Polyphonic thriller Last night in Montreal (Rivages, 2021) to the novel The glass hotel (Alto 2021), which studies the repercussions of a Ponzi scheme over time, including the premonitory narrative Station Eleven (Alto, 2017), who imagined a world devastated by a pandemic, Emily St. John Mandel built a daring work on the themes of wandering, haunting, doubt, regrets and starting over.
In The sea of tranquilityher latest novel, the Canadian writer offers her narrative mosaic by far the most ambitious to pursue a reflection on the absence of choice and the illusion of freedom, using the amplitude and creativity that science fiction allows for better dig the furrows of the intimate.
Set in three distinct universes — Earth, a lunar colony and an institute that studies and makes space-time travel possible — spanning from the end of the 15th centurye at the beginning of the 20th centurye century, this sixth opus presents a cleverly woven plot, which studies our relationship with time and our perception of reality, and their role in our collective definitions of success and happiness.
Edwin St. Andrew was 18 years old when he crossed the Atlantic by steamboat, ostracized from good English society, in 1912. In British Columbia, where he led an existence made up of reading, frugal meals and walks in nature, he faces a destabilizing experience when the forest in which he is walking fades before his eyes to give way to an aircraft terminal in which the notes of a violin resonate.
In 2020, a composer presents to spectators gathered for a concert a strange video filmed by his sister, victim of a similar adventure. Then, two centuries later, a writer on a promotional tour on Earth is questioned by a mysterious investigator about a passage from her book – a successful novel which depicts a pandemic – in which the same motifs are found.
This anomaly, which repeats itself several times throughout history, will force the Time Institute and detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts to undertake an investigation which will lead the latter to encounter disrupted lives, and to understand the link that unites them.
With her graceful and hypnotic pen, Emily St. John Mandel composes a deeply intimate story of great philosophical significance, whose poetic logic culminates in a skillfully orchestrated finale. Here, science fiction remains above all a pretext for reflecting on what, beyond the boundaries of space and time, and those erected between dreams and reality, defines and brings together human beings, all witnesses and actors in a fractured world, in a constant state of crisis. “I think that, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we are living in the culmination of human history. […] But all this raises an interesting question. What if it was still the end of the world? » An elegant meditation on the many breaks that mark and define our existences.