Sea of Tranquility: A novel

"Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel is a masterful and captivating journey through time and space, exploring the delicate interconnections between individuals across centuries. Mandel's narrative prowess shines as she weaves together disparate timelines with a subtlety that evokes both wonder and introspection. Her characters are richly drawn, each one grappling with profound questions of existence, memory, and the nature of reality.The novel's intricate plot, which spans from the early 20th century to a distant future, is both complex and accessible, keeping readers engaged while prompting them to reflect on the broader implications of humanity's journey. Mandel's prose is elegant and evocative, capturing the essence of each era with vivid, precise detail."Sea of Tranquility" is not just a story but an experience, a beautifully crafted exploration of the human condition that stays with you long after the final page. It's a testament to Mandel's talent and a must-read for anyone who appreciates thoughtful, beautifully written fiction.

Sea of Tranquility“A simulated life is still a life” (Gaspery, a character in Sea of Tranquility)Sea of TranquilityBy Emily St. John MandelKnopf: 272 pages, $25Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian writer with a marvelous talent for taking old stories, i.e., pandemics, Ponzi schemes, or time travel, and making them fresh. Sea of Tranquility, Mandel’s new novel, demonstrates this. Mandel is often labeled as an author of speculative fiction, science fiction, and auto-fiction. She can combine many plots and have multiple characters, some of them appearing from novel to novel, and yet she ties the threads together.Here is a sample of her clear but often lyrical prose:“What it was like to leave Earth: a rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.” A single surreal incident is the core event of Sea of Tranquility.In 1912, an 18-year-old Englishman named Edwin St. John St. Andrew, disillusioned with the British Empire, meets a mysterious stranger and then walks into a Canadian forest. Underneath a giant maple tree, he suddenly feels he is in some vast interior, like a train station or a cathedral. There are notes of violin music. Edwin is terrified by a combination of unearthly sounds. Is he going mad? In 1994, a young woman named Vincent is filming the same tree and sky and hears violin music and unexplained sounds. The same stranger is lurking in the forest.Is time, itself, unraveling with one event bleeding into other time periods? Are there parallel worlds in everyone’s personal story?At a party, years later, Vincent meets a visitor who reveals her spouse is running a Ponzi scheme and that she and her friends will be ruined in a few months. In another scene, a writer named Olive Llewellyn—not unlike Mandel—is warned by the same mysterious visitor to cancel her book tour because something deadly (a pandemic) will soon happen.The mystery man is a time traveler detective named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts living on the moon in the 25th century in a colony called the Night City. He works for a sinister organization called the Time Institute. Gaspery’s assignment is to travel back into the past and discover why separate incidents from different centuries are rupturing and overlapping into each other.Here is where Mandel gets complex with stories within stories.Mandel’s fictional character, novelist Olive Llewellyn, has an individual named Gaspery in her bestseller Marienbad, which was released in the 23rd century. Marienbad is a dystopian novel she wrote on the brink of an actual pandemic. Ironically, this parallels Mandel herself whose huge hit, Stations Eleven—about a pandemic—was published before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. When it did, Mandel resented being called a prophet.Eventually, Gaspery travels back in time to visit Edwin, now a disabled veteran from World War I, and explains to him what his 1912 encounter means. Edwin recognizes Gaspery as the weird stranger from his past. If Edwin is suffering from the war, at least the forest vision was not a hallucination caused by mental illness. This action marks Gaspery as an outlaw and eventual fugitive because he has violated a Time Institute rule of never revealing his purpose.Critics have high praise for Sea of Tranquility. Maureen Corrigan of NPR had this to say: “Sea of Tranquility is a poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing novel that surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally matters.”Here is Laird Hunt: “Following a superb stylist like Mandel is like watching an expert lacemaker at work: You see the strands and later the beautiful results, but your eyes simply cannot follow what comes in between. As in her best work, including Station Eleven, she is less concerned with endings than with continuity.”Sea of Tranquility ends with an extraordinary reveal.If Emily St. John Mandel’s world is always ending, there remains a sense that Mandel’s very human characters, living and dead, will return to haunt the readers.

