Not long ago, Mark Chiverton, a 33-year-old in the U.K., noticed he was making a lot of silly mistakes. He’d mix up words when writing emails, or blank on a basic term while talking to his wife. None of these slip-ups were all that concerning on their own—but they were happening frequently enough that Chiverton worried he was, to put it bluntly, “getting dumber.”
On the Sea of Time, 2020, acrylic on canvas.PAINTING BY CALIDA RAWLES.
On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic
The acclaimed novelist lost her beloved husband—the father of her children—as COVID-19 swept across the country. She writes through their story, and her grief.
BY yesmyn ward
ILLUSTRATION BY calida rawles
My Beloved died in January. He was a foot taller than me and had large, beautiful dark eyes and dexterous, kind hands. He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning. He cried at both of our children’s births, silently, tears glazing his face. Before I drove our children to school in the pale dawn light, he would put both hands on the top of his head and dance in the driveway to make the kids laugh. He was funny, quick-witted, and could inspire the kind of laughter that cramped my whole torso. Last fall, he decided it would be best for him and our family if he went back to school. His primary job in our household was to shore us up, to take care of the children, to be a househusband. He traveled with me often on business trips, carried our children in the back of lecture halls, watchful and quietly proud as I spoke to audiences, as I met readers and shook hands and signed books. He indulged my penchant for Christmas movies, for meandering trips through museums, even though he would have much preferred to be in a stadium somewhere, watching football. One of my favorite places in the world was beside him, under his warm arm, the color of deep, dark river water.
In early January, we became ill with what we thought was flu. Five days into our illness, we went to a local urgent care center, where the doctor swabbed us and listened to our chests. The kids and I were diagnosed with flu; my Beloved’s test was inconclusive. At home, I doled out medicine to all of us: Tamiflu and Promethazine. My children and I immediately began to feel better, but my Beloved did not. He burned with fever. He slept and woke to complain that he thought the medicine wasn’t working, that he was in pain. And then he took more medicine and slept again.
Emma Donoghue on Writing ‘The Pull of the Stars,’ Set During the 1918 Pandemic
by Noah Berlatsky
21 July 2020
“The whole novel was always tending towards death,” Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue says matter-of-factly. Her new book, The Pull of the Stars, is set in a maternity ward in Dublin during the 1918 flu pandemic. The milieu Donoghue depicts has unsettling parallels with our own crisis. The book is claustrophobic, bleak and more than a little apocalyptic; the narrator, nurse Julia Power, looks around a city clogged with phlegm and bodies and death and shuttered businesses. “Dublin was a great mouth holed with missing teeth,” she thinks. But the novel also offers some hope, for Julia and for us, that a broken world can perhaps be put together better, at least in small ways.
I have the option of a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine after having had the AstraZeneca: What should I do?
Around 1.5 million essential workers in Spain will be faced with this choice, after cases of rare blood clots were linked to the Anglo-Swedish medication. Experts respond to questions about the best course of action
Carlos Agudo, a 35-year-old pharmacist who works in Jaén, southern Spain, is one of the 1.5 million essential workers aged under 60 who was given a first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, and now finds himself in a situation he “never could have imagined.” On Thursday, he has his appointment for a second dose, but will be able to choose whether to opt for the Anglo-Swedish medication, or the vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech. “With so many ups and downs, they’re even making us have doubts, and we’re healthcare professionals,” he complains. “I don’t even want to think about the teachers and others who are in the same situation.
The Arts Are in Crisis. Here’s How Biden Can Help.
The pandemic has decimated the livelihoods of those who work in the arts. How can the new administration intervene and make sure it doesn’t happen again? A critic offers an ambitious plan.
Jason Farago
Published Jan. 13, 2021 Updated Jan. 15, 2021
What is art’s function? What does art do for a person, a country?
