Her writing is often called “experimental,” but if anything, oblique prose is the truest way to capture life under the yoke of apocalypse, the dizzying absurdity of deciding to forsake Earth for profit. Williams is a worldbuilder, crafting mood and meaning out of layered fragments. This is the rough plot of “Harrow” by Joy Williams, but the plot is not really the point. In this vision of a near-future beset by ecological collapse, oranges and horses are long gone, but Disney World has “rebooted and is going strong.” A girl named Khirsten, or Lamb, who may or may not have been resurrected as an infant, stumbles upon the group after her mother disappears and her boarding school abruptly shuts down. They don’t consider themselves terrorists, though, reserving that appellation for bankers and war-mongers, “exterminators and excavators … those locusts of clattering, clacking hunger.” You can hardly blame them. On the banks of a fetid lake called Big Girl, a cadre of aging rebels plots acts of ecoterrorism. It’s a light, fun novel, but it may require the reader to stop at every few pages and independently research historical events Taibo narrates, like the CIA’s alleged involvement in the killing of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. And the two journalists’ travels through Latin America overlap with drug traffickers, a Spanish anarchist, a Bulgarian communist, and a shady CIA agent. The book jumps between the past and the present.
They begin to investigate unpublished and undiscovered works by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, written during his exile in Mexico City. Taibo, a renowned author and activist in Mexico, guides us through a story of two journalists in the 1980s. The novel “Cuatro Manos” was published in 1997 and features major historical characters and events from 20th century Latin America. His writing is darkly humorous and full of pathos - highly recommended for anyone looking for a novel to immerse themselves in this summer.
Above any book of epidemiology or history, however, I found that this novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk about an outbreak of plague on a fictional Mediterranean island to be the most enlightening about how disease can sap the human spirit and break open divisions within a society. Like many other people during the pandemic, I searched for books that could help me understand the impact of a mass disease outbreak on society.
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