Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: An Ocean of Minutes
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://thealim.org/
CITY: Toronto
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2018002859
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018002859
HEADING: Lim, Thea, 1981-
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100 1_ |a Lim, Thea, |d 1981-
670 __ |a An ocean of minutes, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Thea Lim) data view (Birth date: 6/22/81)
670 __ |a Amazon website, viewed January 17, 2018 |b (An ocean of minutes: about the author, Thea Lim has an MFA from the University of Houston, and she has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She grew up in Singapore and now lives in Toronto with her family.)
PERSONAL
Born June 22, 1981.
EDUCATION:University of Houston, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and educator.
AWARDS:Received artists’ grants from Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Electric Literature, GRIST, Guardian, LitHub, Millions, National Post, Paris Review, Salon, and Southampton Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Thea Lim is the of the debut novel An Ocean of Minutes. The book tells the story of a young couple, Polly and Frank, who are separated in 1981 in Texas. “Told from Polly’s point of view,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “the novel oscillates between the present and future–a jarring juxtaposition that’s equally touching and heartbreaking.” In Lim’s reality time travel is possible and, when Frank falls sick of the flu that threatens the world’s population, she agrees to travel into the future to work and get him the treatment he needs. “Bonded workers,” explained a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “spend their time doing jobs like riding exercise bikes for hours in order to power resorts and are disparagingly referred to as journeymen.” “I started,” Lim told Rachna Raj Kaur in Now Toronto, “with an idea that was metaphysical rather than current: everyone we love we will one day lose, and how do we make sense of this?”
Lim’s novel has been celebrated by critics as a memorable take on the troubles of contemporary society. An Ocean of Minutes, Lim said in a Qwillery interview, “is an analogy for immigration. It’s been described as a dystopic novel — and I’ll take it! — but I actually think of it as allegorical fiction. I wanted to offer a different view of our own world, rather than a future, more dire world. This world is already dire enough. If, for example, vampire movies are always about sex, and zombie movies are always about the economy, time travel stories are usually about fate — trying to undo it, but failing. But my favourite time travel narratives are about time itself.” “From page one,” stated Kaur, “the Toronto-based author’s work of allegorical fiction reads like a comment on immigration within a love story. Without being force-fed ideology, it’s a heartbreaking page turner that delves into issues of race, class, labour and how to live with the passage of time.” “Like the best dystopian worlds, Thea Lim’s debut resonates with the present,” stated Sarah Gilmartin in the Irish Times. “Families are rent apart because of momentous world events. In 1981 people are dying in such numbers that the value of a single life has lost all currency. In 1998, the year which Polly travels to, conditions are equally grim. The time travellers are prisoners in everything but name. Given visas based on their skills, they carry out years of work for pittance in order to gain their freedom.” “Lim may be writing in the CanLit tradition, but her voice is all her own,” declared Tara Henley in the Toronto Star. “The author … comes into her own here, with prose that’s elegant and haunting, somehow managing to be both unsentimental and deeply moving.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Irish Times, June 23, 2018, Sarah Gilmartin, review of An Ocean of Minutes.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of An Ocean of Minutes.
Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2018, review of An Ocean of Minutes, p. 66.
Star (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), June 29, 2018, Tara Henley, review of An Ocean of Minutes.
ONLINE
Female First, https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ (June 18, 2018), Thea Lim, “My Top 10 Time Travel Narratives by Thea Lim.”
Now Toronto, https://nowtoronto.com/ (July 9, 2018), Rachna Raj Kaur, “Thea Lim’s Debut Novel Puts a Dystopian Twist on Migration.”
Quill and Quire, https://quillandquire.com/ (October 24, 2018), review of An Ocean of Minutes.
Qwillery, http://qwillery.blogspot.com/ (July 10, 2018), “Interview with Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes.”
Thea Lim website, http://thealim.org (October 24, 2018), author profile.