I initially picked up Sea of Tranquility because I loved the author's novel Station Eleven - when I read it last year it became an instant favorite of mine. This time, it took me two tries to get into the story but once I did, I was mesmerized. It was fascinating to me that this work of speculative fiction was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that Emily St. John Mandel drew on so many parallel themes in the writing of this book.We meet four main characters throughout the novel. The first is Edwin St. Andrew, who is journeying into the wilds of Vancouver in 1912 after being banished from his upper crust life in England, and who encounters on Vancouver Island an anomaly which feels to him like momentarily being in a dark space and hearing the sound of a violin accompanied a "swooshing" noise.Our second main character, Mirella, goes to see an audiovisual performance by her friend Vincent's brother in 2020 in hopes of finding out Vincent's whereabouts. During the performance, the brother plays a clip of a video recording Vincent took in the forest of Vancouver Island when she was a teenager, and in the clip the screen momentarily goes dark and the sounds of a violin and a swooshing noise can be heard. Later that evening, Mirella learns of Vincent's fate and also meets a stranger who is actually alarmingly familiar.The third main character we meet is Olive, who is a bestselling author on a tour of Earth from the moon colony on which she lives with her family in the year 2203. A pandemic is spreading as Olive travels around the world, giving lectures and interviews. One interviewer asks her a question about a passage in her book which describes a character in a spaceport who hears a violin and is momentarily transported to a lush forest.The fourth and final main character is Gaspary-Jacques, who lives on another moon colony in the year 2401. Stuck in a dead-end job, G-J hears about a time-traveling mission being conducted by the Time Institute, where his sister Zoey works. G-J is intrigued by the possibility of adventure, and asks to train at the Institute for the mission. However, once he undertakes the time travel and meeting with the people he needs to interview to solve an anomaly in the timeline of history, he makes a split-second decision which has staggering consequences to both the past and the future.I feel that the synopsis on the jacket merely hints at the depth of this (somewhat short at ~250 pages) novel. I went into reading expecting one thing, and instead found something completely other - a truly modern philosophical exploration of how small changes in the fabric of a life might echo through centuries, and of the startling theory that we could, in fact, all be living in a grand simulation. Emily St. John Mandel did not disappoint me with this, the second book I've read of hers, and I'm eager to read what she writes next!

Es un bonito libro, mucha presentación, lindas páginas, todo fenomenal

Are we living in a simulation? Is it realistic to think we will soon be colonizing Mars? This and so much more in this masterly written piece. I highly recommend that you read this book from the paper (and not listen to audio book).

Pacing is great, increasing gradually, and when the story jumps around it’s easy to follow and keep interested. The parallels to our recent moment in history are great. I’m avoiding the story so nothing is spoiled, so just dive in and have fun.

Ähnlich aufgebaut wie David Mitchells Cloud Atlas springt auch dieses Buch einmal vorwärts und einmal rückwärts in der Zeit. Allerdings sind diese Teile deutlicher miteinander verbunden und bilden eine zusammenhängende Geschichte. Dafür sind die Teile deutlich kürzer - Das Buch ist eher eine Novelle als ein Roman. Dadurch fehlt tatsächlich vielleicht etwas die Tiefe an der einen oder anderen Stelle. Das eigentliche Thema ist dabei ein eher klassisches, dass schon vielfach bearbeitet wurde und eine furchtbar neue Seite kann auch die Autorin nicht abgewinnen - aber die alternative Theorie passt schon sehr gut und lässt auch ein bisschen was zum Spekulieren offen,4 oder 5 Sterne? Ich möchte ein Buch nicht abstrafen, weil es kurz ist. Ich hätte zwar gerne sehr viel länger im Meer der Ruhe verbracht, aber das liegt eben auch daran, dass die Autorin sehr gut schreibt und mMn durchaus interessante Charaktere bietet. Daher vergebe ich die höhere Wertung.

What a beautiful book! Refreshingly unpathetic, thus refreshingly un-American (well, she's Canadian, and it shows): the story doesn't need any villains and heroes, nor any action at all. And yet in no way boring, on the contrary. Great concept, great story, great writing.Let me see what else Madame St John Mandel has published...