Beside the Sea

Disturbing. Raw. Poignant. Beautiful.From the first couple of pages, I got a strong sense of gloom - the bleak existence of this woman and her children. If a child watches his mother sit for hours at a kitchen table doing nothing, it's bound to be about a very unstable situation. This is clarified as the book progresses and provides glimpses of the mother's background. She has a menial job, she has been off and on chemical treatment for a psychiatric condition, and she is regularly visited by a social worker. She also has few teeth, which seems to emphasize her poverty level and perhaps her mental illness.Add to that the constant rain and mud, a crowded bus ride to a drab seaside town in the middle of a cold night, walking with two exhausted young children looking for a hotel. If the mud and rain isn't enough to depress you, the description of the hotel definitely will. It's a filthy, slummy pit that should have met the wrecking ball ages ago and the room is so small, the door can't be fully opened because the double bed all but completely consumes it. Its linoleum floor is brown and sticky. The communal bathroom the little boys must use would be condemned on skid row. And still...the interminable rain.The purpose of the visit - for the boys to see the ocean- is more evidence of her psychopathy. She takes them to the beach in the off season and the children are obligated to enjoy it in spite of the cold and the miserable drizzle. She's clearly on the edge of insanity when she tells the kids to hunt for seashells to give to their teachers. The problem is there are none to be found and the boys are freezing cold with still soaking wet clothes from the night before. I definitely got a vivid portrait here of a very unhinged woman. She has no money to feed them, but takes them to a cafe for hot chocolate. After that, unable to further cope with anything, she takes the boys - nine and five years old - back to the hotel room and goes to bed. There's no TV, no toys and no books (she is fully aware that her 9 year old loves to read), so they sit in a grimy, tiny brown box of a hotel room and watch their mother sleep. It is raining so hard, they could not decipher if it was day or night. They entertain themselves by drawing through condensation on the windows.After hours, she wakes and leaves them alone, returning with a bag of cookies for their meal. She is excited. She has a surprise for them. She has found out there is a carnival in town. As they traverse a field of ankle deep mud, the children are in awe of the clamor of the crowds and rides. The mother gives them money for a few rides and treats them to french fries. But, she has a turning point here and we see her begin to completely slide away from reality, while fixating on a Ferris wheel that seems to take her to an otherworldly dimension. I am not even sure, at this point, she realized her children were with her.What ensues is horrific, but the shock wore off and left me thinking "Am I really surprised?".I highly recommend this book. It has tremendous strength and the potential to break your heart. It's not for everyone and definitely not a lofty beach read, if that's what you are seeking. If you are not, it may absorb you as much as it did me.

A powerfully written and mournful story of a woman who seeks help, but doesn't find it despite the efforts of social services. Everything is damp and tearful. The holiday her young kids have looked forward to enjoying at the seaside, has the sad aspect of an abandoned resort. The holiday food of fries and cookies isn't tasty. Nothing works out as planned. Only the moon is watching and can't help this family.

