Each night, you think about all the things you want to do tomorrow, which are essentially all the things you meant to do today but didn't get around tEach night, you think about all the things you want to do tomorrow, which are essentially all the things you meant to do today but didn't get around to. Tomorrow will be better though. You'll wake up earlier, you'll take care of those things you must but might not necessarily want to do (work, cook, clean, etc.) but you'll take care of them in less time, you'll carve out a little more space in the day just for you.
Thinking these thoughts puts your mind at ease somewhat. Hope = tomorrow!
You shower, brush your teeth, get in bed, and wait for sleep to take you ... but your mind is restless, your thoughts pour like a faucet into your stomach. They're not even new thoughts, they're the same ones that repeat every 3 or 4 nights.
Tonight's playlist — "dystopian dreams"!
You wake up late again, start the day again. You open the news to a new American tragedy.
New Year's Resolution: Stop reading the news.
You wonder if it's ethical to avoid reading the news all together, feel guilty at your being privileged enough to even have the choice.
You stare at the screen blankly. Tabs open seemingly of their own will. Scroll, scroll, scroll. You don't want to do it, don't want to do any of it, but it's as though you have no control. And the end result is always the same — emptiness.
You get on Goodreads, leave a review so Lord Bezos has more content to feed to his insatiable AI demons. You wonder how long it'll be until AI is able to write reviews just like this one, self-critical, indistinguishable from anything you could have written yourself ... that it already can do so is beside the point, because the point is distraction, the point is to keep you plugged in, keep you off the street, keep you from organizing.
"Community" — do you see that word there? The fourth one from the left, right at the top? Is the sentiment behind it genuine you think?
How long can a community be allowed to "commune" before it threatens the control of those at the top, so that those on top police it and shut it down?
If Goodreads still exists in 20 years, will it consist only of reviews of books like "Where the Crawdads Sing" — a forum for people to talk about empty, meaningless dreck that says nothing and threatens no one, except the occasional minority group?
Sure, "Barbie 7" will have just hit theaters, as will all the clickbait pieces about how upset it's made someone, somewhere, so we can all watch it three or four or 13 times as a way to show our support for its unabashed feminism and our disdain for those evil Mattel board members the movie depicts, the same Mattel our ticket sales enrich, but we've Made A Statement! — and that's what matters.
In that future, books like "Capitalist Realism" will have disappeared off the virtual shelves. You type it in, but nothing appears. Hmm, you'd thought that was what it was called ... your search for the author reveals nothing either. Maybe you invented it. Maybe it never existed in the first place ...
Tomorrow, tomorrow, it's only ... a daaaay ... aaaawaaaay....more
Chalk it up to supply chain issues or an initial print run in the US that significantly underestimated demand, but you cannot find "The Anomaly" anywhChalk it up to supply chain issues or an initial print run in the US that significantly underestimated demand, but you cannot find "The Anomaly" anywhere right now. Unless you're into e-books, that is, in which case, well, good for you, I suppose, but you're also missing out, because looking for the physical (i.e. the "real") book in actual brick-and-mortar bookshops makes up a big part of the joy of reading ... at least for me.
Let it be noted, though, that even that soul-sucking behemoth and epitome of all that's wrong with capitalism (and Goodreads) known as Amazon.com had this on backorder for weeks as well.
So why exactly is everyone so desperate to get their hands on this book right now? I believe it's because, following what have been two incredibly trying years, we're eager to get our hands on fiction that allows us to escape into a reality that appears to be more confounding and, possibly, more bereft of meaning than the one we're currently living in.
Now you can rest assured that, unlike most of the reviews you'll find by critics in The New York Times and other publications that should know better, I will not be overtly giving away the reality that our characters suddenly find themselves thrust into in "The Anomaly." What I will say, though, is that this "fictional" reality may, in fact, be more real than many people think (and has been cited as a possibility by many notable figures in the scientific community).
But here's the gist of things. At some point pre-pandemic, the French author Hervé Le Tellier had one great, Don DeLillo sized idea that all but guaranteed — without him having even written a single word — that Netflix, HBO, Amazon, or some company willing to drop millions of dollars on the rights to said idea would come knocking. And they will, because this really is a great idea, sure to become the latest binge-worthy hit for whichever company ponies up the cash.
Now, I haven't read much contemporary French literature, if "literature" is the right word for this, but there are some curious things about "The Anomaly" that struck me, aside from the aforementioned idea.
Firstly, do French novelists typically name-drop this much? By which I mean, is it normal for a French author to include 30-some-odd pages in which Stephen Colbert interviews one of their characters on The Late Show, written from the perspective of the very real Stephen Colbert? It's not just Colbert either. Elton John, French President Emmanuel Macron, and many other real figures appear and are given lines in "The Anomaly." I don't think I've ever read an American novel that's really done anything like this.
Though he isn't ever addressed by name, Donald Trump is here too, all too obviously, and it's this thin-veiling of the "real" that I'm more used to seeing.
