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Book List: Social Distance at the End of the World

We’re getting a little stir-crazy at home, already. School, initially intended to be closed through April 13 due to the coronavirus outbreak, will now be closed til May 1, and frankly, I’m not sure the three of us are going to make it. There are a lot of jokes out there about introverts finally getting the alone time they need, but even my daughter, who can happily disappear for hours under blankets, texting her friends, watching videos, and reading in various formats, is upset about missing school.  There are, I think, very few people who don’t ever want any other people around. It must be something that catches writers’ imagination, though, because there are many stories and books out there about a single individual, or maybe a small group, left alone after the end of the world as we know it.  I’ve seen a bunch of lists for books about pandemics or their aftermath that suggest the same books more than once (The Last Man by Mary Shelley, Station Eleven by Emily St. James Mandel, The Stand by Stephen King, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe,  The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, to name a few). These are not so much books about pandemics as they are about isolation (or escape from) others, and I’m going to try and offer a few you might not have found on other lists.


1984 by George Orwell. The only thing that’s more disturbing than the way the members of society are set up against each other in this book is that things were about a million times more poisonous in the Soviet Union.  No one can trust anyone else; it’s social distancing as a lifestyle. I recently read the middle-school novel The Story That Cannot Be Told, by J. Kasper Kramer, which, while not entirely historically accurate, described the paranoia involved in just living daily life in Romania before Ceausescu was overthrown, which turned families, even parents and children who loved each other, against themselves in a way you don’t really see in 1984 as Winston is alienated from everyone around him and has no family.

Allison Hewitt Is Trapped by Madeline Roux. This is Roux’s first book, from before she switched to YA fiction, and it starts with bookstore employee Allison Hewitt, trapped in the break room at the bookstore with her coworkers after zombies take over. blogging her story. Thank goodness for the escapism of the Internet, right? This novel actually started as an experiment in fiction, with the entries actually published as a blog, when the publisher noticed and offered Roux a contract.

The Decameron by Giovanni Bocaccio. Seven young women and three young men are escaping the plague of 1348 together in a house outside Florence, Italy. Over the course of 10 days, each individual tells 10 stories, for a total of 100 stories, some tragic, some comic, some erotic. There are worse ways to spend your time when you’re keeping your distance from potentially deadly disease. Bocaccacio wrote for the common man, which in his time meant he wrote in Italian instead of Latin. There are translations out there that will make it easier on you that the version you can download for free, if you want to check it out.

Hollow Kingdom: A Novel by Kira Jane Buxton takes on the point of view of an intelligent animal, one who doesn’t really fit in anywhere: S.T., a tame crow.  Something has happened to his human, and maybe all the humans; they seem ill, are disintegrating, and have developed a taste for raw meat.  The animals, without opposable thumbs, are mostly trapped inside their owners’ houses. It’s kind of like The Secret Life of Pets with a lot less cutesy animation and a lot more unattached body parts, violence, foul language, and junk food.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. This book was awarded Vampire Novel of the Century by the Horror Writers Association in 2012. and shows the damage people take when they are really, truly, distanced from each other.

Kingdom of Needle and Bone by Mira Grant. Dr. Isabella Gauley’s niece was the index case for  Morris’ disease, which appears to be measles at first, but eventually compromises the infected person’s immune system. The only way to keep people from getting infected is for them to go into a permanent quarantine before they get the disease. Based on the content of this novella, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mira Grant has strong opinions about vaccination and affordable healthcare.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. There’s so much back and forth of humans and Martians trying to connect, distance themselves, or both, in this book, but the standout story on social distancing (although not the best story in the book) is “The Silent Towns”, in which a man who believes he is the last man on Mars after the colonists have abandoned it, discovers there is also a woman on Mars… but upon meeting her, decides he’d rather live alone.

 

It’s a bummer that the library is closed, but you can probably find these as ebooks through Overdrive, Libby, or Hoopla in the library’s digital collections. If not, you can always consider buying them! If you click on the image, it should take you to Amazon and, if you order from there, the site might actually make some money! Enjoy!

