FSG, Liliane Calfee

In Severance, Ling Ma creates an alternate recent past, in which most of humankind has been wiped out by Shen Fever. But Shen Fever doesn't just kill — it renders those infected useless, slowly rotting away while trapped in an infinite, mindless loop of their most mundane activities. When Candace Chen finds herself among a small group of survivors, she comes to terms with the fact that her identity is tied up with her productivity and her conception of freedom tied to success in a system which has now collapsed. Ma's language does so much in this book, and its precision, its purposeful specificity, implicates an entire generation. But what is most remarkable is the gentleness with which Ma describes those working within the capital-S System. What does it mean if a person finds true comfort working as a "cog" in a system they disagree with? Is that comfort any less real?

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