Secondly, do French writers really write the way that Le Tellier's fictionalized novelist, Victor Miesel, writes here, or is Le Tellier poking fun at what he perceives to be French literature's pretensions? I can only speculate, but some of the lines that are cited from this fictional writer's novel, also, curiously enough, called "The anomaly" (for some reason the "a" is lowercase) are cited with seeming reverence by the characters in Le Tellier's "Anomaly," but sound so obtuse and overwrought as to be laughable.
The oyster that feels the pearl knows that the only conscience is pain, in fact it is only the pleasure of pain.
The coolness of my pillow reminds me of the pointless temperature of my blood. If I shiver with cold, it means my pelt of solitude is failing to warm the world.
Umm ... brilliant writing? Yes, according to the fictional French public depicted in this book, who turn Miesel's "anomaly" into a huge hit soon in demand around the world.
Or, perhaps, these lines sound much, much better in the original French. For as Clémence, Miesel's editor, explains to the author late in the novel, "Your book's coming out next week pretty much everywhere...Superfast translations...are sometimes less accurate."
As you see, I am writing around the central conceit of "The Anomaly," but I don't find these points any less interesting or any less integral to the main point.
What we're faced with in "The Anomaly" are two worlds, the fictional world Le Tellier is presenting us with and our own world, which only appears different at first glance. When you look closer, you start to see echoes of our own world across these pages, not just in the characters that exist in both worlds, but in the despair and dysfunction that permeate both as well.
Which world is real? Which world isn't? Are both real? Or — more frightening yet — are neither?...more
It has been some time since I have arrived at the final page of a book and immediately wanted to flip back to the beginning and plunge right in again,It has been some time since I have arrived at the final page of a book and immediately wanted to flip back to the beginning and plunge right in again, but a strong desire to do just that filled me upon reaching the top of page 666 and seeing that I had only five more lines to go.
There is so much here, so much more than I managed to pick up in a single reading I'm sure. Narrated in the first person by nine different characters, all of whom feel at times like various echoes of Knausgård himself, there are surely connections between them I missed, allusions that would have helped in uncovering the odd events that take place throughout the book I overlooked. The referenced songs and books that I skimmed over, failing to look up as I raced through page after page ... they may have contained the key to unlocking it all.
It was only after finishing this — in last night's small hours, my reading having slowed as the remaining pages shrunk under my right thumb, me savoring each one like scripture — that I learned that this is apparently the first part of what will be a new series.
The first part!!
Ha! We should have known. Karl Ove writes books like Krzysztof Kieślowski directed films — leisurely, not in a rush to get to the destination but for the pleasure of the journey. He's in the getaway car, the roar of sirens in the distance, but he pulls over to the roadside diner to have some coffee and a slice of triple berry pie. He's brought along a weathered copy of "Crime and Punishment" so he'll be a while. We'll return to our heist story in 200 pages or so ... just be patient.
I have to admit that I was fearful even before picking up this very eerie — in the most deliciously gothicy Gothic Horror sort of way — novel. Fearful that perhaps Karl Ove was only a one-hit-wonder. Or, rather, a six-hit-wonder, as his game-changing, six-part "My Struggle" series truly raised the bar to a level even Simone Biles would have had difficulty clearing.
Alas, I needn't have worried. Karl Ove is the real deal, which delights me not just as a reader, but as a human being. After vicariously living through so many of the ups-and-downs of his life as he portrayed them, from early childhood up through adulthood, I've come to find myself quite attached to Karl Ove and liking him all the more thanks to his 4,000+ page "struggle."
After his incredible 400-page-essay on Hitler, "The Name and the Number," in Book Six, Karl Ove couldn't resist including another essay here, "On Death and the Dead," written from the standpoint of one of the book's main characters. It's things like that, including scholarly essays in the midst of what the unacquainted might simply accuse of being "genre fiction," that separate Knausgård from the pack. Knausgård has the ability to take what, in another author's hands, would be a novel you buy at the airport bookstore and leave on the plane at the other end, and elevate it to art.
Of all the writers I enjoy reading, there are only two writing today whose books I must get my hands on as soon as they are released — to hell with waiting for the paperback! The French writer Michel Houellebecq is one, Knausgård is the other. I read Houellebecq not because I especially love his books for the pleasure of reading them but more so because reading them has always felt necessary in our times, so relevant to our world today. With "The Morning Star," though, Knausgård has laid claim to that same territory.
What is the morning star? What does it signify? Something dark, it would appear, the strange events greeting its rise hardly the stuff of Disney fairy tales, but a herald of something far more Grimm ...
An ominous beacon? A Sword of Damocles hanging over us all, casting society as we know it in its yellow gaze? Are there any real-life parallels you can draw to that in a world where climate change is an existential threat to us all (never mind the multitude of other potentially planet-altering crises currently staring boldly out of your paper's front page)?
"The Morning Star" is about death and dying. Physical death, yes, yours and mine, but also the death of knowledge, of memory, of tradition.
This loss, this eternal forgetting, is at the door now, bringing with it the ability to doom us all. What could be more terrifying than that?...more
Have you ever watched any of those famous British documentary series on our planet? If you haven't, you absolutely should — they're phenomenal (how doHave you ever watched any of those famous British documentary series on our planet? If you haven't, you absolutely should — they're phenomenal (how do they get that amazing footage??). Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough, most — "Planet Earth," "Frozen Planet," "Blue Planet" — have aired on the BBC, but the most recent, "Our Planet," was released on Netflix.
