emily st john mandel sea of tranquility review

But no matter what the temporal or physical setting, her work is rooted in the present. With Sea of Tranquility, Mandel ping-pongs through time, bouncing from the 19th century to the 25th and various spots in between, seemingly to comment on the things about human life that are supposed to be universal (love, art, colonialism). But at other times it feels like watching someone construct a 1,000-piece jigsaw, struggling for hours to build what is ultimately an insipid drawing of a kitten with a dewdrop on its nose. Sometimes this works, as it does in her most successful novel, Station Eleven, set in the aftermath of a fictional pandemic, and adapted last year into a well-received television show. I think this gimmick is supposed to bestow within the reader a warm feeling of meaning and completeness. She’s again working with a large cast of characters over an enormous span of time, and she slowly lays out a complex plot piece by piece, withholding key information until the very end so she can stun us with the interconnectedness of it all. Sea of Tranquility is another puzzle book by Emily St. A 23rd century woman in an air terminal, a 20th century woman on a beach, and a 19th century man in the forest, their positions and experiences seem to merge in one terrifying moment, and another man must travel from the future to figure out what it all means. They are each simultaneously in three places at once, hearing and seeing and feeling the same things. Three people, separated by centuries, experience the same, haunting phenomenon.

Emily st john mandel sea of tranquility review