Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the September 17, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.
After the library closed in mid-March due to the Coronavirus, and when we were still in some disbelief of what was happening to life as we knew it, I immediately reached for my copy of Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. Published in 2001, it became one of my all-time favorite books. As I thumbed through the pages and thought about it and other books about plagues and disease and death, I outlined a column that I had due at the end of April.
April was not a particularly
emotionally healthy time for me. I missed my place in the library. I was
energized only in fits and starts; I had seemingly comatose times when I merely
stared into space. I couldn't watch the news. My attention span didn't allow
for movies, series, or podcasts, let alone books. I rarely knit but nervously
surfed the Internet watching COVID-19s numbers climb around the world.
Working remotely, my husband
and I navigated our home office spaces and our life as a couple. I baked bread
and roasted chicken, while at the same time leading the library staff in daily
(and sometimes hourly) Zoom meetings. I texted and called, preferring a
personal touch. I updated the trustees and town managers via emails. Those
missives barely spoke of the loss I was experiencing, communication that belied
a deep and profound grief for my place of work, my co-workers, and my normal
life. The only time I felt energized and happy were Tuesdays spent in my office
in a cavernous, nearly empty library.
April was not the time for a
column on a book about sickness and death. I abandoned the topic and wrote
about the wonders of the library's virtual offerings. The staff had performed
miracles from the days before we closed through March through May. We hoped to
reopen, but we prepared to remain closed. It was a confusing, slightly
schizophrenic time.
In the months that followed,
I mused about other novels of plagues that I'd read years ago: Stephen King's
The Stand, and Albert Camus' The Plague. I knew there would be another time
when I could consider writing about these novels in my column.
Stephen King's The Stand is a
giant book – both figuratively and literally. The original I read was around
800 pages.* As a post-apocalyptic fantasy, it isn't a genre that I currently
read. However, in the late 70s, I remember being intrigued, committed, and
addicted to it. The story (or multiples of storylines) was initially set in
1980. King's novel follows numerous characters who are survivors of a
pandemic.
The US government developed a
weaponized version of the flu, and its accidental release threatens the entire
world's population. The fatality rate is 99.4% within one month. Small groups
of survivors from various parts of the country form coalitions and new
societies that confront each other. Scenes take place in Vermont, Colorado,
Nevada, Nebraska, and Maine. *Later, in 1990, King released the uncut version
that was 1100 pages. I have one of those mass-market copies, a carry-over from
when I distributed free copies as part of World Book Night in April of 2012.
There are survivors, and
King's dark book ends with some hope in the first version. Hope is doubted in
the extended version when crazy Randall Flagg survives an atomic blast.
Interestingly, a second miniseries (the first was in 1994) completed production
in March 2020 at the beginning of COVID-19 and will be aired this December.
Whoopi Goldberg is cast as 108-year old Mother Abagail. Alexander Skarsgård
plays Randall Flagg.
Albert Camus' The Plague
(1947) is usually required high school or college reading. At 300+ pages, The
Plague is definitively shorter than The Stand. What it lacks in length,
however, it is abundant in meaning. Camus' plague has a double meaning – both
the pandemic that ravages the port city of Oran, Algeria, and the rise of Nazi
Germany and the suffering that was unleashed as World War II. Camus' The Plague
has many parallels in the Coronavirus pandemic, and it is an eerie read in
2020.
The epidemic is denied as a
hoax. Shortages and hardships are endured. Death is rampant. The inhabitants of
Oran are quarantined for a year, emerging at the end, frightful and relieved at
the same time. However, unlike COVID-19, the outbreak is contained to Oran. In
fact, Camus' premise is that by working together, cooperation is achieved.
"What's natural is the microbe. All the rest — health, integrity, purity (if you like)
— is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The
good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest
lapses of attention." Albert Camus in The Plague.
In Geraldine Brooks' Year of
Wonders, a similar tragedy struck an English town in the 17th Century. War
correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Brooks, visited the small
English village of Eyam. While there, she was intrigued about a sign designating
it Plague Village and learned the plague arrived in the countryside in 1665.
After suffering a multitude of quick and sudden deaths, the village's residents
agreed to self-quarantine for 14 months so as not to spread the virus. With
little written record to go on, Brooks crafted a historical novel centered on
one line in one of the village rector's letters. Her book is the intriguing
story of how one bolt of fabric brought the bubonic plague and the horrors of
death and desperation to the mostly illiterate English town.
In doing some research for my
column this week, I found that NPR wrote a piece on April 20, 2020, titled
"A Matter of Common Decency: What Literature Can Teach Us About
Epidemics." Not surprisingly, the article included both Year of Wonders
and Camus' The Plague. It also included a book I have not read. It is a science
fiction work and was published just one year before our experience with
COVID-19 began. By Karen Thompson Walker, the Dreamers is the story of an
ominous sleeping sickness that sweeps over a fictional town in Southern
California. While the book focuses on the psychological realism of the dreams
of its victims (one sleeping a year through an entire pregnancy), there are
prescient parallels to our own pandemic experience. The virus is airborne. A
community is quarantined. Masks are in short supply. Perhaps most visionary of
all is the description of one of the ways the virus travels from person to
person. Before the town is locked down, one last wedding is held. The bride has
the first signs of being ill:
"Whoever
shares her lipstick that day, whoever borrows her eyeliner, whoever kisses her
cheek that night or dances too close or clinks her flute of champagne, whoever
touches her hand to admire the ring, whoever catches the bouquet at the end of
the night — all of them, every one, is exposed. This is how the sickness
travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and
love." Karen Thompson Walker in The Dreamers
Our library has these books
in print and digital versions. They all have messages that we need to hear in
these difficult times.
"Here
we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can."
Geraldine Brooks in Year of Wonders.
For a complete list of additional readings on epidemics and pandemics suggested by Colgate University's 2020 Summer Reads, click here.