Much of these series, particularly "Our Planet," focuses on the harm that humans are doing to the environment and the creatures and habitats that are threatened by man-made climate change. But to avoid being entirely all gloom and doom, there's always a few minutes towards the end where the producers make room for a bit on the effort a few good humans are trying to make to rehabilitate decimated coral reefs, save some species from extinction, or develop some sort of waste-reducing technology.
Many books in the climate change genre are the same way. Everything's looking very bad indeed, as David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming tells us, but let's spend a few lines talking about this technology that may offer up some hope.
Elizabeth Kolbert's previous book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, was the same way — around 300 pages of pretty bleak stuff with a dozen or so more hopeful pages tacked on at the end so we don't all just go kill ourselves.
This, then, is her sort of elaborating on those dozen or so pages. This is those few minutes in "Blue Planet" talking about the attempted restoration of bleached coral reefs blown up into book length form ... or something like it.
Because, in fact, "Under a White Sky" is a rather slim read. Clocking in just around 250 pages, or about six hours in the audiobook format, which is how I chose to imbibe it, it's tellingly shorter than many of those "we're completely fucked" climate change tomes that get released on an increasingly routine basis.
And if this does pass as the "good" news on the climate change front, that just goes to show how dire the situation really is. Because this book is full of ideas that scientists and others are working on that might help reverse some of the effects of global warming ... or that might make everything much, much worse. There's just no telling.
Towards the end, Kolbert writes that "Under a White Sky" is “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems,” and that sums it up perfectly.
As a result, "Under the White Sky" is a sort of travelogue of doom, in which Kolbert treks from place to place to see firsthand the effect that invasive species have had or measure exactly how many acres of Louisiana have been swallowed by the sea in recent years.
In one case, Kolbert investigates the city of Chicago's attempt back in the year 1900 to divert waste from Lake Michigan — the city's main source of drinking water — by reversing the flow of the Chicago River.
The city did succeed in reversing the flow of the river, but in doing so they connected the basin of the Great Lakes with that of the Mississippi River, which in turn resulted in an ecological calamity when invasive species from one poured into the other.
The message, in any case, is clear: for every possible solution that may exist to lessen the damage already being caused by global warming, there is an equally bad, if not significantly worse, outcome that may result.
So what are we to do?
Depending upon the scientists you're listening to, we've already reached a degree and a half Celsius of warming, meaning that surpassing the 2°C goal set by the Paris Climate Accords is already a foregone conclusion. Many scientists believe that we're well on our way to 4°C of warming, and possibly more, unless we take immediate measures to curb our carbon output, something that is, let's be honest, not going to happen.
So as scary as, say, "dimming the fucking sun" is, Elizabeth Kolbert asks the key question — “What’s the alternative?”
“Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back," she writes. "The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.”
We could pine for what was, agonize over the things we should have done 10, 20, 30 years ago, but none of that matters anymore because the chance to preserve that planet is already gone.
So, in an effort to preserve today's planet, do we experiment with gene-editing tools like CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) in the hope that by doing so, we can edit the genes of a few invasive species and release them back into the wild so that'll hopefully eliminate their kin?
What climate change has left us with, then, is a 21st century version of the trolley problem. Would you dim the sun, experiment with gene editing technology, deploy light-reflective particles into the atmosphere — risking severe and in some cases certain negative consequences — if there's a possibility that doing so might save the planet?
In the words of Andy Parker, the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, “we live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”
2019's "The Uninhabitable Earth" is that rare book in which, by the time the paperback edition comes out (around a year to a year and a half after the2019's "The Uninhabitable Earth" is that rare book in which, by the time the paperback edition comes out (around a year to a year and a half after the hardback here in the US), the entire thing feels like it needs an update.
There is a new afterword attached to this paperback, but even that was written before the COVID-19 pandemic, the record setting wildfires in both Australia and the US, the record-setting Atlantic hurricane season, the "inland hurricane" the midwestern US experienced last August, and the ever increasing number of devastating floods, landslides, etc, that took place in 2020.
So it is that many passages here read like outdated newspaper headlines. Oh yeah, those wildfires from 2018 were bad. The worst ever, in fact. Until 2020, that is.
This isn't your typical book on the topic of climate change either. Because David Wallace-Wells is a self-professed optimist. If you don't read the whole of this book, it's worth at least reading the brilliant 40-page intro, "Cascades," in which DWW mentions that he and his wife just had a child.
Take that, climate alarmists!
But DWW, as he often reminds us, is alarmed too. He's just not as alarmed as some people. He still has hope.
Hope probably sells more books than doom, at least in the nonfiction category. Most of the books in the climate genre go something like this, "that happened, this is happening, that will happen, kiss the planet goodbye because, barring a miracle, we've waited too long to right the ship!" but DWW skips that last part, replacing it with, "there is hope specifically because things are going to soon be so bad that governments will be forced to take drastic action." It's an interesting message, hope through collective despair, but I'm not sure I share DWW's optimism that the governments and corporations of the world are just going to reverse course when they see how bad things are getting.