Scholars, economists, revolutionaries keep debating, but one very good answer has held now for 2,500 years. The function of art, Aristotle told us, is catharsis. You go to the theater, you listen to a symphony, you look at a painting, you watch a ballet. You laugh, you cry. You feel pity, fear. You see in others’ lives a reflection of your own. And the catharsis comes: a cleansing, a clarity, a feeling of relief and understanding that you carry with you out of the theater or the concert hall. Art, music, drama — here is a point worth recalling in a pandemic — are instruments of psychic and social health.
Emma Donoghue's 'Pull Of The Stars' — A Disquieting Pandemic Novel
Readers are awaiting novels of the pandemic, and Emma Donoghue just may have stumbled into writing one of the first.
As Donoghue explains in the author's note to her new novel, The Pull of the Stars, she began writing the story in 2018, inspired by the centenary of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Donoghue delivered the final draft to her publishers this past March, just as a stunned world was taking in the enormity of the coronavirus crisis.
Soldiers disinfect their uniforms after entering a senior residence in MadridCARLOS SPOTTORNO
Coronavirus The war of our generation
Under Operation Balmis, more than 8,000 soldiers in Spain are doing what they can every day to support the fight against Covid-19, from building field hospitals and disinfecting senior residences, to transporting the bodies of victims
English version by Heather Galloway
Jesús Rodríguez 17 April 2020
An icy rain falls on the city of Madrid. The streets are deserted. The scene is desolate. The capital is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Spain, with senior residences and care homes one of the major focal points of the pandemic. On the outskirts of the city, in a residential area of Alcalá de Henares, 48 paratroopers stand under a shower of rain that turns to snow and covers their black berets in white. An accumulative lack of sleep has caught up with them and there is not much in the way of chat. The courtyard of the senior care home has been turned into a parking lot for military vehicles. The paratrooper brigade has been there since dawn, and is ready to follow orders to disinfect the place.
Author Michael Rosen out of intensive care after 47 days
Wife tweets first update in two weeks, saying his recovery on the ward will take time
Mattha Busby Saturday 23 May 2020
The poet, broadcaster and author Michael Rosen has left intensive care 47 days after he was admitted.
Rosen, 74, the author of children’s books including We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Little Rabbit Foo Foo, charted the initial stages of his illness on Twitter. He has not tweeted since late March but his wife, Emma-Louise Williams, updated wellwishers periodically while he was “very poorly”.
After more than a fortnight without updates about his health, Williams tweeted on her own account: “Today Michael has been in hospital for 8 weeks & I’m v happy to say he left ICU yesterday after a long & difficult 47 days. His recovery is continuing on the ward & will take time. He has done so well to get through this but please don’t expect him back here yet.”
She retweeted the post on his account and praised “the amazing efforts of the lovely kind staff” at Whittington hospital in north London, where Rosen has been receiving treatment.
Williams last tweeted on Rosen’s account on 7 May, saying: “Thanks very much for all your continuing love and support on here.” She has not confirmed whether Rosen contracted coronavirus.
On 20 April she wrote: “Thanks v much for all the love. I’m not updating regularly because when someone is very poorly things can change daily & details of Michael’s ongoing care from fantastic NHS staff are private. So please be patient, no news is good news.”
Rosen, a former children’s laureate, described his illness on 22 March. “Can’t stop my thermostat from crashing: icy hands, hot head. Freezing cold sweats. Under the covers for bed-breaking shakes. Image of war hero biting on a hankie, while best mate plunges live charcoal into the wound to cauterise it,” he wrote.
The next day he wondered whether he was suffering from a heavy flu rather than coronavirus. “Have had no chest pains. No persistent cough. So all along it could have been a heavy flu and not corona. Today the fevers are ebbing. In their place a deep muscle exhaustion. In every corner.”
He was admitted to hospital later that week and spend his first night in intensive care on 29 March, before being placed on a ward. He returned to the ICU in early April.
