THE END OF THE WORLD OR JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE Erika Puusemp

from Open 58, 2020-2

Experienced Educator

Dreyer’s English, all in all, is a refreshing look at the spelling norms of English. The book is written in an engaging style that should appeal to those normally shying away from grammar issues. It covers multiple topics, both historically and contemporarily relevant – even browsing some of the chapters will be useful for those working with language.

THE END OF THE WORLD OR JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE?

Erika Puusemp Miina Härma Gymnasium, Tartu

In a precarious time due to the coronavirus, would you read something that has predicted the conundrum to some extent but has a ray of hope in it?

Severance, the 2018 satirical debut science fiction novel by the Chinese-American author Ling Ma, is just such a book – the main character Candace Chen fluctuates in her musings between her current predicament, being one of the few people who have for unknown reasons so far not contracted the fungus-caused Shen Fever that has basically obliterated global civilisation (there are unaffected pockets at the beginning of the story still in remote places including the isle of Kihnu, for example), her parents’ experience of immigration to the US from Fuzhou, China (her father being among the first granted the possibility to study in a university in Utah), and her own experience of working as a Bible product coordinator for a New York firm who ordered many of their products from China (where the fever originated from).

Candace is nostalgic about the first summer after finishing college when she spent months walking the streets of New York and taking pictures and living off her parents’ legacy and postponing getting a job, and about her boyfriend Jonathan, who left New York in the early days of the fever in the hopes of living someplace less capitalist, less consumption-oriented, and even about Salt Lake City, where she grew up as a first-generation immigrant.

She stays in New York, manning the office she works in until all infrastructure falls apart and no alive people can be seen (the ones infected repeat old routines compulsively, without consciousness and until death), and documents the downfall of the city in a blog. Finally she flees and ends up joining a group of eight other people who seem to be inexplicably immune to the fever and, under the influence of quite a tyrannical religious leader, struggle to survive in what they call the Facility on the outskirts of Chicago.

Obviously, things do not turn out to be good. So this is predominantly a story of staying alive and staying hopeful no matter what, quite a satirical spin on both the end of times and predominant international firm office culture, which was awarded the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and has been included in several Best Books lists of the year.

The New Yorker has penned it as “the best work of fiction (…) about the millennial condition – the alienation and cruelty that comes with being a functional person under advanced global capitalism, and the compromised pleasures and irreducibly personal meaning to be found in claiming some stability in a terrible world”. Read and decide for yourself, though.

HAVE A LOOK AT TEXAS (Explanations on p. 36)