Aren't things already bad? Maybe other countries are taking gradual steps toward addressing climate change, but that's not nearly enough, and other countries — namely China and the US, the two greatest contributors to global warming — aren't even pretending to do anything. Amid record wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, a deadly pandemic, etc etc etc, what more has to happen before anything resembling appropriate measures are enacted? Do Miami and Hong Kong have to be swallowed up by the sea?
DWW aims some of his fire at out-and-out climate pessimists too, including those, like the author Paul Kingsnorth, who would appear to cheer the climate crisis on, believing that humanity has brought it on itself — which it most certainly has.
DWW would certainly not agree with the deep cynicism shared by the characters in Paul Schrader's 2018 film "First Reformed," in which the pastor of a small church in upstate New York becomes radicalized by an environmental activist into believing the only solution is violence toward those companies culpable for global warming.
It's just hard, as a reader, to read page after page of increasingly dire predictions steeped in hard research only to be comforted at the end that somehow, possibly, things might still be alright if companies and governments at long last recognize the error of their ways. Perhaps I've misread DWW's basic message there, but I just don't buy it.
Maybe I've become too cynical myself, but while the science that "The Uninhabitable Earth" cites is sound, and its predictions terrifyingly believable, the evidence for DWW's optimism seems in woefully short supply. Unfortunately, we have no other choice but to believe that we can still stop the worse from occurring, even if we have to just take that on faith....more
A global pandemic, however, is the kind of topic most people might run the other way from if that's all theyI like what I read to be somewhat topical.
A global pandemic, however, is the kind of topic most people might run the other way from if that's all they saw in the newspaper or on Fox News.
Ha, just kidding. Fox News could be down to Tucker Carlson and a single, solitary blond and the official memo would still read "the virus is a hoax/Deep State plot."
My Dad is very much one of these people. In terms of art, he would very much subscribe to Marie Kondo's whole absurd maxim of throwing out whatever doesn't "spark joy."
Out goes the Shakespeare and the Homer, he'd definitely ditch the Nabokov and those other, more Russian Russians, and in comes whatever Will Ferrell happens to be starring in these days.
Some people, especially here in America, go to the cinema and read — purely for escapism. You work the 9-5, or too often in my Dad's case when I was growing up, the 8-8, and you don't want to come home and plump onto the couch to watch "Schindler's List" or read Notes from Underground.
I get it, I do.
But, while Emily St. John Mandel likely did not foresee her book being read in an actual pandemic, "Station Eleven" tries to please both crowds. Those who read to try and escape the real world, in search of a more pleasing alternative, and those who are looking for serious, capital "L" Literature.
So it is that "Station Eleven" is something of a cross between Literature and an airport novel. On reflection, it's hard to say which it's more like ...
Probably an airport novel.
But I don't mean that as a bad thing. It's got some of the more familiar characteristics of airport novels, the sort of Dan Brownian cliffhanger lines right at the end of chapters that mean you just can't stop reading, not yet anyway.
And it's got some of the chintzier ones.
The final line of the summary on the back of my paperback edition reads, "And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed."
Uh oh.
That should have been my first clue, really, but I often don't read book summaries, whether printed on the jacket or on the back of the paperback, because they can all too often be like a bad movie trailer, giving the whole thing away.
So I only read that last night, after having turned the last page.
And yes, now I get it. All the characters have something in common. A "strange twist of fate" that connects them all, other than their shared humanity and the fact that they're part of the less than 1% of the population that somehow survived the pandemic, here known as the "Georgia Flu" (as in the country).
And now here I'm just going to tell you what it was that annoyed me the most, that possibly kept me from giving this five stars and that revealed, ultimately, that it wasn't capital "L" literature but more like an airport novel.
The Prophet. He's sort of the main villain here, commanding a cult following, as all good prophets do, and setting out to do evil to our protagonists, most of whom make up something called "The Traveling Symphony," a sort of a troupe that goes around the new world (specifically, around the derelict towns lining the east coast of Lake Michigan, I think) performing music and Shakespeare.
It wasn't the character that bothered the me, but the big reveal — the sort of thing that's supposed to elicit an audible gasp from the reader — that comes when we find out exactly who the Prophet is.
Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you, but if you read the summary on the back of the book, then you'd know he was already connected to the others by some "strange twist of fate."
It's a move that feels very airport novel-y. You know what I mean. The kind of revelation that's supposed to make you forget that you're seated on the plane next to a guy who clearly has some type of ailment with the way he's sniffling and rubbing his nose all the time.
Oh, and now he's fiddling with the tray table, getting his germs everywhere and causing such a racket when you just want to get back to this book in which being on a plane would amount to pretty much a death sentence.
And the big reveal gets you there, it makes you tune out the outside noise.
Except it's totally predictable. I mean, I don't want to go on about it, but you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to recognize that that particular dude is totally going to become the Prophet.
