Quarantine Books - Part 1

Ahhh books.

Well well well, dear readers. Looks like we’ve got a fair bit of time on our [perfectly washed] hands.

I keep picturing myself as this beautiful Pre-Raphelite reader, basking in the just-warm-enough rays of the Italian afternoon. I thumb through hand-printed pages of poetry, lazily eat a grape or two. I retire to a supper of hand-made gnocchi and make love with someone named Francesco beneath a fig tree:

©Saint Barbara, Maria Spartali Stillman  

But the truth is?
It's Day 5 on Quarantine and I look like Gollum.
And you know what? SO DO YOU:

Mmmm toilet paper my preciousssss...

We'll get through this.
Just please: remember to shower.

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As I put together this special “Corona Virus Quarantine Series” of book lists, I faced one enormous question:

     What exactly makes a “good” coronavirus quarantine read?

Do we lean into the terror and devour all knowledge of it?
Do we escape?
Do we utilize the time to learn new things?
Do we remind ourselves of what matters the most?

…Or do we need a comprehensive sampling of all of the above, to suit and meet and match our inevitable moment-by-moment changing needs in this most uncertain of times?

The short answer: yes.

So each book list post shall focus on a Quaran-theme (if you will), and today we begin with [THUNDERCLAP!] ...*THE END OF THE WORLD.*

I know I know. It’s been a heckuva news cycle.
Death and destruction. Pandemic. Catastrophe.
How did this happen? How will we endure?

I’m not one to ignore the profundity (and believe me, I am and shall not, particularly in future posts) but sometimes we just need to do a deep dive into the hyper-obsessive, we need to pour gasoline onto the flames of our anxieties, we need to arm ourselves with WAY too much information. And something about this over-indulgence feels good—like binge drinking at a high school reunion until you blackout, good. Ya know— not entirely good. But heck: it’s a start.

So: if you want to read more about pandemics and the end of the world? Here you go. A few of these are classics in the literature of pestilence and pandemic (there is such a sub-genre! Now is the time to carpe that di[sease]em!), and a few are recent offerings that brilliantly tap into current global situations. (And look: I couldn’t cover everything. For instance, one of the earliest descriptions of a plague comes from History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. where a plague devastates Athens in the 5th century BCE.)

The books I’ve selected use the mode of storytelling to think about the human condition in times of illness, (and of course, about the human condition in general). Illness in the following works often also represents any kind of extremity that truly forces humanity to consider the fundamental conditions of society. As a person with a chronic illness (I have an auto-immune disease that makes me immune-compromised and thus extremely vulnerable during times of global pandemic), I have long appreciated the concept that just as rest (Sabbath) is so much more than the absence of toil, so too is True Health so much more than the absence of disease.


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IMPORTANT PSA:
In all times, but particularly in these times of extraordinary economic struggle for all, I strongly advise you philanthropic and socially-minded readers to support your local communities by purchasing your books locally from local bookstores—many of whom are happy to or ship books to your door, or drop them off personally, at least six feet away from your face.

Buying at local stores keeps money in the local community, supports independent enterprises and also reduces your carbon footprint!

There are a number of sites that make it easier to find and support local independent bookstores in your area.

Chief among them:

• IndieBound.org: Find bookstores and other independent retailers near you. (Says Indiebound: “Spend $100 at a local and $68 of that stays in your community. Spend the same $100 at a national chain, and your community only sees $43.”)

Other book resources:
• WorldCat.org: Search for a book title at your local library!

(Right now, it is very helpful to make financial donations to local libraries for those who cannot afford to purchase new or used books, and I strongly encourage you to sign up for the library’s downloadable books programs to avoid unnecessary public outings.)

• Bookshare provides accessible books and periodicals for readers with print disabilities. Everyone, of every ability, deserves the gift of reading!

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1. Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel
 
    As the New York Times Book Review put it,

    “Station Eleven offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.”

Once you’ve read Station Eleven, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it. Especially now.

The gritty and glorious 2014 novel jumps back and forth between the first days of a global pandemic that ends all of civilization and the painstaking aftermath. Small faction-groups of survivors attempt to rebuild any kind of life in the post-apocalyptic world. One band of characters forms a ramshackle Shakespeare troupe that travels the backwaters of Canada, performing the classic plays in exchange for basic necessities.

The real drama of the novel doesn’t come from where you’d expect. Not from violence, or fight-to-the-death battles for survival, but from the protagonists’ individual, private and absolutely ceaseless reckoning with just how much they have lost.

What happens after a pandemic decimates the population and reshapes civilization as we know it?
    “Survival is insufficient,” they keep muttering to one another, even as that very survival is far from certain.

