Severance

I kept thinking that this is exactly what it would be like if you were a surviving office worker in Manhattan while the rest of the world's population was being wiped out by a deadly fungus. Among other believable details, there would definitely be a Bob the IT Guy taking charge and displaying his latent survivalist tendencies.

I was intrigued by the premise and wanted to know what this was all about. But after finishing this, I'm not at all sure what to say about it. It's not exactly bad writing because even when I wasn't totally engaged, I kept listening to the audiobook. The author is also probably commenting on the perils of corporate culture where all us employees keep working like mindless creatures, gaining no satisfaction from work, but also not finding the time to do anything more pleasurable or satisfying. But the way this story is told - both in the flashbacks or in the present after a zombie like pandemic - it's very slice of life and boring and with not much connecting threads, and I was just left wondering what was the point of it all. Or maybe it's the brilliance of the author because she is satirizing our banal existence through this story. Ultimately I think it just wasn't for me, but I still wanna checkout the author's upcoming book Bliss Montage.

Ling Ma's post-apocalyptic, anti-capitalist debut about life before, during, and after a global pandemic has so many similarities with the circumstances of the current pandemic it's uncanny, and makes what might just have been a dystopian fantasy entirely relatable. Perhaps too relatable. There is a palpable feeling of rising panic throughout this book but it's well balanced with flashes of optimism and resilience, much like current times. Loved it, and will definitely be looking out for Ma's next novel.

Severance switches between present and various times in Candice's past, so you get one part “immigrant family aclimates to life in United States”, one part “twenty-something out on her own in New York City”, and one part “not-quite zombie apocolypse”. I'm not a big fan of the “screw linearity” thing but fine, it's trendy.

But it draaaaags. I thought I was near the end and checked how much was left. I was only halfway through! The ending is really inconclusive and unsatisfying and the not-quite zombies never get explained.

Firstly, what the hell was that ending?! I was expecting more closure, and was in fact waiting for the next chapter on my audiobook and then... it ended??? WHAT.

Overall I felt like this ending summed up my feelings about this whole book. It felt like it was going somewhere but I couldn't really quite figure out where, and just kinda meandered a lot. It was engaging but at the same time the pacing could've been much tighter.

There were definitely a lot of messages here that was interesting and at least I felt like it was fairly cohesive, but at the same time... it didn't feel impactful enough for me. I liked what it was saying about late-stage capitalism and expected that to tie in somehow with the origin/mechanism of Shen Fever but... it didn't. I wanted it to talk more about some very interesting ideas it brought up, like how the glossy designer labels are all manufactured in third-world countries! While the book wasn't too disjointed and was somewhat coherent in that I can definitely see a motif critiquing capitalism but I just had trouble figuring out what the whole post-apocalyptic situation was for and why Candace had to be pregnant and all that. I was left feeling like I was teased for something more interesting than it really was.

The plot itself was pretty engaging but yet I found myself wishing it would hurry up. The pacing could've been a lot tighter. I only took 3 days to read it but somehow it felt like forever and I was wondering why I was spending so long reading this book. When I was reading it, it was engaging and I found myself trying to form theories on what the author wanted to say through these plot and thematic devices used. All in all I feel like there was a lot of good stuff here but it wasn't tied together very well and I wasn't left feeling like I learnt anything new here.

Also, Shen Fever was eerily prescient about the Covid pandemic, even more so than Station Eleven was.

I enjoyed this one a lot even though I felt it dragged a little at times. The main character is endearing, and I really liked her. I also enjoyed the nature of the pandemic which I found to be an interesting spin on the “zombie” idea and the description of its progression through Candace's eyes was also pretty great.

3.5 rounded up. Half star ratings are immaterial but it really didn't seem like a 3 star and it's also not quite a 4 star in my mind. I'd like to read this again at some point and reevaluate my feelings on it. It's one of those novels that would probably provide more on a second reading vs the first time around.

“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 Candace's backstory leading up to and during the plague, where we learn more about her, about the flu, and about how the world reacts during a time of crisis.

I thought the depiction of the fevered was incredibly creepy, and had me on edge for a large part of Candace's post-apocalypse jaunt through the Midwest. This is what basically kept me going, because Candace herself ended up being incredibly frustrating as a main character. I wanted to root for her, but at the same time she basically shuts down during crisis and requires other people to push her into making decisions. I loved the depiction of the crumbling society as the plague gets going, and how the different people around Candace react.

What I didn't like was the ending. Or, rather, the absence of an ending. I honestly had tuned in so completely to the story that when I hit the acknowledgements page, I thought my ebook had skipped. I don't mind ambiguous endings, but this was just basically a non-ending. We just....stop having more chapters. Incredibly frustrating. The story framework also requires you to be invested in the satire about capitalism and being a corporate slave for it to really have an impact.