Because the timeline shifts back and forth, you see. We're with the characters in their pre-pandemic lives when they're happy — or not happy, mostly — and then we're with them when the world has become one great big hell hole.
But now let's talk about the good stuff, because the way I've been talking about it you probably think that I hated this book. Actually, I liked it. I just thought, being that I've seen it on all these "Best of the Decade" lists (here's one) that it would be capital "L" literature.
Don't even get me started on what books most of these lists left off ... Better books, is all I'll say.
What I liked:
God, even when I talk about I liked I've got to talk about what I hated. In this case, The Handmaid's Tale. Yes, thank Homer this book is not "The Handmaid's Tale."
Why is that incredibly overhyped Margaret Atwood novel relevant here? Because it's also dystopian fiction except that it's all written in something like diary entries and only teensy little hints are dropped every hundred or so pages about how everything went from suddenly being all "normal life, working the 8-8" to "now we're in a world ruled by crazy religious fundamentalists who rape us every so often."
I am interested in the how. If I'm reading a story set in some alternate version of Earth, I want to know what the hell alternated it. Why is it suddenly different? What happened?
No, Ms. Atwood isn't good enough to tell us that, because that would involve explanation and compelling storytelling. Emily St. John Mandel (henceforth known as ESM) does tell us.
ESM gets into the nitty gritty (ok, maybe not too nitty, we don't know much about the virus itself other than where it sort of came from, that it's some kind of avian flu, and that it's really effective in killing people).
But she shows us the world before, the world during, and the world after, and that's what I like to see. Hell yes! I don't like this whole "Oh, everything's destroyed. Lots of people, like, the majority of humanity, died. How? We're not going to get into that."
And ESM does a fine job of reenacting what I think would happen if a killer virus came and started just wiping people out left and right.
And I think we're all quickly becoming able to assess that.
Though COVID-19 is no "Georgia Flu," so take some solace in that.
"Station Eleven" is one of the cheeriest dystopian novels I've ever read. Like, the big bad thing happens, but people move on. As they do. ESM doesn't focus, as many other films and novels set during pandemics do, on the dangers of such a world (with one or two, mostly Prophet-related, exceptions). Her focus is very much on the world left behind. In that way, "Station Eleven" is very much a nostalgic novel, a novel that makes you appreciate a world we so often take for granted.
"It just doesn't make sense," one crazy and very underwritten character says to a man she's been stranded in a Michigan airport with. "Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?"
"Well," Clark offered, "it was always a little fragile, wouldn't you say?"
No line better encapsulates what this book is about.
Yes, civilization is fragile. Yes, we too often only know what we had when we've lost it. And yes, sometimes bad things happen, sometimes real life can feel eerily like fiction.
But life finds a way ... or something.
Now, if only it weren't for that damned Prophet ......more
It's the COVID book! You know, the one that came out right at the start of the pandemic that everyone was like, this book is about a pandemic and it'sIt's the COVID book! You know, the one that came out right at the start of the pandemic that everyone was like, this book is about a pandemic and it's coming out at the start of a pandemic!
It terms of the virus itself though, that's pretty much where the similarities end. Because "Kongoli," the ultra-lethal pathogen that ravages the world in "The End of October," is just that — ultra lethal, with a mortality rate that, in these pages, never drops below 40%. It appears that the COVID-19 mortality rate, by contrast, hovers at something like 0.2%, but of course that varies wildly according to age, geography, and a number of other factors.
It would have been easy to read a book like "The End of October" before the COVID-19 pandemic and think that, despite Kongoli's high mortality rate, the effect it has on much of the world is likely exaggerated. Here, the world's governments shut down, law and order completely disappears over the course of a few short weeks, and wars break out around the globe.
Having seen the insane reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, with its 0.2ish lethality rate, and how unprepared many nations — particularly the US — were for it, fathoming something of greater lethality, never mind 40%, is just too much for the mind to comprehend. We all would have been completely and utterly fucked.
"The End of October" doesn't take a truly global perspective on the pandemic, instead focusing largely on its effect on just a handful of countries. Early on, though, it appears that the US is handling the whole situation far better than many other nations. As prescient as much of this has proven to be, that point remains firmly grounded in the world of fiction.
As much hype as "The End of October" got earlier in the year because of its perceived similarity to our own situation — that is, after all, how I heard about this book in the first place — at the end of the day COVID-19 likely did this book a significant disservice. First of all, because who really, in the midst of a truly life altering pandemic, wants to escape into a novel about another pandemic (save yours truly, of course — I've always loved a pandemic read and our very real pandemic has done nothing to alter that). Secondly, because one can't help but read this now with an eye to just how much Wright has gotten, well, right.
And he does get a LOT right. Virus lethality aside, of course, because a book about a virus with a 0.2% mortality rate wouldn't really be about that virus at all, but more about how we all have reacted to it (and what a fascinating book that would be).
