Sea Now

Reviews / Votes

'One of the unanticipated highlights of my reading year...a fabulist disaster novel, doubling as identity-of-the-nation commentary...playful, with a dry sly omniscient voice...a little bit as though Stephen Baxter's Flood (2008) (or Japan Sinks) had been rewritten by Italo Calvino....the cumulative effect of this wide-ranging, generous narrative attention is a constant sense of motion, and a lightness of touch that allows Meijer to move smoothly from, say, haunting elegy to academic satire to a more serious intellectual point... Simply as a page-to-page reading experience, Sea Now is consistently fresh and interesting: You never quite know where its eye will fall next...Sea Now struck me as sharply challenging in its diagnosis: that governments are powerful and can achieve great things, but that the incentives they respond to can make them slow and belated; that the sea level rise is the end of a process, not the start of one; that ''a loss of faith in the idea that things would keep on getting better'' might, tragically, be rational, or might at least require redefining what ''better'' means.'
- Niall Harrison, Locus

'People picture disaster either as a sudden explosion, or as something that might happen elsewhere, or far in the future. But in Sea Now disaster just comes, crawling forward, wave by wave. One day, the tide simply comes in and stays. It is unprecedented, mystifying [...] an intriguing view of what climate disaster might look like-not so much a flash flood, but instead a slow creep, taking cities over one by one [...] will keep readers drawn in until the end.'
- Leah Rachel von Essen, Chicago Review of Books

'Broadening both the scope of the novel and the bounds of our understanding and empathy...What sets Sea Now apart from other recent climate fiction, however, is its decentering of the human perspective.... It asks us to think more broadly than we are accustomed, to take the time to imagine the lives of rabbits and fish, and to wonder what the sea might feel.'
- Rebecca Hussey, Words Without Borders
'Sea Now unfolds from both broad and intimate perspectives with a voice that, in Anne Thompson Melo's translation, is delightful and terrifying in its simplicity [...] It isn't just a human story, but one of overfished fishes learning not to be afraid; of shellfishes, birds, rabbits, and 'sea-being'; of horses discovering that 'what they mean by freedom [is] the seaweed that moves inside you'; of whether, like mussels and octopuses, 'the sea dreams'... In its regard for other-than-human Earthlings, Sea Now joins Meijer's rich oeuvre of novels and philosophical meditations on multispecies coexistence. One could read this novel as the story of two characters-the Netherlands and the sea-posing a question of each other: What am I? What and who is "the Netherlands"? What and who is "the sea"? The first question implicates uncomfortable stories of value: Who determines the status quo that decides who or what (a foreigner?, a painting?) deserves to be saved, who or what (a US-trained scientist?, the Dutch language?) would count as a loss? [...] Meijer's prose, in Melo's hands, flows quietly with a consistent bittersweetness, and the novel's pervasively dreamlike quality underscores the true horror of this entirely realistic scenario.'
- Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Asymptote