Thea Lim’s novel An Ocean of Minutes is out now from Quercus/Hachette in the UK, Viking/Penguin Random House in Canada, and Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster in the US. Her writing has been published by the Paris Review, the Guardian, Salon, the National Post, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, the Southampton Review, GRIST and others. She has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her novella The Same Woman was released by Invisible Publishing in 2007. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of creative writing.
My top 10 time travel narratives by Thea Lim
Thea Lim writes a piece for us upon the release of her new book An Ocean of Minutes.
18 June 2018
I organized this list in order of “Most Clearly Time Travel” to “Really? Are You Sure This is Time Travel?” because I believe there’s more than one mode of transportation through time...
Thea Lim
Thea Lim
Looper (film), Rian Johnson
If vampire movies are always about sex, and zombie movies are always about the economy, time travel movies are usually about fate. But my favourite ones are about time itself; how we try to dig in our heels and stop it from passing, but we never can. This one starts out as a gangster flick but turns into a deeply touching story about family and sacrifice.
La Jetée (film), Chris Marker
A series of photos, filmed with voiceover telling the story, so that both the plot and the medium seem to dabble in time travel: instead an actual film that moves, we get pictures that stay still, and that seems to say so much about how time feels.
Kindred (novel), Octavia Butler
Dana can’t stop time travelling, and she’s African-American, and she keeps being drawn back to the slavery-era US south. One of the first books to ever to use time travel to study the political divisions in our current moment, this book is terrifying and essential.
"The Late Philip J Frye" from Futurama (TV), Matt Groening
This episode of Futurama is one of the most poignant pieces of television ever made – I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. On his way to meet Leela, Fry goes for a ride in the Professor’s time machine. They’re supposed to only travel a single minute, but instead they go forward a billion years. Will Fry and Leela ever reunite, or were the few stupid moments they had together all they’ll ever get? Heartbreaking (I’m serious!).
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (film), Robert Stevenson
An old lady and some kids stop the Nazis by (spoiler) importing ancient soldiers across time, to do battle on the coast of England. One of the first things I ever saw that imprinted on me the wonders of storytelling; how a story could take me somewhere I’d never been, where I’d always wanted to go.
Arrival (film), Denis Villeneuve
An alien race visits; their language is non-linear and if you learn to speak it, you can see all the moments of your life at once. If you knew the person you’d love most in your whole life was destined to leave you, would you still make all the same choices? Beautiful and wrenching.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (film), Michel Gondry
Joel wants to erase his ex Clementine from his memories (so relatable) but to do so he has to visit all of their moments in reverse order, seeing them one final time. This movie uses a bizarre, surrealist device to create a story that is so true on the topic of how final it feels when love ends; this is a kind of witchcraft!
Watchmen (graphic novel), Alan Moore
Somehow this comic managed to invent a new tense: one where everything happens simultaneously. But if everything’s already happened, that also means that anything that’s lost still exists. “It isn’t gone, it’s still here. Let yourself see it.” Watchmen offers the most profound insights into what it means to be a timebound being, and it’s all uttered by a naked blue radioactive man.
A Visit from the Goon Squad (novel), Jennifer Egan
Friends who’ve borrowed this book from me always laugh at the chart I made on the back flap, in order to sort out the timeline. But I love this book enough to draw a zillion charts. As the characters struggle with being mortal, Egan uses every storytelling device in existence to play with time, and to expose its unforgiving self, so that the reader fights along with the characters, all of us together.
"The Beggar Maid" from Who Do You Think You Are (short story), Alice Munro
No one does chronology like Alice Munro. This story moves back and forth and back and forth in time, repeatedly undermining the noble intentions of all of the characters, showing how time makes fools of us all, how it reveals our weakness, our foibles, our humanity. You’ll laugh until you cry.
In the Mood for Love (film), Wong Kar-Wai
The director uses everything at his disposal – framing, shadows, costumes, and of course, that song – to show how the two protagonists’ lives seem to exist on an endless lonely loop, time balefully circling back on itself. Even though the movie ends with the sweetest and saddest of separations, we imagine the two neighbours are still and always meeting at that noodle stall, smiling at each other in the rain.