It's never said that the US president here is Donald Trump, but he is very clearly Trump-inspired, and the vice president is very clearly Pence-inspired. Or rather, perhaps not inspired at all. Since we never, from what I recall, learn either of their names, they probably are Donald Trump and Mike Pence. And why not? The other characters are all here. We hear Alex Jones ranting on the radio, see Chris Wallace and Bret Baier conducting interviews with obstinate officials on Fox News, Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) — or a very thinly veiled version of him anyway — whispers deviously into the old king's ear, urging him to war, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is his normal, villainous self, obsessed with bringing the former Soviet states back under Russian control and, to do so unobstructed, successfully ties the US down in the Middle East.
There are so many references here to real-life events that at times it's a bit jarring, no more so than when we learn one of the main characters has a connection to the 1978 Jonestown massacre. It's also clear throughout that Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer, has devoured more than his share of foreign policy books. Iran and Saudi Arabia go to war with one another, Russian cyberterrorists wreak havoc in the US, conservative ideologues rant and rave — along with the Trump followers — about how the whole "Kongoli" thing is a hoax, until people start dying right in front of them (hard to deny a virus that has a minimum 40% mortality rate) and then it's no longer a hoax but a government supervirus engineered in a lab and let loose by a rival country (though the country suspected here is Russia, not China).
Perhaps the main villain here, other than Putin, is Jürgen Stark, an eco-terrorist with an appropriately devious moniker (it's the umlaut — eternally a mark of villainy). Stark believes that humans need to be mostly wiped out in order to preserve the planet and that — this is where he lost me — viruses like polio have, as living organisms, the same right to life as any human does. He openly discusses all this in TV interviews, so he's not exactly subtle about it.
Naturally, our protagonist has a connection to Stark, because like any good villain Stark is a former colleague. Stark is the typical brilliant but godless evil genius, underlined by the fact that his opposite here would appear to be the wise Prince Majid, a scientist but also a god-fearing Muslim. Stark does dish out some killer vegetable soup though, intent as he is on populating his garden with formerly extinct squashes and other veggies, so take that, Majid.
In one scene our protagonist goes to the villain's lair — a beautiful, glass encased structure built to be a part of nature rather than something outside of it — and the villain, after learning that our protagonist has essentially disrupted his super genius plan, is like, "I should probably have you killed" and then just lets him go anyway. It's something of a bizarre scene, because Henry Parsons, our protagonist, doesn't really need to go to the villain's lair. He's invited under the pretense that the two are going to work together again to recreate a fearsome bioweapon. Except that Stark doesn't need the bioweapon — he has it already — and Parsons never had any plans to help Stark recreate it anyway. What then is the point of this little rendezvous for either man? Parsons gets the aforementioned incredible, otherwise literally unobtainable (because its made with vegetables that have gone extinct) bowl of soup out of it, but the whole thing plays out pretty much like this:
Parsons: Ha! You thought I was going to work with you? Instead I just disrupted your evil plan!
Stark: I don't need you anyway, but now I should probably have you killed because you rendered my new disease useless, but whatever, you can't stop what's coming next. Exit from the room containing my amazing juice bar, please.
That scene, and Stark's somewhat cartoonish villain, are the only clear misfires here, as everything else reads as though it were literally pulled from the headlines, and I'm not using literally the way many people use it today when they actually mean figuratively, but because many of the events Wright describes have actually happened at some point over the past nine months.
As for our protagonist, Henry Parsons, he's also a genius who's basically responsible for every good thing that happens here. He's the first to diagnose Kongoli as the seriously bad news that it is(view spoiler)[, he's also the one to come up with the vaccine for it — aboard a submarine with no lab equipment, no less — and he's the one to actually discover Kongoli's origin and exactly who's at fault — spoiler alert: we all are (hide spoiler)]. Think Anthony Fauci crossed with Christopher Hitchens crossed with Superman.
Despite its subject matter, I honestly wasn't expecting "The End of October" to be as dark as it is, and I have to give Lawrence Wright major kudos for that. It's written at times in a real spirit of nihilism, and far too few books these days are. Characters that you thought were like major characters who, in any other book, would make it through this thing unscathed,(view spoiler)[ because they're a family member of Henry's, say, (hide spoiler)] are instead not just knocked off, but killed offscreen. They're fine one moment, but by the time the book returns to that storyline, we learned they died weeks ago.
In some way, "The End of October" feels like a 600-page book that's been edited down to 380. There's a lot here that could have been included that just isn't. The book also leaves us with a few unanswered questions. Henry, for example, is an unapologetic atheist, but when his life is under serious threat, his thoughts drift to the fancy Quran that Prince Majid gave him at their parting and he finds himself wanting to pray. There is never any real followup to this. Is Henry questioning his atheism? Will he convert? We're left wondering.
Likewise, other characters disappear off the page for long sections. The book largely follows Henry, and if you're not with Henry, your screen time is seriously limited. I actually didn't mind that, because the events that Henry finds himself in interested me far more than, say, what his kids were up to, but you do wonder exactly how (view spoiler)[Henry's 12-year-old daughter, who couldn't even back the car out of the driveway without hitting a wall, managed to drive all the way from Atlanta to Tennessee without, we have to presume, incident. (hide spoiler)]
This is a spectacularly researched book. See the acknowledgments section in the back if you don't believe me. Wright appears to have spoken to just about every disease and international affairs expert he could find. But, in the end, it's an enthralling, very good book that consists of truly great parts. Some of these parts feel like they didn't fit naturally together but were forced together anyway.
