Meet Us by the Roaring Sea
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15
Ratings1
Average rating4
"A spellbinding book." —Megha Majumdar "Akil Kumarasamy is a singular talent . . . I love this book." —Cathy Park Hong Written in vivid and pulsating prose, alternating between the young woman’s present life and passages of the translated manuscript, Akil Kumarasamy’s Meet Us by the Roaring Sea is a remarkable, genre-bending exploration of memory, technology, friendship, love, consciousness, and the costs of caring for others in an age when we are so often lost in the swamps of our own minds. In the near future, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students—living through a drought and at the edge of the war—as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator’s life and the manuscript begin to become entangled. Along the way, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project will force her to question her own moral compass and sense of goodness. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world?
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I made it nearly halfway and yet I will give up on this.
The main narrative is told in the you-perspective and is interlaced with a story told in the we-perspective. And as grating as that sounds, that wasn't my main issue with the book. I thought the setup was quite interesting - near-future, AIs, compassion, trauma - but the poetic stream of consciousness style was exhausting and the plot itself didn't crystallise enough to make up for that.