An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim is published by Quercus
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Interview with Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes
Please welcome Thea Lim to The Qwillery as part of the 2018 Debut Author Challenge Interviews. An Ocean of Minutes is published on July 10th by Touchstone.
Please join The Qwillery in wishing Thea a Happy Publication Day!
TQ: Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece you remember writing?
Thea: I once wrote a whole novel on my mother's Word Perfect program about an underground motorcycle club in 1993.
TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?
Thea: A hybrid. I make a very skeletal outline, because I need to have some sense of where I'm going, but the only thing that will really let me know whether or not my plot is going to work is test-driving it -- by writing it. So I don't spend too much time drawing up a plan, because it's never long before I have to make a new one.
TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?
Thea: The writing part. I once heard ZZ Packer say that writing is like being in marriage counselling, except with a total stranger. That sounds about right.
TQ: What has influenced / influences your writing?
Thea: Cityscapes, and trying to write about my life, and process the things that have happened -- but without it looking like I'm writing about myself in the slightest.
TQ: Describe An Ocean of Minutes using only 5 words.
Thea: LDR but 1991 to 1998. (I used an acronym and cheated.)
TQ: Tell us something about An Ocean of Minutes that is not found in the book description.
Thea: The whole thing is an analogy for immigration. It's been described as a dystopic novel -- and I'll take it! -- but I actually think of it as allegorical fiction. I wanted to offer a different view of our own world, rather than a future, more dire world. This world is already dire enough.
TQ: What inspired you to write An Ocean of Minutes? What appeals to you about writing a time-travel novel?
Thea: If, for example, vampire movies are always about sex, and zombie movies are always about the economy, time travel stories are usually about fate -- trying to undo it, but failing. But my favourite time travel narratives are about time itself -- the human instinct to try to dig in our heels and make it stop, kill change, even though we know it's hopeless. (The 1998 film After Life, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- which is totally a time travel movie if you think about it -- are good examples.) It's hard these days to write something totally new, so my strategy was to try and combine two well-worn genres into something else. I wanted to write a work of migration lit (inspired by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Maxine Hong Kingston), combined with time travel. In what way does the past feel like another country? In what way is returning to an old home like travelling through time?
TQ: What sort of research did you do for An Ocean of Minutes?
Thea: I visited Galveston and Buffalo, two cities I love, that are like spiritual twins, on either ends of the country. Both are cities trying to outrun time (Galveston dealing with natural disaster, and Buffalo dealing with economic disaster), and both have a sense of faded history that echoes through each day. I interviewed an upholsterer (She owns Maple Leaf Furnishings in Toronto if you are looking to get a chair recovered) so that I could properly write about Polly's time working at the Hotel Galvez. And I read many first-person accounts of migrant work, many of them wrenching and sad, like El Contrato, a documentary about tomato farmers in Ontario, or this comic strip about Almaz, a domestic worker from Ethiopia who sought work in Saudi Arabia, or the book Underground America, about migrant workers to the US.
TQ: Please tell us about the cover for An Ocean of Minutes.
Thea: The cover was designed by Scott Richardson, who is a really well-known Canadian designer (who happens to be a novelist himself!), so I was very lucky to have him. I loved how he worked in the Texas horizon, and the subtle touches to indicate that the book tells the story of our world, but a slightly off-kilter variant -- the slant of the skyline, and the two mirrored shores, side by side but forever apart, like parallel timelines.
TQ: In An Ocean of Minutes who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?
Thea: Norberto was the easiest to write, even though he makes some terrible choices. I knew that I wanted him to offer a kind of inverted version of Polly's suffering, so I had a clear model to follow, and just his overall personality -- so gloomy and vulnerable and hopeful still -- spoke to my heart. Frank was the hardest to write. He was mysterious to the end. It wasn't until I wrote the sections where he retrieves Polly's lost furniture, and where his mother throws an anniversary party -- they were late-stage additions! -- that I really figured out who he was.
TQ: Which question about An Ocean of Minutes do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!
Thea:
Q: What's your favourite part of the book?
