Marienbad by Olive Llewellyn

Medusa in the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities thanks to Helen Miles Mosaics on Instagram 

Title: Marienbad

Author: Olive Llewellyn

Publisher: not known 

Source book: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Well! Sea of Tranquility is a book that leads you around in circles and then more circles and then back again so you can’t quite believe what you’ve just read. Weird to read but I do recommend it.

Marienbad, a successful book just about to be a movie, is about a pandemic, and includes a lot of detail about the history of pandemics, I think. Olive Llewellyn has to leave her family (she doesn’t live on Earth) for a long series of interviews and book signings to publicise a new edition to tie in with the film. The pandemic theme seems quite unusual for a novel, except of course that Sea of Tranquility is a novel that features a pandemic, and a fictional novel about a fictional pandemic. And here we go round in circles again. Olive Llewellyn has written three books before Marienbad, her first was called Swimming Stars with Goldflitter, but they were not distributed beyond the Moon Colonies. And then suddenly she achieved huge success. People even have their favourite line from the book as tattoos: we knew it was coming (a bit like Cloud Atlas whose fans get tattoos of comets). There are two subsequent books but none so successful as Marienbad.

I have no idea why Olive calls her book Marienbad. She lives on the Moon but she chooses to name her book after a spa town in the Czech Republic. Perhaps she is a fan of Last Year in Marienbad?

Also featured in Sea of Tranquility is Moon/Rise, a coming of age on the Moon story by Jessica Marley. Olive doesn’t like Moon/Rise, thinking of it as an insufferable little book. Jessica dies in the pandemic. Olive does not.

There is also mention of a chapter in a criminology textbook dedicated to the near annihilating nightmare of the so-called Rose Loop, when history had changed twenty-seven times before a rogue time traveler was taken out of commission and the damage undone.

And there’s a taxi driver who wants to write a sci-fi/fantasy epic featuring wizards, demons and talking rats. Horses and dragons and whatnot are just too big thinks the taxi driver; what you need is a pocket sized animal sidekick and obviously rats are perfect. Or at any rate they’re quite portable. Sadly we don’t hear any more about this promising literary masterpiece.

Mosaic from Zeugma