 

 

Posted on March 21, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

Arcade Publishing, 2018 (English-language translation copyright), originally published by Changbi Publishers, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1628727814

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

 

City of Ash and Red has obvious similarities to the work of Franz Kafka, although it’s more brutal, violent, and stomach-turning Anonymous protagonists and locations, endless bueraucracy, mazes leading nowhere, characters seized by authority for unclear reasons, indifferent or servile characters… all of these can be found in

Kafka’s work.  However, Hye-Young Pyun’s novel personalizes her nameless protagonist, known only as “the man”, and sets him down in an apocalyptic society filled with disease, fear, garbage, brutality, and indifference. However, while this could be an issue of translation (this is not to criticize the translator, she certainly had a difficult job), City of Ash and Red lacks Kafka’s absurdism, instead using elements of his work to create an unrelenting, nightmarish situation. I have not read the author’s other work, or Korean fiction in general, in the past, so I can’t say whether this is either representative of Joon’s work or common in Korean fiction. Knowledge of Korean culture and language would almost certainly be helpful, as I’m sure her work is influenced by other Korean writers.

The protagonist has been transferred to an overseas branch of the pesticide company he works for, due to his proficiency at killing rats, in a country known only as “Country C.” (the irony of her protagonist being a vermin-killer surely is a response to Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”) An epidemic is traveling through Country C, leaving the city in chaos, filled with trash, and sprayed regularly with clouds of toxic pesticide. On arrival, the man is quarantined due to his having a fever, then released, but when notified of this, the person responsible for his incomprehensible transfer puts him on a 10 day leave to make sure he has recovered. His suitcase stolen, the man is trapped in his apartment when his entire building is quarantined. Alienated from his coworkers, divorced from his ex-wife, and friendless, he is unable to contact or communicate with anyone in his home country to alert them to his situation, and with his cell phone missing, he has no contact information for Mol, the contact at his new place of employment. When he does finally get through to someone, he is unpleasantly surprised to learn that his ex-wife and dog were found murdered in his apartment. Afraid he will be arrested, he escapes his apartment building and becomes a homeless vagrant, with rat-killing his only useful skill, unable to contact anyone from the company he works for due to the bureaucracy it takes to get an appointment and the new procedures in place to protect people from infection. With his limited knowledge of the language, the people around him are incomprehensible, the trash-filled streets are a a maze, and a fear of infection is ever-present. The trash becomes such a problem that spraying it is not enough to control the rats, so the city starts burning the trash, leaving the ruined city covered in grey ash and red flames (in an interview, Pyun indicated that this is where the book’s title came from). It becomes impossible to tell whether what is going on in his mind is reality, paranoia, or both.

The man’s skill at rat-killing gets him recruited as an exterminator and offers him a little more stability and protection, but as a paranoid, violent, and alienated individual, it’s not clear that this is a good thing. His continued attempts to communicate with anyone through public telephones are failures (interestingly, the word for public telephones in Korean can also be read as “midair”, a nuance that is lost in translation) and as the people of the city adapt to their new reality, he adopts the name Mol (a Chinese character that means “to disappear”, another nuance lost in translation), finally resigning himself to a daily life of futility, loneliness, and meaninglessness, running in circles or hiding in the shadows, like a rat.

It’s to her credit that Hye-Young Pyun is actually able to make her protagonist at all sympathetic, mostly through flashbacks that document his unfair treatment by his coworkers and distance from his wife, and the frustrations and fears that readers themselves may have of such things as being seized by the government, abandoned in an unfamiliar location, robbed, and deprived of the ability to communicate. While it may be unclear as to whether the protagonist killed his ex-wife, it is clearly stated that he raped her and put her in an abusive situation, and he is responsible for the brutal death of at least one other person in addition to the gory details of his rat-killing. Thankfully, Pyun chose to write as a distant, third-person narrator instead of from the protagonist’s point of view. As someone with a particular revulsion to rats (thanks to George Orwell’s terrifying rat scene in 1984) this made the book really difficult for me to finish.