A: The second last chapter, when (very mild spoiler) Polly sees her childhood home for the first time since 1980.
TQ: Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from An Ocean of Minutes.
Thea:
"They will have a September wedding, so their anniversary doesn't change. Their guests will blow bubbles instead of throwing rice, rice is bad for birds. They will have something of her mother's there --her bicycle or her rocking chair. In another universe, this timeline becomes actual. In their universe, the vial breaks, the virus spreads, the borders are closed. Frank gets sick."
"But what could she do? She kept laughing in the evening light, which is what people do when monstrous epiphanies surface in their minds. You cannot put life on hold to have a moment of grief, so every second, half the people in the world are split in two. This is what they mean by life goes on, and the worst is that you go along too."
TQ: What's next?
Thea: I'll be appearing this Friday at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, with the writer Jessica Wilbanks, to celebrate the US launch of An Ocean of Minutes!
TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.
Thea Lim's debut novel puts a dystopian twist on migration
Toronto-based author's time-travel tale An Ocean Of Minutes deftly delves into issues of race, class and labour
BY RACHNA RAJ KAUR JULY 9, 2018 12:04 PM
Expand
Ocean-of-Minutes-Thea-Lim.jpg
Thea Lim
Thea Lim’s beautiful debut novel, An Ocean Of Minutes ($24.95, Viking), is a deep dive into personal longing, political turmoil and time travel. Frank and Polly are in love in Buffalo circa 1981. Frank gets sick and they can’t afford medical care, but Polly can travel into the future; her job there includes health benefits so Frank can get well. They promise to meet in Galveston in 1993, but she ends up re-routed to 1998. America and the United States are two different countries: one stratified, one more equal. In America, there is only electronic currency, movement is restricted and strict curfews are enforced. What will it take for Polly and Frank to be reunited?
From page one, the Toronto-based author’s work of allegorical fiction reads like a comment on immigration within a love story. Without being force-fed ideology, it’s a heartbreaking page turner that delves into issues of race, class, labour and how to live with the passage of time.
Did you set out to write a novel that comments on the state of migration in today’s first world?
No! My first book, a novella called The Same Woman, was overtly political, and I was trying to change my style to be a bit more subtle. I started with an idea that was metaphysical rather than current: everyone we love we will one day lose, and how do we make sense of this? As I teased a story out, the plot leaned towards immigration and then, in order to up the stakes, it became about migrant workers. It was surprising and comforting to learn that if I trusted the process – instead of forcing a moral – my work could still say something.
Why set the story in Galveston?
I was living in Houston, Galveston was just down the road. Plus, it’s an island with only one road out, making it the perfect trap. But then I began to see how Galveston made sense as a setting for a story about endings. It has always been pummeled by hurricanes. But once the waters recede, the people put the city back together. It’s a real-world post-post-post-apocalyptic town, and though my novel offers an alternate Galveston, that sense of striving against time – it’s only a matter of time before another hurricane – haunted the story in a very productive fashion.
Why is Polly Lebanese? Why not Chinese/Singaporean, like yourself?
Though the major designation of privilege and power in my novel is “chrono privilege” – people who live in the time they were born vs people who left their time of origin – it was important to decide how race figured into all of that. As we know so well, our identities intersect with each other, so why wouldn’t Polly’s lack of chrono privilege intersect with her race?
I was loath to make Polly white, for fear of Dances With Wolves-ing it – writing an experience associated with a community of colour, but through a white avatar, as if readers can only care if the protagonist is white. I chose Lebanese because there’s a significant Lebanese community in Buffalo, where Polly is from. But also, Arab Americans have been alternately characterized as white and non-white over the past 100 years. By making Polly Arab, I could explore something that fascinates and dogs me: how race changes depending on where you live, and how you’re coded by class. When I was growing up in Singapore, everyone referred to me as white. When I moved to Canada, most saw me as Asian. So there’s a wee bit of hidden autobiography.
Do you think the fear of loss is specific to Third Culture Kids? Is longing ingrained in TCKs in a way that others don’t experience?