In 2008 Rosen wrote a poem, These Are the Hands, for the 60th anniversary of the NHS. “These are the hands / That touch us first / Feel your head / Find the pulse / And make your bed,” it opened
Luis Sepúlveda, pictured in Italy in 2019. Photograph: Roberto Cano
Chilean author, campaigner and escapee Luis Sepúlveda dies aged 70 of Covid-19
Agence-France Presse
Thu 16 Apr 2020 17.56 BST
The celebrated Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who was exiled by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, has died from Covid-19.
Best known for his 1992 novel The Old Man Who Read Love Stories and 1996’s The Story of a Seagull and The Cat Who Taught Her To Fly, Sepúlveda died in hospital on Thursday. He first began showing symptoms from coronavirus on 25 February, after returning to his home in Spain from a festival in Portugal. On 1 March, it was confirmed that Sepúlveda was the first case of Covid-19 in the Asturias region, where he had lived for 20 years.
The end of coronavirus: what plague literature tells us about our future
From Thucydides to Camus, there are plenty of hopeful reminders that there’s nothing unprecedented about the coronavirus lockdown - and that pandemics do end
Marcel Theroux
Friday 1 May 2020
Shortly before the London lockdown, at an eerily quiet branch of Waterstones, I managed to get my hands on The Decameron, by Boccaccio,and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But Camus’s The Plague had gone the way of dried pasta and toilet roll; there was just a desolate gap on the shelves where the copies had once been.
The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.
Defoe would have recognised the impulses behind the strange tableaux of life interrupted in central London: piles of ice melting outside abruptly closed bars; a truck unloading gym equipment at an oligarch’s house in Mayfair; jittery shoppers with overloaded trolleys. “Many families,” he writes, “foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased.”
The sudden, powerful need to know what’s coming is predictable, too. We turn to historical witnesses who can explain what it’s like. Defoe’s motive for writing A Journal of the Plague Year was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720. Anticipating its spread, readers wanted to know what it had been like in 1665. Defoe, responding to demand, provided them with an instant book, fashioned out of statistics, reminiscences, gossip, anecdote and blood-curdling dramatic detail. “Passing through Token-House Yard in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, and a woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, “O death, death, death!”
Bring out your dead ... a depiction of the Great Plague in London, 1665.
Defoe almost certainly didn’t witness this – he would have been about five. Novelistic moments such as these would make the book compelling at any time, but right now it has a painful relevance. Defoe is particularly strong on the unpreparedness and prevarication that made the impact of the plague more severe. Or, as he puts it: “I often reflected upon the unprovided condition that the whole body of the people were in at the first coming of this calamity upon them; and how it was for want of timely entering into measures and managements, as well public as private, that all the confusions that followed were brought upon us, and that such a prodigious number of people sunk in that disaster which, if proper steps had been taken, might, Providence concurring, have been avoided.”
Bracingly vivid ... Daniel Defoe’s religious fanatic Solomon Eagle from A Journal of the Plague Year. Photograph: Colin Waters/Alamy
Defoe is sometimes dismissed as a hack, but his lack of vanity about his prose is one of the things that gives the book its power. There’s something amazingly bracing about his vividness and curiosity – the bills of mortality, quoted in full; minor characters such as the religious fanatic Solomon Eagle who walks around naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head; and the imprudent John Cock, a barber who is so relieved by the apparent retreat of the epidemic that he returns to normal life too soon and pays the penalty. Moral: don’t be a John Cock.
So much of the behaviour of our 17th-century forebears is uncomfortably familiar. The citizens of east London watch complacently as the plague tears through the West End, and assume they will be fine. They’re proved terrifyingly wrong. Defoe adds in a chilling parenthesis: “For indeed it came upon them like an armed man when it did come.”
Even before germ theory, Defoe’s common sense and perceptiveness lead him to conclusions of which our chief medical officer would approve. He gives a prescient warning about the danger of asymptomatic carriers: “The plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a town infected, and people have it when they know it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that they have it themselves.”
