Reviews with content warning for Dementia - Salgın

This book was eerily prescient for what was to come during the COVID-19 pandemic, given that it came out in 2018. This book elicited an interesting emotional response in me, overall leaving me feeling reflective and adrift.

While firmly in the dystopian fiction genre, what I found unique was that this read more like a character study than anything. We follow the main character Candace Chen’s reflections on her life, moving back and forth through each point in her life that were mini-apocalypses in themselves, as her worlds as she knew them collapse.

As a Chinese immigrant who moved to the U.S. when she was 6, themes of belonging/unbelonging resonate strongly throughout this novel, and are elements that give richness to the decisions she made and the points she gets to in her life.

I think what really added to my love of this book was the narrator Nancy Wu’s approach to characterizing Candace. Her style was a sort of a resigned deadpan, which I felt added a depth to the character that I don’t know I would’ve gotten from the tree book.

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coffeespooncait's review against another edition

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funny reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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jazhandz's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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alisasreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

anti-capitalism and zombies made me want to read this, but i stayed for the way the writer managed to make me feel like i was experiencing it all with candace. very well written and definitely a book i would recommend to people. also pretty odd to read this a year after the pandemic..

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wordsaremything's review against another edition

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dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The truth is, I had stayed in the city as long as I possibly could. The whole time, I had been half waiting for myself to turn, to become fevered like everyone else. Nothing happened. I waited and waited. I still wait.

I start every book out at 5 stars and work down, rather than start at 0 and work up. I waffled between 5 and 4 for a good amount of this, but because I was waffling, that tells me there was something in this that wasn't a five star read for me. I think because I felt it was too much about the before, and not enough about the after. I would want to see what happens when

Spoiler

she gets out of the car. What does she find? What does her life look like? Luna's?

Ultimately, this is a novel about routine. Even when it isn't, it is. Anything about Candace and the Bibles is about routine — the steps required to make it (which she thinks about to soothe herself to sleep) and the sameness of the text no matter how it's packaged. Anything about her parents is routine, too — even the scene in which she burns offerings for them: For my father, I burned a Jos. A. Bank suit. ... For my mother, I burned a Louis Vuitton suitcase and a Fendi handbag. ...I imagined that it would be more than they would ever need, more than they knew what to do with, even in eternity. She is doing this out of the tradition, the routine of remembering her family, rather than the actual feelings she has for them.

What I found most interesting, however, is how empty of a character Candace is. She is a vessel only.

In talking to her mother, stricken with memory-loss and making grand promises of what she will invite Candace to, Candace says Thank you, I'd say, though, again, she had done no such thing. Candace is used to humoring people even when things go wrong. She is a good liar and used to dealing with people who are either not all the way there or who ask impossible tasks of her.

When she goes to China to see how the Bibles are made, she says It didn't feel like I was in China. It didn't feel like I was anywhere. Candace doesn't belong to anyone or anywhere, which is why Bibles work well for her. They are worldly books that mean something different to everyone, even though she can follow the same routine in creating them most of the time. (Again, everything in here is about routine.)

And in the strongest example of this vessel-ness is something her mother says to her: I just want for you what your father wanted: to make use of yourself, she finally said. No matter what, we just want you to be of use. This whole line I would argue is Candace is a nutshell. Candace creates the Bible for others, she works for others, she

Spoiler

takes pictures of NYC for others, and then is carrying the baby for Bob.

She only breaks out of the routine when she decides to do something for herself.

Spoiler

Because I would make the argument that Candace IS fevered: "I didn't know what to do, so I pushed it to the farthest corner of my mind. I went to sleep. Then I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine." Her routine is to keep going, to keep pushing forward. Either that or she is 100% immune to it. Because we already know that routines don't have to be exactly the same: "The variations [in how the fevered performed their routine tasks] were what got to me." (Which gave me goosebumps to read.)

So what's with the title? If everything is about routine?
There were only two instances that I caught where the word "severance" is used in the book, and both involve men. The first, her father, the second, Jonathan

Spoiler

(who is her baby's father)

. Both are absent from her life.

- By the end of [Jonathan's] second year, corporate announced that policy regarding severance packages would be changed.
- My father rarely spoke of the past, and perhaps it was only after having officialized his severance from China that he felt free to speak openly of his life there.

Even when she is severed from the world, she is OK. She thrives in solitude because her life was rather quiet and monotonous pre-Shen. Her severance package is what she gains when everyone is gone: The push to take action without knowing what the next on the list will be.

As a final note, the line that has stuck with me for days after reading: The smell [of the shark fin soup] is so delicious, unbelievably rich, that I understand why sharks have to die to make it.

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