 |
David and Tereza have been together since they were children. Both are progressive and intellectual thinkers. As young lovers, they believe they will change the world together. However, the circumstances of life end up taking them down separate paths. Each eventually marries and has children, although they are able to keep their families close and their more platonic love intact. When they leave a family barbecue together, a microburst brought on by advancing climate change brings down a jet that slams into the house, killing their loved ones. This leads to a terrible argument where they shut each other out, each one wallowing in their own destructive guilt. When they finally patch things up, they take their tested and, at times, confusing relationship to the Ashami Institute, a retreat for artists and intellectuals. The institute is in bad shape financially, and David and Tereza, along with David’s new girlfriend, formulate a plan to take over the leadership and turn the institute into an environmentally friendly, sustainable community. However, the increasing climate crisis and the ever-evolving complications of their relationships threaten to tear their lives apart again.
Marcello’s book falls somewhere between current events and a near-future dystopian tale. In one sense, it is a generational love story between the protagonists, like a more modern telling of Marquez’s classic Love in the Time of Cholera. Yet it also reads like a less dystopian prequel, creating the kind of world where Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock or even Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife could take place. This is the time right before everything goes to hell, that period when things have gotten much worse, and people begin to lose sleep, wondering if the worst-case scenario is becoming the current-case scenario. Everyone knows someone who has lost a home, a job, or a loved one in some way to climate change. Still, the book is hopeful, if dire. The message seems to be that we’ve ignored the issue for too long and must face the consequences, but just maybe there is time for dramatic changes to stave off the apocalypse.
Readers will immediately recognize Marcello’s professionalism in his writing. His sentences are fluid without laboring or being overly stylized. He strives to create complex characters and situations with real-world emotions and implications. David and Tereza are multi-faceted characters who will engage and affect the readers, even if both feel a little too self-absorbed to love. The concluding chapter is exceptionally well-conceived and touching and will move the audience. However, the blending of the climate-change storyline and the love story is not fully realized; it is often an abrupt shift from information overload and climate discussion to a personal emotional moment and back, which comes across as a bit jarring. Still, all of Marcello’s topics are important and well-discussed. This book is easy to recommend to those readers enamored with both topics, and some will likely list it as a favorite book of the year. Readers concerned with climate change who are looking for a story that explores how it can drastically change lives may find this book is just what they are looking for.