Emily St. John Mandel | Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Glass Hotel
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Knopf
Publication date: March 24, 2020
Length: 302 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events–a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

Once again, I find myself practically speechless after finishing a book by Emily St. John Mandel. Earlier this year, I was transfixed by the beauty of Sea of Tranquility. That book, however, was published after The Glass Hotel, and as I learned while reading Sea of Tranquility, there is a certain amount of cross-over between the two books. Naturally, I had to see what The Glass Hotel was all about.

As in her other books, the author weaves together seemingly disparate story threads and characters to create an intricate, interconnected whole. As the synopsis explains, the basic framework of the novel involves a vastly wealthy man whose fortune is built on a Ponzi scheme and his relationship with a woman whom he meets at the bar of a remote luxury hotel. As Vincent and Jonathan’s lives come together, we also see snippets of their pasts, as well as scenes involving other people caught up in their orbit. Some connections are clear, such as their various family members, but others are connected by circumstances, coincidences, random encounters, and chance overlaps at particular times and places.

The writing is gorgeous, sharp, and evocative. A recurring theme throughout centers on worlds within worlds. Vincent thinks of her years with Jonathan as her life in the “kingdom of money”. Jonathan, imprisoned for the remainder of his life, imagines what he calls his counterlife, a life that he inhabits in his mind that lets him experience the other ways his life might have gone, had he only gone different places or taken different actions.

At one point, a friend of Vincent’s tells her:

I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

A man who loses everything due to the Ponzi, now living a nomadic RV life at a time when he and his wife thought they’d be comfortably retired, contemplates that:

… they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived… He’d seen the shadow country, its outskirts and signs, he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it.

Another man who goes from hopeless addiction to triumph in a music career shares:

“I stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world where people actually listened to my music.” […] The condition of having landed in an unimaginable life was something he thought she might know something about.

As in Sea of Tranquility, the connections and overlapping lives are what make this book so fascinating, as do the intriguing characters and the sense of inevitability about the events and their outcomes.

I simply can’t say enough good things about The Glass Hotel. Now that I’ve read it, I feel an urgent need to re-read Sea of Tranquility (even though I just read it a few months ago).

I truly loved this book, and simply couldn’t put it down once I started.

Title: Sea of Tranquility
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Knopf
Publication date: April 5, 2022
Length: 272 pages
Genre: Science fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.’

I’m not sure how to even begin describing the beauty of Sea of Tranquility. The writing here is so precise, and the narrative arc so carefully constructed, that I was spellbound from start to finish.

Part of me hesitates to describe the plot at all, other than what’s already shared in the book’s synopsis. I read the book without first reading anything about it, and I’m so happy that I did. Letting the wonder unfold around you is really the best way to experience Sea of Tranquility.

But to give a brief idea — the various sections of the book occur in completely separately timelines and locations. From 1912, across time and space all the way to the 2400s, there are vignettes — some very short, some with more detail and length — delving into specific actions and moments in the lives of the characters.

As you might guess, there is a connection that ties all these vignettes together eventually. As each piece slotted into place, I experienced continuous “aha” moments as elements became clearer. And while some concepts are more mind-blowing than others, there’s a sense throughout that there’s more to the book, and more to our lives, than we could possibly even hope to truly understand.

If you haven’t yet read Sea of Tranquility, then what I’ve written probably makes little sense, but I truly don’t want to discuss specifics and risk lessening the pleasure of discovery for anyone considering reading the book.

At under 300 pages, Sea of Tranquility is easy to get through quickly, but the images and ideas linger long after reading the final lines. This is my first 5-star read of 2023, and will absolutely be going on my “favorites” list.

In case it’s not obvious: Highly recommended.