Book Recommendation: Severance by Ling Ma

Grace Xu, 2T3 MAM

Favourite quote:

“Memories beget memories. Shen fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop.

What is this book about? Why would you recommend it?

One review described the book Severance by Ling Ma as a "coming of age immigrant experience anti-capitalist zombie novel," which makes it seem a lot flashier than it is. I think that Candace's apocalypse is much more of a slow burn—but that measured pace acts to accentuate the bleakness of the world she lives in now and the one she lived in before. The zombies themselves are not dangerous. Instead, they're trapped in habits and cycles of their memories until their bodies disintegrate. But, Ling Ma carefully illustrates how the living are equally stuck in their mind-numbing modern day routines, despite not being zombified. The reader may slowly come to the question: even if we are living breathing human beings, when do we feel truly alive? This unnerving query is threaded through the language Ma uses. Her prose is very dry and blunt, but she weaves in the rare jarring illustrative and peculiar analogy (she'll convince you that exchange rates are basically drowning swimmers). The lack of quotation marks also blurs the lines between characters’ statements, the protagonist's thoughts, and the narration, resulting in a marriage and tension between individual voice and collective thought. Ma also does an excellent job of showing how Candace's Asian upbringing shaped her into a person who would sacrifice almost everything for normalcy (too relatable—but also made me want to shake her out of her jadedness). It's nice seeing a sci-fi(ish) heroine whose culture is essential to understanding her apathy—her severance from the world partially stems from severance from her motherland. Uneasy and unsettling, this book left my palms a little sweaty, especially while living in a pandemic of our own.