I doubt it. Many stories that dwell in the fantastic offer analogies for everyday experiences: Lord Of The Rings is an analogy for coming of age in the actual world. But plenty of specific real-world experiences are analogies for universal ones: immigration is an analogy for death, being a TCK – moving repeatedly as a child – is an analogy for losing your parents. While we can’t be overly simplistic and equate these experiences, there’s probably more room for understanding than we think.
There is so much longing in this novel: for love, people, place. Did you write from a place of longing?
This is getting personal! I’m fairly macho in real life, so I guess all my human longing has to squeak out somewhere.
books@nowtoronto.com | @checkoutrach
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Print Marked Items
Lim, Thea: AN OCEAN OF MINUTES
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lim, Thea AN OCEAN OF MINUTES Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 10 ISBN:
978-1-5011-9255-5
Traveling to the future is their only chance to stay together--as long as time doesn't tear them apart.
"People wishing to time travel go to Houston Intercontinental Airport," begins Lim's shimmering debut
novel. The year is 1981, time travel is possible, and a flu pandemic has ravaged the globe. Frank and Polly,
a young couple from Buffalo, are navigating the world together until Frank gets sick. In an effort to save
him, Polly enters into a contract with TimeRaiser, a company that sends healthy people to the future to work
in exchange for medical treatment for their infected loved ones. The couple promises to meet in Texas the
year Polly is set to arrive, but something unexpected derails their plans. It's only when Polly reaches her
destination--sprawling, crumbling, unknowable--that she realizes the devastating decision she's made ("it
was irreversible, and only comprehensible after it was done"). Told from Polly's point of view, the novel
oscillates between the present and future--a jarring juxtaposition that's equally touching and heartbreaking.
While Polly's future is unrecognizable, there are a few depressing tenants that remain: all-consuming
capitalism, sexual violence, and extreme wealth inequality are a few. The novel's unsettling tone ensures the
reader remains as confused as Polly. Where the United States of America had been, there is now the United
States and America. A land divided by borders, wealth, and something far more precious: normalcy. Lim's
writing shines brightest when she's ruminating on time, memory, and love: "No matter what happens, the
past has a permanence. The past is safe," and "Eventually this white noise of optimism would completely
fuzz over her memories of their minutiae: their laughter, musk, tics, gripes, singing, skin."
A beautiful debut exploring how time, love, and sacrifice are never what they seem to be.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lim, Thea: AN OCEAN OF MINUTES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571213/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d6e08c6.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571213
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An Ocean of Minutes
Publishers Weekly.
265.22 (May 28, 2018): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* An Ocean of Minutes
Thea Lim. Touchstone, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-1-5011-9255-5
Lim's stellar follow-up to 2007's The Same Woman concerns Polly Nader, who signs an agreement to travel
through time from 1981 to 1993 to save her boyfriend. During a road trip in 1981, Buffalo residents Polly
and Frank are stuck in Texas as state borders are closed to prevent a virulent strain of flu from spreading.
Due to time-travel limitations, doctors are unable to travel back far enough to prevent the pandemic's onset,
but people are being recruited by the company TimeRaiser to help rebuild the future. After Frank is infected
by the virus, the two decide to separate; Polly strikes a 32-month deal to work for TimeRaiser and plans to
reunite with Frank upon arrival. Bonded workers spend their time doing jobs like riding exercise bikes for
hours in order to power resorts and are disparagingly referred to as journeymen in a future where the
country has been divided into the United States and America. Polly is in the latter (composed mainly of
resorts for the wealthy), but Buffalo--where Polly assumes Frank is--is in the former. Polly's lowly status
and lack of funds keep her from knowing if Frank is even alive, and she isn't allowed to leave America for
the United States until her contract is up. She endures betrayals and despair as she tries to break free of her
servitude and make the potentially hopeless journey to find Frank. Lim's enthralling novel succeeds on
every level: as a love story, an imaginative thriller, and a dystopian narrative. Agent: Alexandra Machinist,
ICM Partners. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"An Ocean of Minutes." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 66. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638767/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a3035163.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638767
An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim review: a timely debut novel
New fiction offers fresh perspective on the complexity of migration and displacement
Thea Lim: creates a vibrant, dystopian world in her writing
Thea Lim: creates a vibrant, dystopian world in her writing
Sarah Gilmartin
Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 06:00
Book Title:
An Ocean of Minutes
ISBN-13:
978-1786487919
Author:
Thea Lim
Publisher:
Quercus
Guideline Price:
£14.99
In 1980s America, a deadly pandemic has gripped the country. Medicine to stop the virus is so rare that those who want it must have someone in their lives willing to make a huge sacrifice. Enter Polly Nader, a 23-year-old heroine from Buffalo, who chooses to participate in a sketchy time travel programme in order to save her fiancé Frank. The TimeRaiser initiative she signs up to hopes to mitigate the virus by sending people into the future to prevent further outbreaks and rebuild a broken country.