There's an entire chapter here that's a flashback to a family trip Henry and his family took a year or so before the pandemic struck. They're in Idaho, very much off the beaten path, when one night two grizzly bears surround the tent the family is sleeping in. It's a poignant scene, a beautiful scene, with real heart. But much of the rest of the book feels like it lacks this same heart.
Nevertheless, "The End of October" should be read, whether there's a real pandemic on or not. It's a crucial warning to our age about the urgent threats we face in the form of disinformation, the rush to war and, most especially, climate change. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be any more prescient than it already has been....more
Sales of "Severance" have shot up in recent weeks as readers (some segment of them, anyway) have flocked to the genre of pandemic literature in an effSales of "Severance" have shot up in recent weeks as readers (some segment of them, anyway) have flocked to the genre of pandemic literature in an effort to further immerse themselves in current events. Or perhaps trick themselves into thinking that what they're currently experiencing is really just fiction.
I picked up "Severance" at the book megastore Powell's (it takes up an entire city block!) in Portland, Oregon late last year. That was back in the days when the word "corona" made people think of a Mexican beer, not a deadly virus that has the majority of the world on lockdown.
All of which to say, the virus had no impact on my desire to read this. In fact, I hadn't even known when I bought it that a pandemic featured in the plot. My interest instead was piqued because of the pink cover and the blurb from the New Yorker on the back stating that "Severance" was "the best work of fiction yet about the millennial condition." (Who wouldn't be intrigued by that?)
While I very much enjoyed that other pandemic novel, Station Eleven, I mentioned in my review last month that I ultimately felt it to be more of an airport novel than a work of capital "L" Literature (as I dubbed it).
But "Severance" is different. With great envy, I must confess that on her very first attempt, author Ling Ma looks to have written an unforgettable work of Literature. This is largely because, unlike "Station Eleven," the pandemic that wipes out the majority of the earth's population in "Severance" is something of an afterthought to the larger social issues at hand.
A novel about a disaster, man made or natural, is at the end of the day still a disaster novel. Like disaster movies, entries in this genre can be wildly entertaining, well written or directed, but they're rarely worthy of accolades because they're still functioning mostly as escapism.
I love "Independence Day" but it's not exactly going to win any Oscars outside of various technical categories. Ditto "Station Eleven," which is as well written as anything you'll read, with incredibly compelling characters, but it's not about anything that you and I are facing today (current pandemic notwithstanding).
Such novels, such movies, have to be about something bigger than just the end of the world.
Leave a comment if you feel differently, but I can't help but feel that that, then, is what distinguishes Capital "L" Literature from Airport Novels. Literature focuses on issues that you and I are experiencing today. That's why the only literature that can ever truly endure focuses on grandiose human themes and issues that remain relevant long after its first readers are dead and buried.
"Severance" then, is not about a pandemic, but about capitalism. Within that broad framework, Ling Ma tackles the workplace, globalization, inequality, consumerism, and immigration, among other things. And she does so brilliantly.
"Severance" is at once biting satire, akin in some ways to "The Office", and a cathartic takedown of consumerist culture. Brand names are tossed about with wild abandon.
Shiseido facial exfoliants. Blue Bottle coffee. Uniqlo Cashmere.
Jos. A. Bank suits. Salvatore Ferragamo wing tips. Eddie Bauer fleece jackets.
Louis Vuitton suitcases. Talbots dresses. Burberry trench coats.
And the list goes on.
Working that job you hate, biting your tongue when your colleagues make a cutting remark, failing to report a superior who harasses you.
You do it all in order to get that stuff. To hopefully be able to one day afford that silver Jaguar XJ, the Coach satchel.
The pandemic exists only as a backdrop to our greater societal and economic woes, it exists to contrast the mundanity of office life, of the factory mentality that sees you clock in and clock out each day and feed progress reports to your superiors, with a virus (fungal spores, not avian flu) that leaves the "fevered" not so much incapacitated as stuck in a loop performing banal and mundane tasks of every day life.
In the context of the disease, these tasks look empty, they feel pointless. But these tasks, the hamster wheel we run to succeed in the professional world, have always been empty and pointless. It's only when we see them performed by the "fevered" that they become obviously so.
The disease shows the modern day runaround for what it's always been — the province of the soulless.
Author Ling Ma is a Chinese American and her protagonist, Candace Chen, is likewise Chinese American. Candace was whisked from China to Salt Lake City when she was a young girl and after so many years of being in the US feels, as do so many immigrants, and so many millennials generally, as though she doesn't fit into either place, doesn't fit anywhere.
The notion of place, of community, has always been central to an understanding of one's identity. But what if you don't have a place? What then?
All you're left with are your memories. Your memories are what you cling to for some clue as to who you are when you don't know where home is.
It's only fitting then that Shen Fever (so called because it originated in the Chinese city of Shenzhen) is "a disease of remembering." The fevered, we are told, "are trapped indefinitely in their memories."
