Meet Us by the Roaring Sea

March 1, 2022

In this follow-up to Kumarasamy's Bard Fiction Prize-winning story collection, Half Gods, a young woman responds to her mother's violent death in a near-future Queens, NY, by working her way through language studies, artificial intelligence, and television, eventually translating an old manuscript about female medical students in a catastrophic world figuring out how best to help others. With the arrival of both a stranger and a childhood friend and the advent of a special AI project, the protagonist asks herself the same question. With 40,000-copy first printing.

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May 16, 2022
Kumarasamy’s dazzling if sometimes unwieldy debut novel (after the collection Half Gods) follows a young woman as she tries to unpack the past amid an unforgiving near future. Ada, 26, works as a trainer for an advanced AI model, and on the side, perhaps as a coping mechanism, she translates a manuscript written in Tamil during the 1990s, which she first encountered during her college years. The manuscript details a group of women students at a remote medical college who slowly descend into a cult of “radical compassion” while treating war refugees, inflicting as much suffering on themselves as possible in order to truly understand their patients. After the students receive televisions from the government, their philosophy becomes tested and a schism develops within the cult. Kumarasamy also gets into Ada’s interactions with Sal, an artist whose parents died in a self-driving car accident; and Rosalyn, Ada’s cousin and roommate who illegally performs memory experiments on a homeless man. While some of the thematic threads can feel underdeveloped or untethered, such as the AI subplot, Kumarasamy’s gorgeous prose and quiet meditations on memory will enthrall readers. This ambitious effort has much to offer. Agents: Bill Clegg and Chris Clemans, Clegg Agency.

June 15, 2022
An AI programmer's mourning process takes her into her own past and the unusual manuscript she's translating. Kumarasamy's slippery debut novel concerns an unnamed young woman whose mother has recently died. To stay connected with her Tamil heritage--and her interest in language and communication--she dedicates herself to translating a document written years earlier by a group of female students at a South Indian medical school. In the meantime, she's assisting a friend with art projects and cohabitating in her family's Queens house with cousin Rosalyn, who has opened their home to a homeless veteran who's appeared on a popular reality show called Soldiers' Diaries. (We're in a near future where the military occupies "stabilization zones" in unnamed places and citizens are obligated to keep their "carbon score" low.) And at work, she's shoveling data sets into an AI model she's nicknamed Bogey and discussing the nature of consciousness with co-workers. Where is all this going? Kumarasamy's language can be delightfully lyrical: "All along you think you have control, moving along a straight line, from one point to another, but really you're spinning with the earth so deep in that vortex of girlhood." It can also be frustratingly abstract. (A line the protagonist asks of the Tamil manuscript might apply to this book: "Why is your syntax so elliptical?...Is this a testimony, a final note, written to no one, everyone?") Kumarasamy's core interest is with "radical compassion," a term the medical students use often to discuss their obligation to alleviate others' suffering. Our own struggles to articulate that compassion--symbolized here in shows like Soldiers' Diaries or AI or other technologies--reflect either human nature or a human problem that requires solving. Difficult emotions may require difficult writing, but Kumarasamy's demanding approach creates less a well-woven story and more a mass of interesting but unbraided tendrils. Intensely mournful but jagged storytelling.

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August 1, 2022
Kumarasamy (Half Gods, 2018) offers an ambitious, classification-defying novel that straddles the past and the future and offers deeply thoughtful commentary on the lines defining personal and collective identities. A translator in a highly digitized near future, whose day job involves morally problematic AI projects, is immersed in the lives of young women studying medicine in Southern India as she translates the written record of their progressive radicalization. There is acknowledgement of the trauma of war, the dehumanization of a digitized world, and an examination of the nature of creativity in this cyber-dominated time. Kumarasamy's nontraditional characterization and plot development work remarkably well in furthering the theme of unmoored individuals seeking their places in inchoate social contexts. The language, especially the references to the challenges of translation, adds to the impact of the story as it ties together individuals and histories across countries and continents. This is a compelling read that tackles some of the most urgent questions of our times, and Kumarasamy demonstrates restraint in not offering simplistic answers.

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