Series Review — Nobody Wants This

Series Review — Nobody Wants This was originally published in Story Lamp Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Plague by Albert Camus

Book: La Peste (The Plague). Date of Publication: June 10, 1947. Pages: 352. Genre: Historical Fiction

Edinburgh is a city on top of a city and beneath the broad cobblestones of the Royal Mile lies a warren of passages and quarters that many would have called home. The first thing you notice is the closeness: the tour guide says “If you stooped to follow me in here you’d be bending down for the rest of your life”. The next room is a stable complete with hay and troughs. The next room is that of a family represented in wax figurines. The father has started work as a gravedigger as the city is offering extra pay in the face of the plague’s overwhelming death toll. Unfortunately he has brought the sickness with him. The mother and her eldest daughter have bubonic plague, evident in the painful swelling on their lymph nodes. With luck they may be able to fight it off. The youngest daughter has pneumonic plague and it is beyond the saving of any medical techniques available in the 15th century. This scene of tremendous suffering is illuminated as if by candle light. Thankfully as a modern day visitor we are spared its smells and sounds.

In The Plague Albert Camus describes the range of responses in a French Algerian town to an outbreak. In the town of Oran rats begin to die in waves. They crawl from every nook and cranny to expire in the sunlight. The citizens are alarmed and the plague soon makes the jump across species. Many elements of Camus’s writing are remarkably prescient. The town’s officials are at first reluctant to treat the situation seriously so as to not cause panic. When they do impose a lockdown it is total, even severing the lines of communication to the outside world. People escape into entertainment and the cafes and theaters are full every night. Essential workers are burned out and numb. Some withdraw, some rise to the occasion, and some take advantage.

The Plague is a profoundly life-affirming work about the monumental struggle to preserve the best characteristics of humanity in circumstances that should obliterate them. As Camus puts it:

These kinds of facts or fears, in any case, fostered the feeling of exile and separation in our fellow citizens. From that angle, the narrator understands how perfectly regrettable it is that he cannot report anything here which would be truly spectacular, like, for example, some comforting hero or some burst of action, such as those you can find in the old tales. But nothing is less spectacular than a scourge and, by their very duration, great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the terrible days of plague didn’t appear as tall flames, sumptuous and cruel, but rather as an endless stagnation that crushed everything in its path.

The Information by Martin Amis

Book: The Information. Date of Publication: January 1, 1995. Pages: 384. Genre: Thriller

“Guess what. We had an intruder last night.”
“Really? Did she take anything?”
“We’re not really sure.”
“How did she get in? Was she armed, do you know?”
Gwyn closed his eyes and inclined his head, acknowledging the satire. He had a habit, in his prose, of following a neuter antecedent with a feminine pronoun. From Amelior: “While pruning roses, any gardener knows that if she…” Or, from the days when he still wrote book reviews: “No reader could finish this haunting scene without feeling the hairs on the back of her…” Richard clucked away to himself, but these days he often opted for an impersonal construction, or simply used the plural, seeking safety in numbers.
“Through the front door.”
“She didn’t turn violent, did she?”
“Come on, don’t be a tit. It’s very upsetting actually.”
[Pg. 175]

Comical as it may be the novel is painfully digressive. Amis invests a lot of time in painting Richard’s train wreck of a life: his mistress at the literary magazine who is always threatening to expose him to his wife or kill herself; his many substance abuse driven benders; his errands around his neighborhood of London that never quite gentrified as he hoped it would. He also invests a lot of energy in character portraits of the petty criminals Richard attempts to hire to rough Gwyn up which as a whole have aged like milk. It should be quite telling that in all the most popular Goodreads reviews of The Information not one of them actually explains what happens in the novel they are talking about. But to end on a positive note here’s a passage that almost made me spit out my water when I read it:

Demi watched her husband, who was now contemplating his halved grapefruit, and with suspicion: not with rapt and childlike curiosity, the way he used to, as if he’d never seen one before. He had stopped doing that to grapefruits after a certain grapefruit, responding to Gwyn’s rapt and childlike prod with the tined spoon, had squirted him in the eye.
[Pg. 297]

What I read in September: The Plague by Albert Camus and The Information by Martin Amis was originally published in Story Lamp Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Something that begins with a bad intention does not always lead to negative consequences.”

Film: How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
Year: 2024
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Director: Pat Boonnitipat

In a previous article (which was written in Bahasa), I mentioned that I decided to join my father’s favorite activity — watching movies — because I had just watched this Thailand movie two days before I wrote that article.

They’d be like: “Guys, let’s watch how to make grandma!”
Or, “Are you guys free this weekend? Let’s see How To Make Grandma Dies in the cinema!” FYI, Indonesians call “cinema” as “bioskop”.
I don’t know if should I laugh hearing them saying the title incorrectly or not…

The movie began.
There’s a family with a grandma in it. The Grandma has three children: 2 sons and a daughter.
The first child is a quiet sufficient family man who has a little sweet daughter.
The second child is a single mom with an early 20s age son. Her son’s name is M.
And finally, the last child is an irresponsible single man who barely can take care of himself.

They were in a cemetery area, visiting the Grandma’s lovely husband there.
Grandma has a request for their children and her grandson:
She expressed a wish to be laid to rest in a spacious cemetery like the one shown at the beginning of the movie. It should be a well-maintained cemetery in a beautiful setting, similar to the one where her grandmother's husband is buried.

M’s grandma is so precious and full of wisdom.
She truly knows and understands what her children need.
If you say: “Of course, she is a mother.”
I am telling you that not all women have the nature to be a mom.
You’d understand what I am talking about if you see this movie yourself.

From M’s grandma, I can see and feel how lonely it is like to be an elder, especially when all of your children have their own lives and families.
It is not certain when your children will visit you.

Thank you for reading!

With Love,
Jesica ❤

Books & Movies

Caring for Grandma in How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies was originally published in Story Lamp Reviews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.