For many months it’s been predicted, its arrival declared inevitable. The experts have been consulted, and the think pieces have urged us to prepare ourselves. You can sneer or avoid it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but it won’t go away. No amount of cynicism will deter its spread. In March 2020, the New York Times told us it was only a matter of time, and now the wait is over: the first wave of pandemic fiction is upon us.
“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” then-president Donald Trump tweeted just days into the first work-from-home mandates. It was a statement outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and the talking heads went wild. Saying the unsayable is not the job of political leaders; it is, however, the province of great fiction. There is a reason world-historical ruptures, like the one collectively experienced in the spring of 2020, tend to produce big, ambitious books. Already the pandemic has crept into some novels (Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, and Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends), but as a fact of the world rather than a moral and intellectual crisis to be reckoned with. The task of the great pandemic novel, if such a thing were to exist, might be to start metabolizing the unprecedented disruptions caused by the COVID-19 response: the ideas internalized, vocabularies assimilated, risks assumed, sacrifices made. That is the feat Hanya Yanagihara has attempted with To Paradise—a quick turnaround for a 720-page book, which is perhaps why it only decides to be the first great pandemic novel halfway through.
As newspapers were lamenting the labour frittered away on crossword puzzles, they also had cross words to say about another form of cryptic writing and time-consuming interpretation: modernist literature. With Nottingham Zoo barely recovered from the alphabetic siege, a journalist for the Aberdeen Press and Journal remarked, in a review published on November 8, 1926 about Gertrude Stein’s “The Fifteenth of November”: “Cross-word puzzles are like eating toffee to this stuff”.Stein’s story, glossed as “a portrait of T. S. Eliot”, reads, through squinted eyes, like someone shuttling over the rows and columns of a weekly crossword’s clues: “In this case a description. Forward and back weekly. In this case absolutely a question in question. Furnished as meaning supplied.” Another humorous critic writing for the Daily Mirror on “Rhymes to Cure the Cold”, that is, on literature as medicine — Longfellow, for instance, gets prescribed to insomniacs — disagrees with the toffee analogy: “Much more modern [medically] and infinitely more powerful in its effects is Gertrude Stein. Up to date disease like cross-word mania can be banished in one dose.”
The Riemann hypothesis and the subconvexity problem are important because prime numbers are the most fundamental — and most fundamentally mysterious — objects in mathematics. When you plot them on the number line, there appears to be no pattern to how they’re distributed. But in 1859 Riemann devised an object called the Riemann zeta function — a kind of infinite sum — which fueled a revolutionary approach that, if proved to work, would unlock the primes’ hidden structure.
“It proves a result that a few years ago would have been regarded as science fiction,” said Valentin Blomer of the University of Bonn.
At the start of Gunnhild Øyehaug's Present Tense Machine, a mother misreads the word trädgård — Norwegian for garden — as tärdgård, a nonsensical word, as her young daughter plays nearby. The mistake triggers the expulsion of the child from her life.
Thus the allegory of The Fall becomes a linguistic accident, rather than a hubristic quest for knowledge. From this irrevocable error, the mother's world is spliced into two parallel universes — rendering her invisible and forgotten to her daughter and vice-versa.
In Concrete, the recent novel by French Oulipian Anne Garréta, is an absurdist psychosexual satire about how a father’s dangerous mania for mixing concrete in the name of nonstop “muddernizing” — i.e., building, tinkering, fixing — embroils and threatens his wife and two daughters. Garréta’s novel is a charming tour de force of childhood adventure, positing fanciful tomboy spunk and punning humor as an antidote to deadening fixity and daddy fixations. Deftly balancing the literal and the imaginative, Emma Ramadan’s splendid translation from the French is funny, beguiling, and mysterious from first to last.
This is a book that doesn’t afford easy succor or any particular comfort at all. In Nakamura’s universe we are all damned, not by our sins so much (although those, as well) as by our ignorance. Who are we? What are we doing here? The answers to those questions are unavailable to us, but it doesn’t matter anyway. “Turn this page, and you may give up your life,” indeed.
“I don’t know if I was enjoying myself or just in a continual state of curiosity,” says Meg in Snakebite, one of 10 short stories in 25-year-old British author Saba Sams’s exceptional debut collection. Sams joins the ranks of writers such as Megan Nolan and Frances Leviston with these acute portraits of the fragile intimacies and euphoric moments snatched by a generation of women coming of age into a precarious future.
If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.