Severance by Ling Ma is a contemporary post-apocalyptic satire and her debut novel. I borrowed the audiobook version from my library, which is narrated by Nancy Wu.
I read this as part of my video game music orchestra’s book club!
Originally published in 2018 and set in 2011 New York City, the book features a global outbreak of a fungal infection that causes those who contract it to become trapped in repetitive, mundane acts of daily life. They are known as The Fevered.
Our point of view character, Candace, is a first-generation American, both of her parents are deceased prior to the start of the novel, and her mother recently passed after suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s.
I appreciated this was satire about our automated age, focusing on memory, nostalgia, and routine. The book also is flashback-heavy, another great way to talk about how some people get lost in the past too much, or about how the past can be painful. Nostalgia can definitely be seen as a disease in some cases.
Another way to look at memories and how we share them, there’s also a reference to 1,001 Nights and I liked how the structure of the book somewhat reflected even more parallels.
Though the author was very prescient and some things she wrote about did actually happen during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m very glad that some of the things she wrote did NOT.
The end is very open-ended, and everyone in the book club agreed that it was the weakest part of the whole book. It would be a great ending for a visual medium, like a movie or a tv series, but as a novel we wanted more from it.
That being said, I inhaled this in one day and I probably would have given it 4.5 stars if the ending was stronger.
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