Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel

 35 pages in and I can tell this one is going to be challenging.  I know it's a time travel sort of arty book

so.....by the sections in the book

1. Remittance 1912

Edwin St Andrew has been exiled to Canada by his family for badmouthing the aristocracy.  While he's in Canada, and going bush, he bumps into father Roberts, and in Chapter 8 hears a violin and a feeling of "a vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral".  Apparently (yeah, I read reviews), the violin is significant. 

2. Mirella and Vincent 2020

Apparently these are characters from a previous book , but doesn't really matter, but will spoil the ending of The Glass Hotel.  I don't care.

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and....I stopped updating, because the stories were kind of boring, and nothing to update, then it got good, and I couldn't put it down.  Almost finished.  The whole book is a brain burner, and a bit of a standard time travel....don't mess with the past type of story.

So to recap, the first half is a setup for the second half. 

The first half is 3 stories with 3 separate characters in 3 separate timelines, but they all hear that weird violin and the whoosh.  With one connecting character who was Father Roberts in the first story.  He keeps popping up.  And all are connected by various pandemics.  the 1918 Spanish flu, 2020 Covid 19, and a future pandemic

Story 3 was an author who named a character Gaspery who is destined to die by her future pandemic

Story 4, which is the middle of the book, before it starts going back to story 3,2,1, is set in the future about a character called Gaspery, after the book character, who is trained by the time traveller institute to investigate the weird anomaly all the previous story characters were having.  He goes back in time to story 3, and warns her to change her path, and therefore avoid the flu.  But by doing so, he breaks a major law, so is now on the run, and his sister saves him and sends him back to 2019 and 2012, where he pretends to be Father Roberts.  Meanwhile, there is an ongoing theme of whether they are all real, or part of a simulation.  Looks like it is a simulation, but that is considered a life anyway.

However by jumping around in time, and breaking the rules, he ends up being the person playing the violin and is interviewing himself, under a different name, that his sister organized for him when he was on the run.  This causes the programming glitch, which involves all the previous stories. It's a mess of a story, and it's a mess of the code.  And the code adjusts itself. 

my brain hurts just writing this.....it's pretty clever actually.