What Are We Reading?: Beside the Sea, by Veronique Olmi, translated by Adriana HunterRating: 5/5 Broken SeashellsGive me the short version: A disadvantaged mother scrimps to give her young sons just one treat, before ...**spoiler alert! It's difficult to write in any way about Beside the Sea without revealing the finish. But of course, the moment you begin to read you understand it can't end any other way**By chance I read Beside the Sea directly after Jane Gilmore's amazing and heartrendingly honest essay What I Learned About Poverty in Meanjin, which made for quite the one-two punch. On reflection I've come to think this was the perfect introduction and recommend it for companion reading, especially if like me you come from an advantaged background. Think of it as a primer.Beside the Sea is a short and uncompromising. A single mother struggles to provide an unaccustomed pleasure to her two children: a trip to the seaside. You have a front row seat to the disorienting effects of her mental illness, her social isolation, their poverty, and how unpleasant a place the world can be.There are moments of love. They are mostly drowned in the mud of the everyday.A couple of years ago as part of a friend's production of Medea I was in a group of women who were interviewed on love, and what we thought of mothers who kill their children. Some were quick to condemn the culprit, but not so much the grinding everyday life which drove them there, the strictures of society that kept them down.Having flirted with being poor and depressed, those two going hand-in-hand like a couple of assh*les, I recalled a video I'd watched while studying psychology. It was of a mother who'd undertaken exactly what Beside the Sea is about. Her mental illness was now controlled, but her grief and bafflement were so overwhelming I couldn't find it in my heart to blame her. Instead I felt sick and horrified by even that brief brush against the life that had driven her so far.Reading stories like this isn't "enjoyable," unless by dispassionate appreciation of the author's mastery of language (and the translator's!). They are shattering. They stay with you for days, weigh the spirit down. However I think stories like Beside the Sea are essential for developing our empathy.We live in an age of echo chambers, where people too easily become insulated and trigger-happy. We forget that the vast majority of humanity is not like us. Their experiences are invisible to us and unlike ours. Their actions should not be coldly measured by our tape.I think it's critical to read and have some understanding what existence means for a great many people, and how smothering darkness might become the only gesture love has left.Favourite bit:"We'll take her back a seashell, I replied, and I thought perhaps we should do that, choose a seashell and give it to the teacher, my son's first love, yep, give her his first seashell. Now that made Kevin smile, and I was proud of myself, I know how to handle my kids, I thought, I just need to be left to get on with it ..."

what a powerful and difficult story, so well written!!

A book by a discreet but very respected French writer, a book about life and misery, about a woman lost in a world foreign to her, who desperately tries to do ONE thing for her kids : show them the sea... for the first and last time... Heartbreaking !

Short, simple and extremely depressing. Predictable almost from page one this brief exploration of depression, love and insanity was mostly unsatisfactory.

This book is on the one hand truly disturbing, haunting, that will bore into your soul for months, if not years after you have read it, and at the same time their is a beauty in the horror.A mother who loves her children too much? This novel explores the unwritten horror of being a woman alone, raising children alone- the impossible, insane standards we hoist onto motherhood, setting up women to fail. At the same time the unique deepness of motherhood is shown alongside the horror. A very important novel and a must read for those who are not scared to shine a light into the deepest parts of the soul.

Beside The Sea took me barely more than hour to read - it's only about 120 pages long - and I do think this intense, claustrophobic novella is best read in one sitting. Written by French author Veronique Olmi, the story takes place over 24 hours in the lives of an unnamed mother and her two boys, Stan and Kevin, beginning with her taking them to the seaside on an overnight bus, having suddenly decided that it's essential they see the sea for the first time.If, like me, you find the opening ten minutes of Casualty almost impossible to watch without wanting to intervene to stop the inevitable accidents, or have to put your hands over your eyes at CCTV footage of someone recklessly running across a railway line or edging along the outside of a motorway bridge, you will find Beside The Sea a deeply unsettling and stressful read. It becomes almost immediately apparent that the narrator is at best inadvertently neglectful of her children and at worst, severely unstable, and it's almost impossible to read her story without wanting to protect the children from her; at the same time, it's also impossible not feel deeply sorry for her.Endless anxiety and cruelly severe depression torture her daily and, by association, her sons. Aged nine and five, they're left standing outside the school gates until 6pm, dressed in ill-fitting clothes and frequently unfed; their mother's self-confessed inability to stick to any kind of routine means they fend for themselves while she sleeps for whole days at a time. Stan, the elder boy, frequently finds himself cast in the role of carer for his mother and his little brother as the family struggle desperately to cope. And yet, despite her erratic parenting, despite her infuriating, disturbing state of denial about certain aspects of her neglect, it's obvious the narrator loves her children, wants something better for them, wants to provide for them - and understands them, too. In fact, her love for the children is the one constant in her life, and strangely, it's this that makes the book all the more disturbing as the story comes to an end.We're told very little about the narrator's past, except that the children have different fathers and the younger boy's doesn't know his son exists, yet tiny hints (a reference to her missing front teeth; a passing comment that implies she has lived with someone who constantly belittled her) suggest that she may have been a victim of domestic abuse. Is this what has tipped a vulnerable woman over the edge? What was she like before she had her children? Those questions are simply never answered, and I think that perhaps the book is all the better for that: while the narrator's problems are clearly a long way beyond those of most mothers, every parent has moments like hers. Every parent doubts their ability to care for their child; every parent feels guilty, inadequate, over-defensive in the face of other's judgements. What makes this narrative so powerful is knowing this, knowing that even the best of parents can find themselves at the precipice of becoming unable to cope, and wondering how easy it might be to slide over the edge.This short read is expertly translated by Adriana Hunter, retaining a vivid narrative voice for the protagonist, as fractured and dislocated as her state of mind. In fact I absolutely felt like I was reading the words of a real person rather than a fictional character, and in many ways, this was one of the things that made Beside The Sea a tough read. I have no children, and I'm not sure I could have got through this book if I did. In short, brilliant but devastating.

