A quarantine (re-)read
I bet it’s really hard to concentrate right now. I’m certainly feeling that, although it’s gotten a little better now that we’ve settled into quarantine life and have had a few weeks of practice with the crushing uncertainty and anxiety. If you are still feeling too jumpy to settle into a book, I recommend re-reading an old or recent favorite. It offers enough of an escape while limiting surprises—whether that’s a shocking plot twist or just the realization that hey, I’m not liking this book as much as I expected to. There’s enough uncertainty in the world right now. Please allow yourself to read something you know you will like.
My quarantine re-read was Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. I read it when it was published in 2017 and loved it, and I had been wanting to revisit it even before all this began. It turned out to offer exactly the mood I wanted right now, both dark and hopeful with a substantial side of surreal. Exit West tells the story of Nadia and Saeed, two young people who are beginning a relationship just as a sectarian war creeps and then explodes into their unspecified city. (They could be in Syria; they could be in a lot of places.) At the same time, around the world, previously normal doorways are turning into portals that can transport people instantly between one country and another. More than being a piece of literary homework about the refugee crisis (remember that? It’s still happening!), Exit West is a sharp portrayal of what it feels like when the bottom suddenly drops out of reality. Here’s a quote I underlined on this read, when Nadia and Saeed are waiting for a moment of seeming stability to to bubble over into something worse:
They face it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.
R.I.P.
Adam Schlesinger died this week of COVID-19 at age 52. He was one of my all time favorite musicians, a pop genius who was most recognized for his work within fictional universes, including most recently the fantastically zany musical TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Long before that, he was in my first favorite band, Fountains of Wayne. Their 1999 album Utopia Parkway found its way deep into my adolescent soul and the rest of my personality and artistic taste grew around it, intertwined and forever inseparable. Schlesinger was an artisan whose profound understanding of and commitment to the rules of his craft—pop music—resulted in one-of-a-kind art. I’m devastated we won’t get to hear any more of it. For a more comprehensive remembrance of his work, I recommend Carl Wilson’s obituary in Slate.