She has a girlfriend but we learn virtually nothing about her or their relationship as this section is more of an ode to Vincent. It’s corona-time and Mirella (Vincent’s ‘friend’) has yet to fully recover from the death of her partner and the whole Ponzi fallout. We then are reunited with a side character from The Glass Hotel. This section comes to a close with Edwin witnessing something quite Other. There was almost an otherworldly feel to this section, partly due to the remoteness and vastness of Edwin’s new ‘home’ (i am not at all familiar with that type of environment hence my finding it surreal). There are some stunning descriptions of the landscapes here and there was something about Edwin that appealed to me. His attempts at making a go of things in Canada don’t quite go as smoothly as he’d hoped. Andrew is but a young English lad who after angering his father for the last time has been banished to the ‘new world’. “hese moments that had arisen one after another after another, worlds fading out so gradually that their loss was apparent only in retrospect.” Here this sense of familiarity with her characters and their struggles is very fitting indeed given the story’s ‘crucial’ theme. Maybe because Mandel often returns to the same issues or even goes so far as to refer to the same characters in seemingly unconnected/stand-alone books (a la mandel-multiverse).
So much so that I often read of her characters and or the landscapes which she writes of with a strong sense of Deja Vu. I also find her use of imagery to be highly effective in that these motifs add a certain nostalgic atmosphere to her settings. I always found myself appreciating her subtle storytelling and her ability to make her characters retain a certain unknowability. Her prose has this cool yet delicate quality to it that brought to mind authors such as Hanya Yanagihara and Ann Patchett.
On the one hand, I recognize how talented a writer she is. This is my third novel by Mandel and once again I have rather conflicting thoughts and feelings about her work. It’s the lightest sketch of civilizations, caught between the forest and the sea. “This place is precarious, that’s the only word for it. Cloud-Atlas-esque novels seem to be all the rage in 2022…
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