“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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