Akil Kumarasamy recently debuted her first novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, which explores themes of loss, identity and change through interconnected stories.
The novel is a book-within-a-book, where a young woman working in artificial intelligence brings readers into the lens of the historic war manuscript she’s translating.
Ahead of this weekend’s Unbound Book Festival, KBIA’s Ava Neels discussed grief and humor with Unbound author Akil Kumarasamy.
Ava Neels: Take me back to the beginning: Can you tell me how the idea was born and what is your creative process like?
Akil Kumarasamy: Yeah, I think at the center of the book, it's this idea about, how do we care about other people? How do we care about people who are far away from each other? Especially in this digital world. What does that look like? What does that mean? I think, you know, when you watch the news of all the things that are happening all over the world, it's this question of: What does compassion really look like? And what does it mean to like, push that to different edges?
I wrote this book also during the pandemic. So the pandemic also brought a lot of these questions to the forefront of my mind ... With the pandemic, we kind of saw how interlinked we all really are.
So, that was maybe the central idea. But the book kind of moved in different directions, you know? Like it has this translated manuscript, it has this AI project and has all these different components that might not necessarily seem like they come together, that they belong together.
So I think one of the goals of the book was also just to have all these disparate pieces, even geographically, temporarily ... It takes place at different time periods, and have them all come together and all fit [in a] kind of meaningful way.
I think how we cope and how we manage through so many things is through humor. Even though things might seem really dire or stark, I think everything kind of lends itself into humor, because it's just sort of the absurdity of it, the strangeness of it.
Neels: I would love it if you could dive a little bit deeper into this theme of grief within the novel.
Kumarasamy: Yeah, so, the book starts off with the AI coder losing her mother. And for me, like, grief is just a very interesting space. Because it's like suddenly ... your idea of reality kind of cracks open. And nothing is the same anymore. And like, I think that gaze just de-familiarizes things that might seem very familiar to a reader.
And also ... grief, of course ... there's like a lot of sadness. But it's also kind of absurd, kind of strange and I want this book to kind of capture that kind of strangeness. And it's so weird...The idea of death is also such a strange part of our lives that it's someone who's there and someone's gone. And then what does that even mean?
And I think the narrator is also just questioning a lot of things about reality, consciousness. And ... have these questions be circulating. What does it mean to lose someone? What does it mean to care about somebody? What does it mean? What does memory mean?
Neels: Meet Us by the Roaring Sea manages to deal with heavy topics of grief and loss while also having moments of humor and warmth. How did you find a balance between the two?
Kumarasamy: Yeah, I think that was really important for me to get the tone right. Because sometimes, you know, it is heavy in the sense of like, you're grieving someone. And ... there's an AI car accident, too, that happens in this book. There's different things of death. And also just like, there's the climate crisis and all these other aspects of the world.
I think how we cope and how we manage through so many things is through humor. Even though things might seem really dire or stark, I think everything kind of lends itself into humor, because it's just sort of the absurdity of it, the strangeness of it.
So, even though the subject matter, it might be difficult, I wanted the reader to be able to move through the book with a kind of lightness. Also this tenderness too ... there is loss in the book, but also a strong sense of compassion. Characters trying to connect with each other, connect with people that they don't even know and also showing that there's a way out of grief too.
See more Unbound Conversationshere and see more including the complete schedule at Unbound’s website.