This is a literally stunning narrative. It rings so true and is so close to the bone of life's terrors that one reads on with a sense of dread. The unnamed narrator, the mother, is taking her two boys, Stan and Kevin, to the seaside for a holiday, she's packed their sports-bags, though she can't carry anything because of a recent dislocation of her shoulder. The reader is forced to piece together the background to this story from such clues. Is she fleeing some kind of attack? No father is mentioned, the children never mention one but the mother seems to have a history of medication, all of which she has left behind for this trip to the sea. Quite early, I would say from the initial bus journey and arrival at the seaside, in this very short (111pp) novella, that one senses a growing darkness around the future for these vulnerable children and their increasingly vulnerable mother. The writing is superbly natural throughout, with the two boys given distinct personalities. Stan, the elder boy is around nine - he is watchful, careful with his mother, but there is a moment on the beach where, looking back, one senses his estrangement, when something of his mother's desperation is given expression by this child. Kevin is the needy one, the baby, five or six years-old, forced, perhaps to behave badly, or younger than he is, in order to gain attention.The mother has very little money with her, and that in small denominations, which causes her problems with a café proprietor. The mood of the novel is set by the constant rain, the muddy beach, the hot greasy chips, which are all she can afford for the children to eat. She never eats herself, however, spending everything on the boys, the last of their meagre collection of coins on rides at the funfair, and then they walk back to their hotel. There is a final scene. This is one of the darkest and most devastating books I have ever read.

This isn't a book to read if you're depressed, but it's a book you should read. I found it disturbing and very moving. It was apparently a 'controversial' best-seller in France. Narrated in the first person, vernacular, it's the story of a young, single mother, who is struggling to cope - with her two little boys, with her own mental health, social workers, teachers, and inadequate money. We are totally inside her world and her head. It makes gut-wrenching reading.She has decided to blow all the money she can lay her hands on - which isn't much - on a trip to the sea-side for herself and the boys. They have never seen the sea and she wants to give them one last glimpse of it. She envisages a blue sky, sand, blue water, but it's winter and it's raining.What makes the book so brilliant is the way the young mother's state of mind is conveyed to the reader - the occasional dazzle of back-story glimpsed between phrases - the blink of a hidden meaning behind a particular word. What is also fascinating is the way she observes the world watching her - judging her - a million light years away from where she actually is.This is a book about a social tragedy that could be happening in the next street - on the next bus you take - in a cafe you slip into for an aperitivo. You won't look at people in the same way again.

This book is narrated by the single mother of two boys, Stan who's 9 and 5 year old Kevin. She takes them to the seaside as they've never seen the sea before but they go during the week when they should be at school, arriving late at night when it's dark to stay in a hotel.I felt sorry for the three of them, it becomes apparent from the start that the unnamed mother is unwell and unable to cope with the simple things in life. Social workers are mentioned and she tells us how Stan often gets himself and his brother to school in the mornings, and how when they need picking up she does sometimes get there it's just not at the same time as the other parents. She takes all her money on the trip (loose change in a tin) and none of the visits to the beach, cafe or funfair go well, as you read the book and it becomes darker you know it won't have a happy ever after ending.I don't want to say too much for fear of giving the ending away but although this book is heartbreaking it must be read.