If human behaviour remains dismayingly constant, one thing that has changed for the better is science and our understanding of it. Seven hundred years on, there’s something deeply poignant about Boccaccio’s pre-scientific description of the spread of the Black Death in his native Florence. “What was particularly virulent about this plague was that it would leap from the sick to the healthy whenever they were together, much as fire catches hold of dry or oily material that’s brought close to it. And that was not all. Not only did speaking with the sick and spending time with them infect the healthy or kill them off, but touching the clothes of the sick or handling anything they had touched seemed to pass on the infection.” You feel like the audience in a pantomime, wanting to shout across the centuries and tell him who the villain is and how he operates.
‘There was particularly high mortality among doctors,’ Thucydides tells of the plague in fifth-century Athens. Photograph: Science History
Not everyone responds to plague by immersing themselves in data about epidemics. The escapist response to disaster is another predictable move and The Decameron epitomises it. After his short but terrifying description of the Florentine plague, Boccaccio sends his troupe of young characters into quarantine, where they spend the remainder of the book, swapping funny, ribald stories: the plague doesn’t feature again. It’s a welcome relief to lose yourself in a world of cuckolds and randy nuns. And once more, plus ça change. The gilded Florentine youths are doing the 14th-century equivalent of binge-watching Sex Education on Netflix.
Thomas Mann and Camus are less interested in plague itself than in using it to make existential points. The plague in Death in Venice is an avatar of death in general, the terrible mystery, the pale horse; it is something that strips away vanity and reveals unpalatable truths. In Mann’s novella, it is the catalyst for Von Aschenbach’s humiliating descent into clownish self-destruction. At the same time, the pages dealing with the cholera epidemic are vigorous and apposite. The hotels in Venice empty swiftly, despite official protestations that there is nothing to worry about. It’s a young English travel agent who finally cuts through the official flannel. The doubts he raises about administrative competence and probity are ones that in due course we’ll all be obliged to consider. “‘That is,’ he continued in an undertone and with some feeling, ‘the official explanation, which the authorities here have seen fit to stick to.’”
FacebookTwitterPinterestExistential epidemic ... a scene from Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Camus’ The Plague at the Arcola theatre, London, in 2017. Photograph: Jane Hobson/Rex/Shutterstock
Camus is the real odd one out. The Plague is often read as an allegory of the French experience under occupation, but right now there seems nothing allegorical about it: the hero, Dr Rieux, seems like a naturalistic depiction of a frontline care-worker forced into impossible decisions over who gets a ventilator. At other historical moments, the constant reflection on the meaning of the plague could seem heavy-handed – Gallic, not in a good way – but in 2020 it’s like reading The Cruciblewhile your elderly parent is on trial for witchcraft. For long stretches, you forget any notion of allegory and simply wonder how Camus could have got it so right: from the panic buying of peppermints that people think will be a prophylactic, to the high mortality rate in the municipal jail, to the exhausted healthcare workers, and the terrible monotony of quarantine, something with which we are only just beginning to get acquainted.
And then, of course, the plague ends. That’s the actual good news that these books bring. The epidemic always passes. The majority of people survive. Thucydides himself had it and recovered. “I shall simply tell it as it happened,” he promises of the plague that ravaged fifth-century Athens, “and describe the features of the disease which will give anyone who studies them some prior knowledge to enable recognition should it ever strike again.”
Should it ever strike again is the phrase that awakens our sense of hubris. For all the talk of an unprecedented crisis, we are living through something with many precedents. “There was particularly high mortality among doctors because of their particular exposure,” Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago in a sentence that could appear in tomorrow’s paper. We have assumed that deadly epidemics belonged to a phase of history that was behind us, as quaint and irrelevant as candlelight and milking your own cows.
When the number of fatalities finally peaks and dwindles, Defoe’s citizens pull up their windows and shout to each other to share the news. Camus’s Oran is liberated; its citizens struggle to make sense of what has happened to them. Back in fifth-century Athens, the Peloponnesian war continues. Whether society changes for the better or worse, or simply stays the same, is what we will find out.
