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The Sea of Light
hardbound
First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 11, 2017
Three women, all swimmers, all queer, and all broken in major ways. Bren, the coach of this Division II women’s swim team, has just lost her partner to cancer. Babe, the former champion swimmer, has survived a plane crash and some 50 hours in the ocean. Ellie has survived her parents’ survival of the Holocaust. Reading the copy initially, the word overwrought came to mind. But Levin makes it work. There are moments in this book, entire passages and chapters, where the personal drama transcends itself and becomes something sublime like Greek tragedy. The way these women have lost and continue to suffer at times attains such power and beauty with Levin’s language, that you move past what can otherwise become melodrama.
And then there are the swimming passages. As a former competitive swimmer, I am forever searching for books that will give swimming the language it deserves. So far I’ve found few writers who can do this. Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies approaches this inner sensation of swimming, both physical and emotional, and Charles Sprawson explores what it means to have a “feel for the water” he says is his subject in his Haunts of the Black Masseur (an excellent cultural and literary history of swimming). Antony Ervin, in his memoir, has some gorgeous passages when he talks about chasing the water, what that feels like and how it haunts you, in and out of the water. But Levin, I would say, does it best. Here’s one such passage:
“This feeling I get toward the end of my main set each morning workout…My arms turn to lead in the water, shoulders protest that they are all used up, and the right side of my neck feels as if someone’s been banging on it with a nightstick. When I’m wrapped inside this pitiless wet blanket of sorrow, and hurting, and rage, I can’t fight the slowing down any more, I know my splits have deteriorated and my stroke is falling entirely apart. But at the same time the pain changes, reveals a different piece of itself. Becomes buoyant somehow, and rhythmic. So that I just keep moving—slowly, futilely, but forward. And, that is the sway.”
There are strands of this book that are less successful than others. There are passages that become too general and didactic, and chapters written from points of view of characters I don’t think are important enough to have their own chapters (the story is told from multiple points of view, while I would have wanted only Bren, Babe, and Ellie). But moving past all this, I had the feeling that this book is beautifully flawed, sort of like Babe herself after the crash, like her scarred body. It may not be able to attain perfection, but it can feel and know and express in ways that are powerful and beautiful, like this book.
And then there are the swimming passages. As a former competitive swimmer, I am forever searching for books that will give swimming the language it deserves. So far I’ve found few writers who can do this. Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies approaches this inner sensation of swimming, both physical and emotional, and Charles Sprawson explores what it means to have a “feel for the water” he says is his subject in his Haunts of the Black Masseur (an excellent cultural and literary history of swimming). Antony Ervin, in his memoir, has some gorgeous passages when he talks about chasing the water, what that feels like and how it haunts you, in and out of the water. But Levin, I would say, does it best. Here’s one such passage:
“This feeling I get toward the end of my main set each morning workout…My arms turn to lead in the water, shoulders protest that they are all used up, and the right side of my neck feels as if someone’s been banging on it with a nightstick. When I’m wrapped inside this pitiless wet blanket of sorrow, and hurting, and rage, I can’t fight the slowing down any more, I know my splits have deteriorated and my stroke is falling entirely apart. But at the same time the pain changes, reveals a different piece of itself. Becomes buoyant somehow, and rhythmic. So that I just keep moving—slowly, futilely, but forward. And, that is the sway.”
There are strands of this book that are less successful than others. There are passages that become too general and didactic, and chapters written from points of view of characters I don’t think are important enough to have their own chapters (the story is told from multiple points of view, while I would have wanted only Bren, Babe, and Ellie). But moving past all this, I had the feeling that this book is beautifully flawed, sort of like Babe herself after the crash, like her scarred body. It may not be able to attain perfection, but it can feel and know and express in ways that are powerful and beautiful, like this book.
September 4, 2022
My second of this author. I just love how she puts together the world of swimming, competitively, into a novel. I very much enjoyed both books.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews