Severance

by

Hardcover, 291 pages

English language

Published Oct. 28, 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-26159-7
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
1004911431

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4 stars (41 reviews)

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.

1 edition

The end of the world, or the end of capitalism?

5 stars

“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” (Fredric Jameson)

I read this book in 2021, which no doubt coloured my intrepretation of it, but it's left a lasting impression. A really biting portrayal of modern "knowledge work", and the increasing absurdity of Candace's life as the wheels gradually fall off her world...

Review of 'Severance' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

"A second chance doesn't mean you're in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance."

I.....huh. After I got past my initial hangup with the minimalistic dialogue (seriously, not a quotation mark or other indication to be had here), this book sucked me in hard. Candace works for a publishing company in New York at a time when Shen Fever sweeps the world. The fever reduces people to their most basic elements, drying them out to a husk of their former selves and reducing them to mindless zombies where they repeat the most basic tasks they're familiar with endlessly. Somehow Candace and a handful of others remain immune(?) to this disease though, and they band together for survival. Interspersed with the present-day narrative is …

Review of 'Severance' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

What makes this zombie apocalypse satire interesting, to me, is how it's grounded in the very specific circumstances of Candace's Chinese-American upbringing and moreover in her experience in the specialty bible production business. Oddly, the book is most vivid not in the zombie scenes but in the parts dealing with the details of book ordering and production, including the site visit to the Shenzhen factory where the bibles are made.

Review of 'Severance' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

This would probably have suited me better had I been American, a millennial, or both. As I'm not it felt a little bland, and certainly not as satirical as some reviewers find it. The unquoted dialogue is a minor annoyance, but an annoyance still.

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Subjects

  • Epidemics
  • Fiction
  • Science fiction
  • Literary fiction

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