Like the best dystopian worlds, Thea Lim’s debut resonates with the present. Families are rent apart because of momentous world events. In 1981 people are dying in such numbers that the value of a single life has lost all currency. In 1998, the year which Polly travels to, conditions are equally grim. The time travellers are prisoners in everything but name. Given visas based on their skills, they carry out years of work for pittance in order to gain their freedom. The country, meanwhile, has split in two – a self-contained north and a plague riddled south – a world where soulless officialdom and aggressive policing contrasts with the scale of human grief, a new nightmarish America that is horribly recognisable.
Lim’s lucid language establishes Polly’s predicament from the off as she leaves Frank in quarantine in Texas and heads to Houston (one of many neat references) for take-off. The sense of panic among the time travellers, who are herded from one bureaucratic nightmare to another, is clear. Information is thin on the ground and all around the airport, people are regretting their decisions. A woman in line beside Polly suddenly breaks down: “It is an unacceptable noise. It triggers an avalanche of dread that comes plunging over Polly, and her ears and airways fill with it, and for a second she is too heavy to move. The only way she can get out from under it is to narrow all her emotions into a fine point of rage. She wants to scream at the woman, Do you think you are the only one suffering here?”
Believable
Intense early chapters skilfully show how humans react in extreme situations. Armed with the loosest of plans to meet Frank on a Saturday in 1993 outside a hotel in Galveston, Texas (if he survives the pandemic), Polly’s courage in stepping into the unknown is revealed in intricate detail: “Her gut crowded with sudden, childhood fright, her capacity for the strange exceeded”. Once she lands in the future, five years later than planned, reality hits home: “There was no socket for a radio, no books. Her room was the size of a large sandbox.”
There are also no friends, no family, no fiancé, and an uphill battle to discover what happened to all of them. With this suppression of information, there are overtones of 1984, though Lim’s novel is far less sinister. It offers instead a believable representation of how a modern country might deal with a pandemic. No rats strapped to faces are needed here, the banal efforts to reconstruct a nation are chilling enough.
Lim grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto with her family. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and her writing has been published by the Southampton Review, the Guardian and Salon. There are echoes of Laura van den Berg’s Find Me and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife in her debut novel. The latter comes through in Lim’s examination of love’s durability through crisis and time. As she pines for Frank, Polly wonders “how love could neatly and unremarkably stop; that was more impossible and terrible than travelling through all of time”.
Rushed scenes
A shift to the first person in a short section towards the end delivers the depth of feeling Polly feels for Frank. It leaves the reader wishing for a similar voice from the beginning in a story that can sometimes be more about its themes than its characters. Scenes feel rushed at times as Lim fights to cram in her myriad ideas and subplots.
But there is no denying the author’s ability to create a vibrant world and predicaments for her characters. “You’re not a citizen anymore,” an official responding to Polly calls to mind the plights of today’s migrants. “You left before the formation of America, ipso facto you can’t be a citizen. You’re here on a visa.” Polly’s attempts to get information about Frank’s whereabouts are met with motivational double speak: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life, and you have a chance to begin again.” Her arduous trip north across the border in later chapters, “five days in a sardine can”, culminates with a dehumanising encounter with border control. An Ocean of Minutes is a timely novel that brings a fresh perspective on the complex subjects of migration and displacement that plague our world today.
An Ocean of Minutes
by Thea Lim
Toronto resident Thea Lim’s debut novel is a dystopian time-travel story that defies genre conventions by concentrating on the interpersonal consequences of its plot. But somewhere along the line the narrative falls flat: despite the author’s best attempts, the reader feels no attachment to the characters. As a result, it’s difficult to root for their success.
Here’s what we know about the dystopian world that serves as the setting for An Ocean of Minutes: a fatal virus has infected numerous Americans. A cure has been invented in the future and if loved ones and family members agree to travel forward in time, the state will fund the treatment for those left behind. The trade-off is tough, though. People who agree to travel to the future must work in subpar conditions cleaning up the destruction the virus has left in its aftermath.
Slingshot into the future, the main character, Polly, makes plans to meet up with her partner, Frank, at a specific time and place. For her, no time has passed. But he has been infected with the virus and therefore left behind; he must find a way to stay alive for 12 long years before eventually meeting up with his beloved when the future becomes the present. Of course Polly’s scheme fails and she spends the rest of the novel trying to make her way back to Frank.
Flashbacks provide a deeper look at the couple, yet we never feel close to them. Despite Lim’s facility with truly creative and original turns of phrase (“Sweat pools in the diamond made by the meeting of their chests”), the novel lacks the visual imagery that would have allowed the reader to better understand the darkness of the dystopian future world. The abstract metaphors and descriptions are a hindrance to visualizing the setting and characters, in turn making it difficult to become invested in the plot.
And yet, the novel almost redeems itself with its ending, which is delightful in its realistic approach to how a relationship under this kind of strain would unfold. The conclusion gives readers not necessarily what they want but what the book needs.
Thea Lim’s book An Ocean of Minutes, draws on the best of old and new CanLit
By TARA HENLEYSpecial to the Star
Fri., June 29, 2018
An Ocean of Minutes - Thea Lim
In the age of widespread refugee crises, weather events, data mining, corporate greed and totalitarian politics, dystopian narratives are very much on the brain. Toronto writer Thea Lim taps into this trend with her timely debut, An Ocean of Minutes, which draws on the best of old and new CanLit traditions.
The novel follows twentysomething Polly — a furniture upholsterer — and her bartender boyfriend Frank, who are madly in love. The year is 1981 and a pandemic is sweeping America. The couple get stuck in Texas, and Frank becomes infected. To get the treatment that will save his life, Polly agrees to enter into a contract with the TimeRaiser corporation, travelling twelve years into the future and working off her subsequent debt to the company. The couple promise to meet in 1993 in Galveston, to proceed with plans for marriage and children.
But when Polly lands, the year is actually 1998, and nothing is as expected. As a second-class citizen in a breakaway republic, her movements are curtailed and the state is always watching. TimeRaiser is a complex bureaucracy that requires endless patience to navigate. Frightened neighbours turn each other in. Migrants toil away at manual labour, subsisting on rationed food, many unable to understand English or to obtain information on the whereabouts of family. Polly, meanwhile, must risk all to hang on to the love that’s defined her life.
The clear-eyed, evocative writing here is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood, and anyone familiar with The Handmaid’s Tale will find resonance in these pages. Similarly, Lim draws on the New CanLit, tapping into its energetic focus on social justice, using fiction to probe our contemporary reality — in all its staggering inequality. An Ocean of Minutes is, in fact, a study in the ways in which such inequality destroys lives, drives people to desperation and separates them from those they love most.
Lim may be writing in the CanLit tradition, but her voice is all her own. The author — who grew up in Singapore, holds an MFA from the University of Houston and previously published a novella The Same Woman — comes into her own here, with prose that’s elegant and haunting, somehow managing to be both unsentimental and deeply moving at the same time. A devastating debut.
Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.