So, three stars for it being an enjoyable, satirical read with an unsatisfying conclusion.

2.5 stars, rounded up to 3. Hasn't the fever apocalypse thing been done to death? So to speak. Not to mention escape from New York? Even so, it might have been tolerable if the forward momentum hadn't been killed by the two backward narratives. But what was even worse, I didn't care at all about the main character, or any of the other characters, for that matter.

Upon finishing Severance I felt confused. I was content in having finished it, and I was engaged especially in the back half of the book, but I also felt like I didn't quite understand what themes I was supposed to have gleaned from this. On reading a bit further into the book, apparently I had somehow missed an important detail that indeed changed my perception of a few key points in the story.

To get it out in the open, there are multiple points in which nostalgia plays a key factor. Somehow, I had missed a link between nostalgia and the fever that incited the events of the book. On realization of this and reflection of the book itself, I really appreciated the theme here.

Much more clear to me was the rhetoric around rampant consumerism, which hit me a lot more than anything else. I appreciated the subtleties in some ways that the book handled this theme, but also how blatant it was at times. It's especially poignant to have picked up on the details Ling Ma put in about this after everything about COVID and the global pandemic we all actually experienced.

Which lastly brings me to the comparison of the pandemic in this book and our real life pandemic we all experienced. I didn't find anything about this book harrowing or depressing to read about, nor did I feel like it sucked me back into that time in all of our lives. I found some things surprisingly–shockingly, even–accurate to how the pandemic shook down in real life, but I didn't really have a lasting feeling of gloom looming over me like I know some who have read this post-2020 felt. I really enjoyed how insightful Ling Ma ended up being about certain things that would transpire during a global pandemic, especially on consumerism and capitalistic goals, and for that alone I wavered from a 3 to 4 star review while writing this.

Overall I was not shaken to my core over this book, but I enjoyed the themes which at times felt disparate but always purposeful–and I think that sums up my general feeling of the book. As it jumps from pre- to mid- to post-pandemic throughout, it was often hard to tell where each thread was pulling towards, or especially how they were relating to one another. However, none of the storylines felt like they were unnecessary. I felt like all had purpose and even if it wasn't obvious how some related to one another, I still gleaned something from them all, which kept me reading. I will probably not read this again, but I would recommend this book, though I'm not sure if I'll spend as much time lingering on it as some other books.

I really did not like this one. Was thinking of DNFing it but I was already at 30% so I powered through. I was really excited to read this with my post-Covid eyes but it did not delivered what I thought it would.
The dual timeline made it difficult for me to understand how she got herself in such a place, but I guess it was the author's plan. Just not my type.

i loooved this book. Ma's voice and writing style immediately captured me and it was hard to believe this was written years prior to 2020. dystopian, unsettling, and highly reflective on how our society is clutched by capitalism, and how quickly things can lose meaning in the face of global disarray.

Wonderful. This novel is so many things at once - dystopian horror, office satire, immigration story - that you'd think don't go together, but Ling Ma does it perfectly. Another 2018 novel that intriguingly mixes quirkiness and (magical) realism into social commentary. It fits right in next to [b: My Year of Rest and Relaxation 36203391 My Year of Rest and Relaxation Ottessa Moshfegh https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1513259517s/36203391.jpg 55508660] and [b: The Pisces 32871394 The Pisces Melissa Broder https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500926737s/32871394.jpg 53479347].

It's the zombie apocalypse but the mindless, infected hordes this time aren't craving human brains but are instead locked in an endless loop of familiar and comforting patterns. Setting the table for example, or trying on outfits, over and over and over again.

In that sense, Candace barely differs from the infected. As the city vacates around her and more and more people succumb to the fever, she is stuck in her own routine. She continues to punch a clock, and put in her time at an increasingly empty office. As a Chinese immigrant she has no family to go to, no living parents, no real connection to her co-workers, or even the city she lives in.

Even at the tail end of the apocalypse, when she decides to throw in with a tiny band of survivors headed out of New York, she's still the odd one out. Their fearless leader, an gothy IT admin, WoW player who smokes vanilla scented e-cigarettes admonishes Candace to try being a bit more participatory. See if their group is a “good fit” as if she's fielding offers from other survivor bands.

It's a wry meditation on being other and the familiar routines we often hide in. Everyone locked into their own repeating patterns, oblivious to everyone else. It's the Millennial apocalypse - full review here: https://youtu.be/oZ-LiukdoCY