"What is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories play, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop."
Why are some characters fevered and others aren't? Because they can't forget the past, but are drawn to it. We all remember — it's what we do when we're faced with our memories that matters.
Reading "Severance" while locked in at the house because of our own real world pandemic is a particularly rich experience. I've realized over the past few weeks that Candace Chen's thoughts resonate deeply.
"The problem with the modern world condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money."
This novel speaks to what ails us today. It gets to the heart of the disease in our societies. But what afflicts us didn't originate in the natural world — it's entirely man made....more
If you haven't listened to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast, do yourself a favor and download it now.
I first heard of Dan Carlin thanks to an If you haven't listened to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast, do yourself a favor and download it now.
I first heard of Dan Carlin thanks to an interview the author Sam Harris gave to The Guardian back in 2015. Harris mentioned Carlin's podcast and before long I'd downloaded all 50+ episodes and was instantly hooked. The only problem is that Carlin, who releases long-form podcasts that often exceed four hours, only produces one to two podcasts a year, so the wait time is real.
I particularly recommend Carlin's podcast on the First World War called Blueprint for Armageddon as well as his series on the rise of Genghis Khan's mongols called Wrath of the Khans.
The reason I mention the podcast here is that Carlin has essentially gone and written a book, his first, that is more or less a "Greatest Hits" of his podcast series. That doesn't mean the book isn't good, it is, but when you're used to a series that takes on a specific subject in six 4+ hour episodes, a 288-page book that jumps through various historical events isn't going to feel like much more than an overview.
So there it is. If you want a great introduction to Dan Carlin, this is it. I predict you'll like it and end up wanting more ... or you could just jump right into the podcast.
While Carlin claims endlessly that he's "not a historian", he certainly does make history fun!...more
"Attention!" This is exactly the kind of book the world needs right now, perhaps more relevant today than it was upon its publication in 1962.
Looking"Attention!" This is exactly the kind of book the world needs right now, perhaps more relevant today than it was upon its publication in 1962.
Looking out the window, at the smoke-filled skies, the streets full of protesters, the degradation of social and democratic norms, one can't help but feel we're on a precipice of sorts. Every day seems to bring with it more horrors than the last. Who can help but look ahead and grimace at the thought of what is still to come?
Imagine that last year at this time you got a glimpse into the world of today, a view onto the marches and the masks, at the division tearing at us all. It would be horrifying, to say the least. It's perhaps even more horrifying that today, we're almost used to it. We've become exhausted by it all, desensitized. We can't move but are paralyzed and rubbed so raw by the actions taking place all around us that we can only sprawl, exhausted and immobile, at the damage being done.
I saw a gif the other day of a woman stepping out of her house only to see government buildings exploding in front of her in a scene out of the 1996 film "Independence Day." She nonchalantly waves it off and goes back inside.
You'll see a lot of criticism of "Island" based on the fact that many believe it to not be a "novel" at all. But how would they know? What is a novel, anyway? Is Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Quartet" novels? Is Karl Ove Knausgaard's largely autobiographical "My Struggle" series novels?
The concept of the novel has been evolving as long as the novel itself has existed. You can find valid arguments that the works of Homer really aren't novels, that Cervantes' "Don Quixote" isn't a novel, and so on.
Is "Island" really a philosophical treatise masquerading as a novel? So what if it is? What is a "novel" if not something needing to be said packaged as something else? I don't think "Island" should be judged harshly on that account. Rather, the general definition of a novel is that of an at least vaguely fictional premise and/or fictional characters. By that standard, "Island" more than fits.
Throw in the fact that "Island" is as captivating as anything you might find on the "Fiction" shelf at your local bookstore, and I'd say that "Island" is a successful "novel," all the more so because it leaves you changed, or at least gives you something to think about.
Here, Aldous Huxley imagines a utopian society and the threat that encroachment from the outside world presents to it. To my mind, Huxley diagnoses what ills modern society perfectly. Largely, materialism and dogmatism, particularly as it concerns religion.
There are so many absolutely brilliant exchanges throughout the book, but one of my favorites comes in the form of children in a field who are controlling scarecrows in an effort to protect the land. The scarecrows have all been created in the likenesses of various deities.
Will Farnaby, our shipwrecked capitalist who's washed ashore on this strange utopian landscape asks his hosts what the purpose of such a display is.
We "wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.”
In another exchange, corporal punishment is criticized as destroying children's creativity.
“Major premise: God is wholly other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children’s bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the fall: whip, whip, whip!"
In short, "A people’s theology reflects the state of its children’s bottoms.”
I could quote this book all day, there is so very much to take away. But perhaps nothing more so than that which is repeated ad infinitum by Pala's mynah birds.
"Attention! Attention! Here and now, boys!"
It may be that, right now, we're on the precipice of something great, or something horrible. It may be that, years from now, we'll have the ability to look back and say that we had already tipped over the edge of that precipice and that today, September 25, 2020, we were already falling fast down the other side.
Regardless of which side of the divide we may be on, looking ahead or looking back is futile.
The only thing we can do is take action and pay attention to the here and now....more