![]() The novel touches upon the big questions like the meaning of it all and the nature of reality, as well as exploring the human obsession with the end of the world: ![]() I don't know if all the pandemic subplots were strictly necessary and I think the author could have achieved the same goal without that being a recurring theme, but this is a small complaint. There is this nostalgic quality to Mandel's writing that made me feel like I was revisiting places I'd been long ago, even though I obviously hadn't. Similar motifs appear in each story and it is clear they are linked, but how?Īs the stories weave together and overlap, we begin to see the recurring theme in each one until it all comes together in a big picture at the end. We begin with several chapters (or "Parts") of seemingly unrelated characters and stories, each set in a very different time and place- Edwin arrives in Canada in the year 1912, Mirella goes to speak to the brother of an estranged old friend in 2020 NYC, Olive visits Earth for a book tour in 2203, scientists investigate the theory that the world is a simulation in 2401. Now I'm wondering: should I go back and read the author's other stuff? Because I have to admit I found Sea of Tranquility riveting and beautiful.įrom what I remember, it is not stylistically that different to Station Eleven- both are quiet, slow-build stories- but I found the characters here fascinating and the exploration of both the simulation theory and what, if anything, that means for humans, deeply moving. The hype and gushing reviews seemed at odds with the very okay novel I read, which is why I passed on reading The Glass Hotel. I was one of the few readers (or so it seemed) left underwhelmed by Mandel's Station Eleven when I read it back in 2014. “Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?” When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.Ī virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.' ![]() Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal-an experience that shocks him to his core. ![]() Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.Įdwin St.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |