Real Compassion Is a Feat: Akil Kumarasamy Interviewed by Lillian Li
A novel both epic in scale and intimate in its focus. Akil Kumarasamy’s new novel, Meet Us By a Roaring Sea (FSG), reminds me of a constellation: brilliant, but seemingly unrelated systems that, with the help of human imagination, cohere into a larger picture.
How else do you explain why the narrative of an AI engineer mourning her mother in a futuristic New York City can feel so natural next to an untranslated text by a group of Indian medical students during the Sri Lankan Civil War? How else can self-driving cars connect to philosophical thought experiments, or reality shows to soldiers, Alzheimer's medication to radical empathy?
At first glance, you might say that Kumarasamy is a writer who infuses everything she touches with the surreal. Upon a second reading—and this book is one that deserves rereading—you realize that she is a writer who leaves no angle unexamined, and that if you look at anything long enough, you find not only the strange in the familiar, but also how to link the two inextricably.
