Beside the Sea

"When it came to an end that was where we belonged. We knew that"
By sally tarbox on 8 March 2018
Format: Kindle Edition
Read in one sitting: a woman takes her two sons - nine and five - on a trip to see the sea. But this is no jolly holiday memoir: the mother (narrator) is very obviously massively mentally ill. Her eldest son is very aware:
"Stan kept giving me suspicious looks like when I just sit in the kitchen and he watches me, thinking I don't know he's there, barefoot in his pyjamas, I don't even have the strength to say Don't stay there with nothing on your feet, Stan. Yep, sometimes I sit in the kitchen for hours and I couldn't give a stuff about anything."

She's planned this treat, saved up bags of change. But the whole thing is show more ill-thought ot, it's cold, wet,they can't afford to feed themselves, the hotel's awful. As the pressures build up, she resorts to sleep... But we have hints throughout that bode ill. Builds to a horrifying climax.
Amazing writing - one you'll never forget. show less

From the opening sentence, I knew there was something different about this book: We took the bus, the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us. I was instantly intrigued and wary. Why would a mother and her two young sons want to leave home unnoticed? The bus takes them to a seaside town, to fulfill the mother's wish that her boys see the ocean. The nameless mother provides the narrative, and the more I lived inside her head, the greater my fear and trepidation. It's clear she loves her sons, and wants to preserve their childhood as long as possible:
he jumps onto my bed and asks me to give him a farty kiss, that's a big kiss on his tummy which makes a lot of noise and it makes him laugh so much you wouldn't believe it, it's like show more he's laughing to hear himself laugh, that he's making the most of that laughter, having fun with it, and I know that a laugh like that runs away the minute you grow up. (p. 32)

But little by little, the story reveals a troubled soul. The holiday is stressful in the way holidays with young children can be. The weather is horrible, and she must deal with two little boys, cooped up in a sixth-floor hotel room accessible only by stairs. But she is also overcome by anxiety and paranoia. Having scraped together all the spare change in the house to spend on treats, she is convinced local merchants are looking down on her for paying with coins instead of notes. Eventually her anxiety gets the better of her, and she escapes into sleep, leaving the boys to fend for themselves in the hotel room:
I left everything, left that town and myself along with it: my body was weightless, painless, I sank into something soft and I shed my fear and anger, and my shame too. I went to a world where there's a place kept for me. Not asleep and not awake, I'm a feather. Not asleep and not awake, but I come undone, I sprawl out look a cotton reel unwinding. Why did I topple over the edge then? Why did I start to dream? (p. 59)

The young family's loneliness and desperation was so sad, and I was completely immersed in the mother's unraveling. But I still gasped out loud when the novella reached its inevitable climax. This is a beautifully written story, but one that will haunt me for quite some time. show less

This dark short novella translated from French by Pereine Press centres around a mother taking a trip with her two small boys to stay in a wet and dreary sea side town. It's a profoundly sad tale of a woman who is struggling with mental illness, motherhood and social poverty.

The holiday has been planned in the wrong season with expectations of enjoyment for the children that will never be realised. We experience through her first person narrative the never-ending rain, their financial hardship and the mother's severely distorted thought process of what other people think of her.

It's a superbly written but deeply sad account of serious mental illness and tragedy.

4 stars for the fantastic writing, but the terribly sad tale makes for an show more appreciative read rather than necessarily an enjoyable one. show less

Right from the start of this novella, we know that things are never going to end happily. Such was the sense of impending doom through the writing, I had a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach whenever I was reading.

It’s not important whether the unnamed single mother’s ‘condition’ slots neatly into a particular diagnosis or not, or whether we understand exactly why she acted as she did. Her life certainly did not slot neatly anywhere and Olmi very skilfully took us inside her head via the first person narrative. We sense the bleakness of her life, feel the anxiety and hopelessness in her mind as well as the love for her boys, and see the disintegration of rational thought, accompanied by all the extraneous minutiae.

The show more portrayal of both the mother’s psyche and the description of the boys and their reactions is very real. It is an intense read, a tragic story and very well written. show less

The narrator of this story is a single mother, who suffers from both anxiety and depression. She loves her two young sons, but she can't always make herself get out of bed in time to pick them up from school, and the social workers just don't understand. In the first couple of pages of the book, it is obvious that she is taking them to the seaside - but not intending to bring them back.

This is an incredible attempt to get inside the head of someone on the edge of desperation. We are given very little detail about the life which went before, which brought her to this stage. But there is heartbreaking detail about the trip itself: she'd imagined herself giving the boys a treat, but the hotel is filthy, it pours with rain, and the sea is show more a dismal brownish-grey: and worst of all, the coppers she has so carefully saved up are barely enough to buy a few snacks, and are sneered at in the shops and cafes.

This is such a good imagining of a monologue from someone on the edge of desperation that it seems churlish to point out that there is very little light and shade. From the reader's point of view, it might have made a more interesting book if the narrator was trying to keep it together a bit more. But this is a novella, and as such it's focused on the evocation of a mood, and does it very well. I hope that more of Olmi's work will be translated into English soon.

Sample sentence: They all looked like they had somewhere to go, they seemed to know the way by heart. I set off at random, in my I-know-what-I'm-doing mode, the kids trusted me and that brought me luck because guess what we came to? You'd have thought it was expecting us! The sea, yes, the sea! Bang in the middle of town, now that's something. You're looking for a cafe and you find the ocean, that doesn't happen every day, it was quite a surprise.

Recommended for: someone who admires good writing and doesn't mind tough subject matter. show less

Grabbing hold of my heart from the beginning and handing it back in pieces at the end; this sad, sparse story of a family’s last days deftly avoids easy sentimentality and pathos. How this novel will end is never in doubt from the first page, but the sympathy with which Olmi quietly unfolds the inevitable is totally absorbing.

With the first line I was sucked in to her mind:
"We took the bus, the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us."
A mom and her two young boys. A spontaneous trip to the seaside. Disquiet. A bit ominous. What’s going on, mom? Mom is fraying, and has been for a while. There are only opaque hints of the backstory, of the life before this mini-holiday. It feels claustrophobic being here in her mind, there are two of us in here but it seems only one of us can see clearly. It’s clear this mom loves her boys above all else, and also painfully and poignantly clear that she can not cope with even a stripped down reality.

Intense empathy. That is what this story evokes. So powerful.

I'm loving these books from Peirene Press, "...first show more class European literature in high quality translation." This novella was a bestseller in France, "Bord de Mer", and was staged in London a couple of years ago.
They are slim novels / novellas, promoted as books to read in less than 2 hours. But the ones I've read have packed in a lot more than a mere two hours worth of story. show less