched and bewildered by his own powers of self-promotion and manipulation. In an imaginative style at once realist and gothic, modern yet hearkening back to the age of the grand novel, The Sea, The Sea charts a persons journey toward becoming a virtuous, spiritually mature human being. Taking up the moral development of the individual in a novel rather than a philosophical tract might strike some as a hazardous project, one that could mar both the clarity of thought so necessary for good philosophy and the narrative enchantment so integral to a good novel. And yet it was precisely in her novels that Murdoch so successfully discussed the vital issues of the moral life. Despite this marriage of philosophy and fiction-writing that is so prominent in her work, she always resisted the label of "philosophical novelist," refuting any suggestion that her books might be merely anemic shufflings of philosophical positions by consistently delivering vibrant characters and powerfully effective plots in the realist tradition of such great nineteenth-century novelists as Dostoevsky and George Eliot. The Sea, The Sea is no exception in either the profound issues with which it grapples or in the richness of its fictional world. By the time she came to write The Sea, The Sea , Murdoch had already published eighteen novels and several times been short-listed for the Booker Prize. Concentrating her well-honed talents on the tenacious demon of egotism, The Sea, The Sea lays out an absorbing world of magic, illusion, and power -- supernatural as well as theatrical, spiritual as well as worldly. Charles, in turning his back on the dazzling world of theater and retreating to a house by the sea to take stock of himself, write his memoir, and make a lasting testament, believes that he is eschewing the vulgar, self-absorbed power plays that constituted his adult life as a director. He believes that he is learning to be good. But self-regard and the manipulation of others are not so easily dispensed with. His egotism follows him -- as do the many people that he has pulled under his spell over the years, such as his ex-lover Rosina, the ferociously glamorous actress whom he stole from Peregrine (her husband and one of Charless friends); the mysterious Buddhist cousin, James, who for years served as the linchpin for the elaborate network of envy that Charles carried with him from childhood into adulthood; and Lizzie, another actress and ex-lover whom Charles found "surprisingly easy to leave...when the time came." Each steps into Murdochs dizzying and humorous narrative with a segment of Charless past, revealing him to have been a self-absorbed manipulator ignorant of his own motivations. Echoing the prominent place that romantic love and sexual obsession often play in Murdochs novels, the greatest obstacle to the self-understanding and maturity that Charles so falteringly strives for proves to be his accidental meeting with his first love, Hartley, who, after her abrupt cessation of their chaste yet intoxicating relationship, became a rather ordinary housewife. Contrasting the thoughts and motivations of Hartley and her all-too-banally brutal husband Ben with those of Charles and his many neurotic visitors, the novel descends into a whirlpool of opposing wills and thwarted stratagems. With a morbid fascination brought about by Murdochs nimble control of this cast of idiosyncratic characters, we watch as serene reflection eludes Charles and he desperately grasps at the unrealistic phantoms spawned by the long lost object of his unconsummated childhood infatuation -- leaving many victims in his wake. Throughout the novel, theatrical illusion, Tibetan magic, unconscious projections, supernatural interventions, and overripe fantasies all skew clear perception, distorting the characters awareness of events and entangling them in a confused web of self-centered power relations, even as they try to be virtuous. In intricately charting the multifaceted deceptions of Charles Arrowby with stunningly subtle black humor, Murdoch adeptly elaborates on a motif that followed her in her lifelong concern with Good, with Love, and with Freedom: to be good one must transform the personal into the impersonal, one must escape ones private self and concern oneself with others. Inspired by Shakespeares The Tempest and echoing Prosperos attempt to transform magic into spirit, The Sea, The Sea brilliantly depicts the risks and self-deceptions of the spiritual life, the precarious and important distinction between imagination and fantasy, and the vital importance of negotiating these dangers. ABOUT IRIS MURDOCH Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the most acclaimed British writers of the twentieth century. Very prolific, she wrote twenty-six novels, four books of philosophy, five plays, a volume of poetry, a libretto, and numerous essays before developing Alzheimers disease in the mid-1990s. Her novels have won many prizes: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince , the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine , and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea . She herself was also the recipient of many esteemed awards: Dame of the Order of the British Empire, the Royal Society of Literatures Companion of Literature award, and the National Arts Clubs (New York) Medal of Honor for Literature. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 15, 1919, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents. Her father was a bookish civil servant who had served as a cavalry officer during World War I; her mother had trained as an opera singer before marrying. The love of both literature and music instilled in her by her parents proved to be powerful formative influences, and she reportedly began writing at the age of nine. The family moved to London in Iriss childhood and she grew up in the western suburbs of Hammersmith and Chiswich. The 1940s saw Iris receive a first-class degree in classics from Oxford, briefly become a member of the Communist Party (from which she resigned in disappointment), work in Belgian and Austrian refugee camps for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Program, and befriend Jean-Paul Sartre, on whom she wrote what was to be her first published work, a critical study entitled Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). In 1947 she took up a postgraduate studentship at Cambridge, studying philosophy under none other than Ludwig Wittgenstein. The fruits of these philosophical encounters went on to form an important part of her fertile talent as a novelist. With three previous novels unpublished, Murdoch made her fiction-writing debut in 1954. Under the Net is a picaresque existentialist adventure set in London and Pariss Left Bank that displays many of the traits for which her later work is so admired: a fast-paced plot, finely wrought settings, imaginatively developed characters, and a strong philosophical concern with moral issues and ethical crises. Surpassing the somewhat derivative existentialist strictures of this nevertheless stunning debut, Murdoch published almost a novel per year throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and continued at a slightly less feverish pace throughout the 80s and early 90s. With each book, she displayed her unique talent for combining a lively, comic touch in characterization and plot with a serious concern for such profound themes as the nature of goodness and human freedom. A novelist and philosopher rolled into one, Iris Murdoch declared in her famous essay "Against Dryness" (1961) that literature "has taken over some of the tasks formerly performed by philosophy." However, she never allowed her novels or her characters to become abstract stand-ins for philosophical viewpoints, asserting in the same essay that the novel should be "a fit house for free characters to live in." Producing romances such as The Sandcastle (1957), religious fables such as The Bell (1958), and fantasies such as The Unicorn (1963), she ranged widely across genres and settings. A Severed Head (1961) -- later made into both a play and a film -- takes on Jungian archetypes and Freuds theories about masculine sexuality, while in The Red and the Green (1965), Murdoch, in her only foray into historical fiction, delved into the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Her calling cards became the intoxicating combination of love, marriage, adultery, sexuality, and religion, as well as the inventive use o Details ISBN014118616X Author Iris Murdoch Short Title SEA THE SEA Pages 528 Publisher Penguin Books Series Penguin Twentieth Century Classics Language English ISBN-10 014118616X ISBN-13 9780141186160 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 2001 Publication Date 2001-03-31 Residence ENK Birth 1919 Death 1999 Imprint Penguin Classics DOI 10.1604/9780141186160 Audience General/Trade UK Release Date 2001-03-01 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:141680613;

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