City of Ash and Red goes far beyond Kafka’s existentialist dystopias, and pulls the reader into a more horrific and gruesome arena. Despite his namelessness, I just can’t interpret the protagonist an “everyman”, unless the author’s point is that regardless of what we think of ourselves, we all are terrible people, each of us both victims and victimized, and lost to each other (I refuse to be that pessimistic). If you’re looking for a fast-paced, action-packed narrative, you will want to look elsewhere, but while I disliked the main character and what he represented, Pyun is a talented and effective writer whose vivid descriptions create a compelling, if terrible, world, and for those who have a strong stomach and a liking for dystopian fiction, this is a book you won’t want to miss. Recommended.

Contains: rape, murder, violence, gore, burning people alive, animal killing

 

Editor’s note: For a little more information on Hye-Young Pyun, click here.

 

 

Posted on April 30, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: “We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia” : Future-Proofing The News

         

 

The Monster Kid tells me he is writing a dystopian alternate history, beginning in 2012, where there is perpetual war.  “You know, like in the book where we have always been at war with Eastasia but then they change the news.”

In case you aren’t familiar with it, this is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, in which the main character works in the “Ministry of Truth,” destroying or rewriting past news that doesn’t reflect the current reality the government wants people to buy into (in this case, an ongoing war with Eurasia ends and a new one with Eastasia begins, and history has to be rewritten to erase the war with Eurasia). Creepy, but in a fictional way, right?

Reality is so much worse. In M.T. Anderson’s YA biography of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, Anderson has to return to the reader again and again, to explain that there is no good way to untangle the contradictions in the stories about Shostakovich’s life, even the ones he told himself, because of the contortions the truth had to go through to be acceptable to the Stalinist regime and prevent him from suffering a truly horrific ending. Reading this, I realized that 1984 is a pale shadow of the reality of repression and brutality under the Soviet regime and its effects on the arts, literature, and the press, especially under Stalin (and that doesn’t even begin to cover the horrors of the siege of Leningrad). I can’t recommend this book highly enough– it’s an outstanding, if horrific, book for both older teens and adults.

In The Infernal Library, Daniel Kalder asserts that dictators have not only repressed the press and the arts,  in some places they even managed to completely erase history. Many of the little provinces and countries that were drawn in to the U.S.S.R. at the beginning of the 20th century had a limited number of literate people, and when the U.S.S.R. dissolved, the president of Turkmenistan completely invented a history and religion for his country, complete with his own cult of personality, and with no press and few additional books available for comparison (I don’t recommend this one for purchase, but the chapters on dictator literature from some of the lesser-known dictators are fascinating, so see if your library has it. Did you know Saddam Hussein wrote romance novels?)

So how can we keep this erasure and rewriting of history from happening, especially in our era of  “fake news”? Honestly, it’s pretty hard to do. History usually gets written by the winners, and, just like in 1984, it’s not that difficult to destroy and rewrite the version you want, or to make it impossible to report on anything that could make you look bad.  In Future-Proofing the News: Preserving the First Draft of History, Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul report that even when nobody is deliberately trying to prevent the news from being accurately reported, time and environmental conditions can destroy it.  Many of the formats news has been recorded were ephemeral or are now obsolete. Newspapers and magnetic tapes get brittle, hyperlinks break, devices used to record and play back break down. And there is such a quantity of news that many places are unable to store it or make it accessible. Just as a concerted effort needs to be made to repress the press, concerted efforts need to be made to save the news of the past for the present and future. If you are a historian, journalist, archivist, librarian, or otherwise interested citizen, this is worth reading.

We can’t guarantee that primary sources will always be accurate in their reporting. Both in the past and present there have been a multiplicity of sources and points of view, although I’d say that’s truer today than ever before. But sometimes there is only fear shaping the reported facts, as was the case under Stalin, or there is nothing there at all, as in Turkmenistan, and that is terrifying. The free press is not an enemy: it is essential to keeping civic discourse, the arts and literature, and democracy, alive. When you vote tomorrow, keep that in mind.

 

And please, do vote. Regardless of what you think, your vote matters.

 

Posted on November 6, 2018 by , Reply