Sea of Tranquility: A novel

Emily Mandel is a lovely writer and she layers intrigue with high-concept speculative and her trademark existentialism. It’s accessible and fun and easy to read but it makes you think and engage and will make you feel smarter after you’ve read it. What more do you want from a novel?

"A life lived in simulation is still a life." Emily St. John Mandel is an author who has been on my radar for several years. I've seen glowing reviews of her previous novels The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, but I've never gotten around to reading them. Like other much-hyped books, I added them to my TBR list and then ignored them. Her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, was published earlier this year, and the reviews have been glowing once again. Comparisons to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a novel that both mesmerized and confounded me, piqued my interest even more. I decided it was finally time to read a Mandel novel, and Sea of Tranquility would be a perfect place to begin. What is reality? How do we decipher what is valid from what is imagined? These questions mark the impetus of this novel. It opens in 1912 with Edwin, a young man who has been castigated from his family and his home country in embarrassment. He couldn't keep his mouth shut, and now he finds himself halfway across the world, landing in Western Canada's wilderness. As he wanders the forest, Edwin steps into a place that leaves him questioning his very sanity. "He steps forward into a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound—." Just as we begin to grapple with the implications of what Edwin experiences, Mandel thrusts us forward a hundred years. We see a composer giving a lecture about his composition that centers around a video recorded by his sister. In the recording, she is seen walking through the forest when time and space seem to blip. Again, before we have time to wrestle with what we read, Mandel moves us forward to the year 2203. We meet a novelist who is on a book tour promoting her latest work. The tour has taken her from her home on a moon colony back to earth. As she laments missing her family, news breaks of a plague beginning to spread on the planet. In a fiction that mirrors Madel's own reality, the author must face promoting her book amongst the spread of a life-threatening illness. It isn't until the mid-point of the novel that things begin to come into focus. We land in the year 2401, to a world (galaxy may be more apt) that is completely transformed. Humanity exists in domed colonies, a reality that is both alien and familiar. Gaspery, a man we've seen glimpses of in the preceding stories, is fully introduced as a nightwatchman of a hotel, a job he hates. His sister works at a more exciting, but secretive, gig as a scientist who has been investigating anomalies in time and space. She reveals to Gaspery that different centuries and realities are bleeding into each other, an oddity that is without explanation. Gaspery, desperate to shake his dead-end job, agrees to assist her in traveling across time to get to the bottom of this strange aberration. With Sea of Tranquility Emily St. John Mandel takes her readers on a journey across time and space, daring us to ask big questions and to find answers nestled in unlikely places. From a sheer construction standpoint, the novel is a mastery of craft and plotting. Each story corresponds to the next and vice versa creating a nesting doll effect. Yes, other authors have used this device before, but perhaps none to such a rewarding effect. I'll admit to being a bit discombobulated at first. It was hard to see the forest from the trees, especially as Mandel thrust us forward in time with each new section. This confusion is resolved by introducing a character who is able to traverse time, giving us readers someone to help make sense of how everything is connected. Despite the narrative wizardry at play here, Mandel manages to ground her work in characters who glimmer with reality, even when that reality is so different from our own. Ultimately it is the way these characters, love, and lament that makes Sea of Tranquility truly shine.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys well-written sci-fi. Especially about tine travel. Although there are many threads - time lines- they are easy to follow. Those of us who have lived through the Covid pandemic may especially appreciate it.

I'm a huge fan of Mandel, having first read the stunning Station Eleven about 4 years ago. I next read The Glass Hotel and enjoyed it so much, my curiosity was stoked, and I quickly read all three of her earliest novels. I loved them all, particularly The Singer's Gun, and the way she was effortlessly able to create an amazing page-turning tension, a sense of dread throughout her storytelling. I'd compare those books to much of Patricia Highsmith's novels but I actually prefer Mandel's writing. So I very eagerly jumped into Sea of Tranquility with the highest hopes and found the first two parts, the non-futuristic parts, intriguing and engaging. But as the book went on into the distant future and then even more distant future, I lost patience a bit. I couldn't quite see what was relating all of the characters and it began to feel like ideas for several books that never cohered. Finally, in the last chapters, much was explained (and I'll admit that smarter minds than mine might have seen what was coming sooner), but it ultimately all felt rather lame and insufficient for the grand ideas that were being expostulated. I'm still pleased to award this book 3 stars because so much of the writing, the descriptions of characters and places, is up to Mandel's usual standards. It was a page-turner for me as I read it in two days. And I'd recommend it to any Mandel fans just because you'll reacquaint yourself with some characters from previous books and truly enjoy the character who is clearly based on herself.

Sea of Tranquility “A simulated life is still a life” (Gaspery, a character in Sea of Tranquility) Sea of Tranquility By Emily St. John Mandel Knopf: 272 pages, $25 Emily 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.

