Whether you are now consumed by everything plague-related or are looking for a way of escaping the constant pandemic talk, there is a book out there for you. With three more weeks of lockdown ahead of us, grabbing a book off the shelf might just be your only way of visiting places more than two km from your house.
While there are plenty of brilliant books that you could read, only some are capable of satiating your need for more apocalyptic scenes or escapes from the world of coronavirus. In the second part of our new series, The University Times is asking Trinity’s English professors for their perfect read during this strange time.
Dr Sam Slote
I suppose I’m contractually obligated to mention Joyce’s Ulysses, which has been getting some attention as a big book to immerse oneself in during quarantine. On March 24th, Stephen King tweeted what is now my favourite summary of the novel: “Well, I finally got around to ULYSSES, the James Joyce joint. I understand it better than I expected, but I have to say it’s really fucking Irish.” More seriously, Ulysses offers precise observations about the range of human emotions rendered through a variety of styles (some of which exhibit the kinds of complexity for which the novel is infamous). Plus, it’s really quite funny. It’s a book rich with empathy and detail. And since its detail revolves around Dublin, with Ulysses you can walk through the streets you formerly roamed while remaining safely confined to home.
On a different – and far more caustic – note, one of the novels I’m hoping to re-read soon is L’Éducation sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert, the great novelist of the 19th century. Some are saying that this pandemic may well lead to some kind of progressive social revolution. In this novel Flaubert shows that revolutions are populated and perpetrated by flawed and feeble and venal people.
Dr Julie Bates
Perhaps unhelpfully, I’d like to start with a recommendation to stay clear of one book in particular! It’s several years since I read Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1995), but that hasn’t stopped it frightening the life out of me over the past few weeks. Two books I can recommend are Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (2019).
Offill and Lerner have both been celebrated for formal and linguistic experimentation, but also criticised for the solipsism of their characters, and narrowness of the scope of their writing. In these books, we see them pushing autofiction toward politics. Both feature characteristically sharp, wry narrators and characters, but here we encounter them struggling to formulate an appropriate response to contemporary political, cultural and environmental crises. These are books that care, and that are about care. They are also a lot funnier and more entertaining than that sounds!
Two other recently published books I’m looking forward to reading over the coming weeks are Alice Lyons’s Oona (2020) and Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020). Both look fantastic – it’s a comfort having them on the shelf.
Dr Ben Keatinge
I haven’t followed any reading related directly to the coronavirus or to historical pandemics. I figure we get enough of that in the newspapers. I am just finishing a remarkable debut novel by Pajtim Statovci who is a Finnish author of Kosovan heritage. He writes about the confusions of being from a migrant family and about questions of identity and home in My Cat Yugoslavia (2017). My other choices would be Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth Century Icon (2004) by Gijs van Hensbergen about Picasso’s masterpiece and The Boundless and the Miraculous: Found Poems from the Letters of Vincent van Gogh (2019) by Larry Stapleton. Both explore the wider cultural dynamics of word and image through painting, poetry and politics.
Dr Dara Downey
I’ve started and abandoned a few books over the past month that turned out to be too grim for me right now, but Shirley Jackson’s “family chronicles” – Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons – have turned out to be perfect lockdown reading. Her semi-autobiographical accounts of raising a growing family in 1950s New England are the ideal mix of cosy humour and acerbic wit, as she navigates a world full of nosy, judgemental neighbours, her children’s often surreal views of the world, and the demands of an amiable but domestically inept husband. The charming chaos of her quasi-fictionalised life is simultaneously soothing and laugh-out-loud hilarious, and you get the impression that she would tackle the current situation in much the same way – with insight, irritation, and irony. After all, her narrator is so run off her feet trying to stop everyone from starving, injuring themselves, and embarrassing her that she barely has time to leave the house anyway.
I also panic-bought Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight when College shut, and I would highly recommend it too. This is Pratchett doing what he does best – showing how moments of social stress can result in intolerance and scapegoating, but also how easy it is to bring a little enchantment back when things seem darkest.
Dr Clare Clarke
I’m going to recommend Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. This novel is a surprisingly uplifting take on the aftermath of a global pandemic, the “Georgia Flu”, which kills most of the world’s population within a number of weeks. Most of the action of the novel takes place in the North America of 20 years after the devastating event: all countries and borders have vanished, there remain only a few small heavily-guarded encampments populated by survivors. There is no running water, no industry, no air travel, no internet, no gas or electricity.
We follow the journey of the Travelling Symphony: a group of 20 musicians and actors in who roam from town to town in horse-drawn wagons, entertaining survivors with concerts and theatrical performances — their performances are mostly Shakespeare’s plays, because, as the company has learned, this is what audiences prefer: “People want what was best about the world,” as one member of the troupe explains. At this time of great anxiety about what the world will look like after the coronavirus pandemic, this novel reminds us that we will feel hope again and that art ca
Reporting by Martha Kirwan.
