The Sea House

It may unfair to Esther Freud to begin a review by pointing out that she is the great-granddaughter of you-know-who, but it would be unfair to the reader not to mention it, because one of the themes is the German-Jewish refugee experience in England and one of her characters is a psychoanalyst. The author adds to the relevance of her personal background by providing a list of acknowledgements at the end that almost suggests we have been reading a roman a clef. There are two main settings, seaside communities on opposite shores of the North Sea. One is a meticulously described East Anglian village, Steerborough, the other a German island (which might actually be in the Baltic). The two main plots are set 50 years apart in time. One is the story, set in the fifties, of a refugee architect, Klaus, and his wife, Elsa, the other is the story of Lily,a student of architectural history, who is studying the life and work of Klaus and worrying about her relationship with her London architect lover, Nick. Several other plots are interlinked. Lily gets involved with Grae who is desperately trying to care for two young daughters, Emm and Arry, reminiscent of the wonderful ones in "Hideous Kinky," and who may or may not be the guilty party in his violent relationship with their mother. Elsa has an affair with the deaf artist Max, who is painting a panorama of Steerborough. It sounds complicated, and there are many subtleties and nuances that will repay a second reading, but the characters are so well demarcated, their dialog is so realistic, and their actions flow so naturally from their personalities, that it is never hard to follow for pure entertainment.

I really really enjoyed this one. It was moving, thought provoking, provided anticipation, established the characters well. The story is gentle yet forceful. I felt like I was that 'fly on the wall' watching these lives unfold. A story I hated to see end.

Love, art, and memory are the central themes of this fluid and multi-layered novel from Esther Freud. With its duel narrative, its epistolary structure, and its readiness to easily slip from the past to the present, The Sea House paints an indelible and quite beautiful portrait of a small English seaside community in Suffolk; a community that affects people from different generations in unexpected and quite life-changing ways. Lily is twenty-seven and lives in London with her boyfriend, Nick. But when she visits the small seaside village of Steerborough, a few hours away from London, she is immediately entranced. Lily is pursuing a degree in architecture, while also working as a waitress at a restaurant in Covent Garden. She's been working on her thesis, whose subject is deceased architect Klaus Lehmann, a former resident of Steerborough. When Lily moves to Steerborough and rents a cottage to continue work on her thesis, she takes with her a stack of letters from Klaus Lehmann to his wife, Elsa. The letters chronicle the periods during which Lehmann and his wife lived apart. While Lily's research is supposed to be focused on Lehmann's work as an architect, the possessive love letters that Klaus wrote to Elsa before and after World War 11 quickly intrigue and engross her. The angst ridden and desperate letters of love, force Lily to confront her own relationship with Nick, and she realizes that a return to London would be just too deleterious. Lily has not only come to doubt Nick, but also her own ambitions; she begins to feel that she's not cut out to be an architect and anguishes that after three years of training, she still doesn't know what to do. She's content to live in the present, just "drifting around." The story drifts between Lily in the present day and back to 1953 when Klaus and Elsa where friends of Gertrude Jilks, a child psychoanalyst, and her friend Max Meyer, a deaf artist who is energetically painting a scroll of Steerborough. Much of the 1953 narrative is told from the point of view of Max, as he takes over the town, "muddling up traffic on the village's one street, peering through windows, examining borders, and choosing which house or cottage to paint next." The opening of The Sea House is a little confusing as the abrupt changes in time from the past to the present may be somewhat hard to follow for some readers. But this reader recommends sticking with the story, because there are lots of surprising plot twists and turns and Freud's gorgeous descriptions of Steerborough's geography, weather, and natural beauty are unsurpassed. Just as Max paints his scroll of the town, Lily - along with the reader - experiences the same severe beauty almost half a century later. And although there are long stretches where nothing happens, it hardly matters, because the rich and detailed atmosphere of quite, domestic life in this little seaside village is enough to enthrall. The Sea House is a clever and subtle story, proving to be a

Though the twin stories took a while to clarify themselves in this reader's mind, once they did, the novel was quietly hypnotic as it wove together themes of loss, love, and historic tragedy. Set in a seaside English town today and in the early 50s, the book is suffused by a sense of isolation and longing, of human insignificance in the face of the limitless waters that can erase whole cities over time. The prose was beautiful and I read many passages over to savor the author's vision.