POSITIVE: This novel is noted for its themes of pandemic, unique human experiences, longing, and isolation across different timelines and places. Personally, I like the "realness" of characters--while not the most popular choice, the author doesn't fall into a trap of creating hero protagonists or super-likeable characters who eventually (easily) solve everything. Good ending part. Beautiful prose. NEUTRAL: A nice (approx. 8 3/4" book height) hardcover edition by Knopf (a non-deckled edge this time!). 255 pages without extras. 2022. NEGATIVE: Some of the book sections may be a touch underwhelming or having some pacing issues. Moderation of time non-linearity (timeline jumping) would be beneficial. Overall: 4.5/5. Consistently beautiful writing style. What I especially like is that all this author's writings/books seem to share a preoccupation with unsolvable uniqueness of conditions and puzzles of human experience regardless of stories/plots in each of them.

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!

I hesitated in rating this, wondering should I make it 3 stars or 4, so lets call it 3.5. Ms Mandel once again delivers a world of fascination and a mystery as we dance between characters from different centuries and a chance anomaly witnessed between them. We open with Edwin in the 1800s, meet an author, Olive, from the 2100s, Gaspery, a man from even more in the future and a 1980's-era Vincent, who we've met before in Mandel's previously written beautiful novel The Glass Hotel. What the mysterious thread is that brings their lives to this same moment will leave you weeping and thinking on it for some time after. I won't spoil it for anyone, but will admit that, while these characters were all interesting, it was jarring to follow someone for awhile up until the anomaly only to jump to the next- I found myself frustrated at times by leaving a character behind that I felt invested in only to have their storyline drop and then i'm stuck trying to find why I should care for this new person who has taken over the narrative. Ms Mandel, however, brings it all full circle in the end, but it didn't fully make up for my earlier frustration over the constant skipping through time. As wonderful as it was to see Vincent again, seeing as she inadvertently seems to start the ball rolling, I would have loved more to her story. I know she has a book all to herself, but I walked away still wanting more Vincent, and perhaps even a bit of a miracle for her, which never comes. Her time in the book is far too fleeting, but appreciated just the same. I had purchased the book on its release day but put off reading it until now. While the tone of my review may sound negative, I really did come to love this odd story by the time it was through. I am glad I own this and fully intend to read it again, though it won't be until after I read The Glass Hotel again. Like I said, I need more Vincent in my life, even if it is simply rereading what i've already read.

Livro lindo, da vontade de ler mais, pena q é curtinho

Come da titolo, difficile giudicare un libro. Un libro e’ troppo personale, sia se un romanzo sia se tecnico. Personalmente questo in oggetto non mi ha entusiasmato ma, ripeto, e’ molto personale. Buon lavoro, Enzo

Emily St. John Mandel had already brought thoughtfulness to the pandemic novel with Station Eleven. With Sea of Tranquility, she infuses another classic science fiction trope with soul, hitting the perfect note between poignant and playful. Were this time travel novel a movie, it would fit smugly between Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (or rather Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the short that inspired it) and Ryan Johnson’s Looper. Set in multiple time periods and not always on Earth, Sea of Tranquility tells a compelling story from false beginning to richly satisfying end, tying up all loose ends, and avoiding the convolution the genre is known for. I already want to read it again, forcing myself to read more slowly, moving beyond the clever, complex but crystal-clear narrative, to mull over its gentle philosophical questions. Every reader is generously encouraged to become their own metaphysical detective. As with Station Eleven, we are invited to ponder our responsibility to generations past and future, and the role of art as a thread knitting the history of mankind into a coherent story. Precise, elegant, and ultimately quite moving, it may have the makings of a future classic.

What struck me the most after finishing Sea of Tranquility was how much it covered in just 200 pages — spanning centuries, multiple storylines, and several themes — without ever feeling rushed or overly complex. Despite its brevity, the novel takes its time with each of its main characters, immersing the reader in their lives making their journeys feel intimate. It is difficult to write about the book’s premise without spoiling it for readers. Suffice to say, Sea of Tranquility is a beautifully written novel that blends science fiction with human themes. The book follows multiple characters across different timelines. In 1912, Edwin St. Andrew, a young English aristocrat, is banished to Canada and stumbles upon a mysterious anomaly in the forest. In the 2200s, Olive Llewellyn, a bestselling author from a lunar colony, embarks on an Earth book tour, unaware of the eerie parallels between her novel and reality. In 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective from the Night City on the Moon, is assigned to investigate a strange pattern in time that links these characters. Mandel moves fluidly between the various narratives, keeping the story brisk yet immersive, allowing readers to absorb its multiple layers without feeling overwhelmed. The novel ends satisfyingly, tying the threads of its intricate plot together — a feat that is often difficult in stories of this genre. The book’s structure reminded me somewhat of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, another book that I love. Like that book, Sea of Tranquility weaves together multiple timelines and perspectives, exploring the interconnectedness of human lives across centuries. However, Cloud Atlas leans more heavily on stylistic shifts between its narratives, whereas Sea of Tranquility maintains a more uniform tone. Readers who appreciate the philosophical underpinnings of Cloud Atlas but prefer a more straightforward, emotionally resonant narrative with a dash of science fiction will likely find Sea of Tranquility particularly compelling. Pros: Elegant writing, interesting themes, easily devoured in one sitting Cons: Light on the sci-fi mechanics

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