Book Log: Severance (Ling Ma)
Overall
Loved it, will recommend it to others
Reactions
Sentence-level structure is incredibly beautiful. Chose to re-read sentences multiple times because some of them just made me gasp.
Sardonic humor meets serious isolation and loneliness. Made me reflect on how much humor can be a coping mechanism for lack of belonging — making people laugh rarely makes you enemies.
Challenges my concept of what it means to live a life of purpose, and why we’re so obsessed with that concept anyway.
I felt lots of feelings towards every single character. They all felt authentically human, yet Ma is brilliant at exploring the bounds between mindful choice and routine roboticism.
Great for
Getting lost in a world that’s not far from our current reality. Ma’s predictions of the would-be-COVID pandemic are eerily on point (given it was published before the official start of the virus)
Forcing you to look at your relationship to work, routine, and what it means to come home
Reminisicing about literally every pop culture reference from the 90s and 00s
Thinking about what it means to have agency in this world
Not great for
CW: some sexual and physical abuse
Feeling bright and cheery
Selected quote
Such a sound is mesmerizing. It comes into your body. Your breath syncs up with its rhythm. You can feel cells struggling, breaking down, or otherwise proliferating with overcompensating energy, engaging in mitosis and dividing and dividing. Stop, I wanted to stay to my body, just stop it. Stop. The feeling of these cells overreacting is one of pins and needles, like what happens when your foot falls asleep, except all over my entire body. It started in the back of my head, then spread from there. The pins and needles pulsated, squeezed me like a fist, performed the Heimlich, issued lashings of pain, masticated me, palpitated me, pummeling me with crashing waves of nausea. My body was falling asleep. I needed to wake it up, I needed to wake my body up.