Day 858, Quasi-Quarantine: The Irresistibly Melancholy Melange Of "Sea Of Tranquility"

 

"--Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing's attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the world pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us."

The latest from Emily St. John Mandel, "Sea of Tranquility," is something of an extension of "Station Eleven" and "Glass Hotel," featuring recurring characters and moments. However, despite the presence of time travel and the potential existence of the simulation theory, "Sea of Tranquility" is somehow less disorienting than much of the author's previous work.

"Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that's unfair -- this place isn't death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn't care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn't even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged."

Imbued with a frantic quality, the book is beautiful and emotional. The storyline is completely engrossing, and while the pace veers toward too-fast at moments, the overriding melancholy of "Sea of Tranquility" is absorbing. 

"'The truth is,' Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, 'even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don't always know why one person gets sick and another doesn't, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it's chaotic. There's an awful randomness about it.'"

If anything, this novel feels too short, with its resonance on pandemic life leaving you wishing and searching for additional chapters -- and moments.

"'I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climx of the story. Its a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarm, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.'"