separation Wasn’t so lucky.
I’m not talking about the iconic Apple TV series. I’m talking about my fellow Chicagoan Ling Ma’s debut novel, which not only predates the show but also deserves mainstream attention.
As it happens, two severance Share more than just a name. Both deal with memory as their main subject. While The Adam Scott Show grapples with the unrealistic scenario of splitting one’s consciousness between “innie” at the office and “outie” at home, Ma’s 2018 novel is a clever reimagining of the zombie apocalypse through the lens of millennial burnout.
separation Follows Candice Chen, a Manhattan-based book printing coordinator who is so self-quarantined in the mundanity of her office life that she barely realizes that a global pandemic called Chen Fever is ravaging the world. Shane fever is like an infection the last of usIn this it arises as a fungal disease. However, Shen Fever does not turn people into fiery mushroom zombies. It behaves like the zombie-ant fungus, trapping its victims in a memory-induced trance where they compulsively perform tasks like brushing their teeth and washing clothes until their bodies decompose.
The novel alternates between Candice’s normal pre-apocalypse life and her grim post-apocalypse existence with a troupe of “immune” survivors trekking to a facility that is rumored to cure her. Naturally, the journey ahead is filled with difficulties just like his old life. Chief among them are infighting with his hierarchical quasi-religious group, deadly encounters with “fever” on a supply run, and the constant threat of being one daydream away from becoming one of them.
Personally, I owe it a lot separation To be one of the two books that rekindled my passion for reading novels in 2023. In my letterbox-coded Goodreads reviewI described mother’s wisdom, Satirical prose as “very experienced”. Honestly, that’s an understatement. Wandering through a bookstore and finding a book felt like a different kind of magic in itself. And when I opened it out of curiosity, I stood no chance. Ma’s writing is sharp, sarcastic, and genuinely funny, yet a light weight of sadness is evident from the first page.
a reason i fell in love separation Am I totally on board with Candace’s hellscape. I was in the middle of my own period of isolation after being laid off from my first salaried writing job since the pandemic. Apparently, Mom and I are kindred spirits on that front: According to The New Yorker, she wrote separation Living on severance pay himself after being fired from his job. Kudos to them for sticking to their title, even though The Ben Stiller Show is now dominating Google searches.
Another reason the novel appealed to me was that it depicted the mundanity of Candice’s life before and after the end of the world. whoever has read separation You will immediately realize how strange it felt to read this after the pandemic. Speaking to PBS, Ma acknowledged that people like me would have had a wonderful experience reading separation, Toiling away at our menial tasks, working from home, panicked by every news update on the pandemic, only for our faces to go the way of Stonehenge. it was almost the same simpsons-A foreshadowing of what life will be like during COVID, how it captured the strange mix of nostalgia, denial, and anticlimax that settled across the world when we realized the trap of everyday capitalism wasn’t all that different from a zombie apocalypse.
It doesn’t even hurt that I picked up separation Just after finishing another excellent sci-fi novel about memory: Yoko Ogawa’s memory police.
Ogawa’s 1994 novel is good in its own right. Its horrifying story goes something like this Claire Obscure: Campaign 33 is associated with chainsaw manray bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451and George Orwell’s 1984. It takes place on an island where people cannot remember the names of objects like birds or roses when they wake up. Every day, its citizens are tasked with destroying those items by burning them in a pyre or throwing them into the river and going about their merry, ignorant ways. While most people are comfortable accepting their dystopian lifestyle, “immune” people, like the book’s unnamed protagonist, live in fear of being arrested by the Memory Police and disappearing.
Reading memory police And separation Back-to-back was the literary equivalent of the time I, in my infinite wisdom, double-featured Celine Songs past life and park chan-wook decision to leave On my flight to and from San Diego (don’t do this unless you want to be very sad). They complement each other very well as sci-fi novels, and I’ve been chasing the pinnacle of that experience ever since.
While the existence of Apple TV separation While it’s almost impossible to hope for a Hollywood adaptation of Ma’s first film, I’m completely okay with it never being made. After all, books are not made legitimate because they are adapted. Plus, the fact that they share a name means I can keep going “um, actually” – the people who keep bugging me by recommending Ma’s book to finally watch the show. However, it doesn’t hurt to know how to keep it as a buck memory police There is a film adaptation of the works starring Lily Gladstone.
So if you need a pair of sci-fi books that play with romance, nostalgia, and the dystopian and authoritarian power of memory, I highly recommend giving this a try. separation And memory police Read one.
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