The Sea Came in at Midnight (edition 1999)

Literature already makes me put on my dunce cap and massage my eyebrows in preparation for knitted confusion, but this one more so than others. I'm not sure what happened in the book. Several stories intricately pulled together, sometimes talking at you and something observing next to you, a lost woman, a lost man, another lost woman, several lost people, why don't they just talk it out oh yeah then it wouldn't be Literature, huh?, something about missing the present because of focus on the end of the world?, hmmm...huh. What? At the end, a gleam of hope. I think.

I don't understand. But I can see it's beautiful. ( )

Superb writing, plotting, storyline. Fascinating offbeat characters who dounusual, meretricious, or good things. ( )

It is a good thing I like fiction that's off the beaten path because this book is definitely out there. Very dark, very deep and I'm sure I'm going to read it again in the near future because I'm sure many of the nuances in the book have escaped me. It is totally a novel about coincidence on a majorly cosmic scale; full of symbolism that I can't even begin to explain (but there are several scholarly treatises on this novel that do so that I plan to peruse over the next few days).

In the year 999 a group of 999 Celtic villagers take to the sea in boats to escape the tidal wave that will usher in the new millenium. There were supposed to be 1000; one of them, a 17-year old girl, is left in a tower overlooking the sea. In the year 1999, 2000 women & children are ushered off the cliff into the sea by a group of white-robed cultists. Actually, there were only 1,999; again, history repeats itself as one of its numbers realizes the significance of events and flees her fate. This is Kristin; from there her life takes her to LA, where, at the end of her rope, answers a bizarre personal ad from someone looking for someone in the depths of despair. Eventually the man who placed the ad finds her and takes her to his house in the Hills. The man has no name; he is known only as The Occupant, and he is an apocalypser -- but not in terms of the apocalypse of millenial time, but in terms of chaos & the horror of a world run amok. He starts the millenium clock ticking at a time of his boyhood, when he wakes up one night to the noise of a gunshot,goes down the hall to have his mother usher him away from the scene of the killing of a young girl in her & his father's bedroom; then he is thrust out into the chaos of anarchy in the Paris streets, never to see his mother again. He notes that Kristin is the center of chaos, and labels in indelible ink a date which at first is insignificant but later the reader understands the meaning of this date as only part of a chain of surreal links in the cosmic chain.

I don't think once through the novel can give anyone a handle on the story; my take on it is that the characters themselves don't really matter in the long run but it is human history of chaos and entropy that counts here, along with the notion that things have a habit of replaying themselves, and that all of history is a long chain into which humans time and again form their connections, regardless of space, place or time.

If you like postmodern literature, you're going to love this one. Definitely NOT recommended for readers who want the book to do their work for them...this one demands full participation. ( )

So fine, and a rarity: this puts wild "science" into science fiction. Stunningly vivid characters speed through this novel like frames in a zoetrope, united by an unfamiliar way of interpreting life. To get to know Louise Blumenthal (snuff film screenwriter, grieving mother), or Kristen, or Angie is to get to know a new way of thinking of time, of memory and life story. ( )

I had high hopes for this one. It was still OK. ( )