It all feels terrifyingly… present. Relevant. Conceivable.



2. “The Killing Game” by Eugene Ionesco

from the 2005 production at RCS

A town, somewhere, is hit by a mysterious plague. It is contagious, utterly deadly, and final. In 22 scenes, we see unrelated citizens of this anonymous town react to the plague in a variety of ways (and genres) from the dramatic, comedic, to the utterly absurd.

Born in Romania in 1909 and raised in France, throughout his life, Ionesco saw the people of his Europe arbitrarily slaughtered in two world-wars, abandoning their ancient religions in droves, and living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. They were the victims of the most absurd disease of all: their own society.

Written in Paris in and around 1968, the entire world at large was in a constant state of turmoil and revolt. To this maelstrom of clashing mobs of humanity, Ionesco offered a ridiculous reply.

This play is about death: how each of us will face it for ourselves.
Do we gracefully surrender to the inevitable end,
     or do we fight until our bodies collapse beneath us?
Who will bury us?
Who will inherit?
Who will weep for us?
Who won’t?

It is also about loss: how we face the death of our friends, our family, our lovers; parents losing children, husbands losing wives; losing control of our daily life, our food, our water; losing the sense of our responsibilities and our place in the universe.

Finally, it is about society: does it really have the power to save us from the scourge, or is it in itself the secret cause of our disease?

The allegory of a town seized by plague, and ultimately destroyed despite the best efforts of the council and the populace has clear connections to the world we know. One need only consider the unavoidable headlines that assault our senses daily.

Reflecting on our own predicament, the absurd behavior of Ionesco’s fictional townspeople becomes hauntingly recognizable.

I did this play at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2005, directed by the late-great Adrienne Howells. it was my final performance as a student, perhaps my favorite student project, and needless to say, right now? I cannot stop thinking about it.


3.  The Plague, by Albert Camus.

We may all be feeling a need for some existentialism in our lives, so on to Camus.

Albert Camus’s The Plague probably remains the most famous (infamous?) novel on the topic of epidemic disease and is considered an existentialist classic (despite Camus' objection to the label)


The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by French-Algerian philosopher and author Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks several questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

The novel is believed to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran's population in 1849 following French colonization and is concerned primarily with the litany of details related to how quarantines are (and are not) enforced, and the role of both government and individuals joining together to (however haphazardly) control the epidemic.

The narrative voice directly points at the human reaction towards the "absurd,” and The Plague famously represents how the world deals with the general philosophical notion of the Absurd, a theory that Camus himself helped (particularly in this offering), to define for the world at large.

4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Lorca

Come on: CHOLERA is right there in the title. But you know what? So is love you guys! Love wrought by sightly reprehensible, deliciously complicated characters driven by their obsessions with their own passions, feelings, and needs, fueled by the heat of the South American suns. I'm in.

Ask someone for literature about pandemics, and Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the first books that pops to mind. But yes, si, of course, and in fact, this book is about far more than just a rampant cholera epidemic. It’s about love, relationships, destructive passion and the catastrophic actions those emotions inspire, all that span decades.

The term cholera as it is used in Spanish (the book’s original language of course), is cólera, and can also denote passion or human rage and ire in its feminine form. (The English adjective choleric has the same meaning and comes from this source).

Considering this meaning, the title is a pun: cholera as the epidemic disease, yes, but also cholera as passion, which raises the central question of the book: is love helped or hindered by extreme passion? And, above all is love… the actual disease?




Lastly, and perhaps most crucially:




 
5. Severance, by Ling Ma

I’m pretty sure everyone is currently suggesting this contemporary classic that came out in 2018, and today, has emerged to be a kind of “told you so” time machine think-piece in scathing, glittering, novel form.

In Severance, the world is hit by a pandemic that ends civilization called “the Shen fever,” believed to have originated in Shenzen, China, the center of electronics manufacturing, and then spread through tiny fungal spores across the globe.

Our narrator is millennial Candace Chen, who works in publishing in New York City, overseeing (creepily, discordantly) the Bibles division. Candace is smart, witty, caustic, and before the end-of-the-world, hesitant and unassertive. But somehow, Candace becomes one of the last remaining humans in all of Manhattan, and we see our reticent, millennial narrator become our unflinching heroine before our very eyes as she flees into the now-wilds of America in a New York City yellow cab.

As Alison Willmore, a film critic at Vulture, wrote:

    “We should all be reading Ling Ma’s Severance… because its heroine’s survival seems to depend on her resistance to nostalgia.”

Severance is a haunting rage-letter about the toxic intersection of global capitalism and immigration in contemporary super-cities. A must-read for always, a should-read for dooms-today.