Prescience

 

On October 13, 2010, I posted a review of a book by Sigrid Nunez, entitled Salvation City.  My review began with the following words:

A new strain of flu, a world-wide pandemic, a death rate apparently exceeding that of 1918-19: No one should have been surprised, but no one was prepared. Moreover, this influenza virus frequently attacked the brain, leaving survivors with varying degrees of brain damage and memory loss.

Speaking of "brain damage and memory loss," I have no memory of ever writing this review.  I have no memory of ever reading the book.  Although I apparently reviewed the book, I do not own the book, nor is it loaded on my Kindle.  

I was so entranced by my own review, and by the foreknowledge that, ten years ago, it seemed to demonstrate of our present pandemic, that I did download the book on Kindle, and finished reading it today.  It's a nicely written YA novel about a 13-year-old boy named Cole who lost both parents during the pandemic, ended up with severe memory loss, and was put into foster care with a fundamentalist pastor and his wife in a small, Christian community in Indiana.  The story was interesting, but in today's Covid-19 world I was primarily interested in how the novel foresaw the details of our own pandemic.

The insights were stunning. While still living with his parents, as the disease first began to spread, Cole searched the internet trying to figure out what was happening.  He read headlines.

"W.H.O. Officials Call Pandemic "Inevitable.""

"Study Shows U.S. Ill-Equipped for Major Pandemic."

"Dysfunctional Health Care System Would Doom Millions, Doctors Say."

Afterward, living with the pastor, Cole looked back on what had happened.

When the second wave hit, everyone hoped it, too, would be mild.   A hope that died by the end of the first week.

Later, many people would say that if the schools had been closed right away, lives might have been saved.  But at the time, people argued that you couldn't just close the schools, because so many parents worked.  If they had to stay home to take care of their kids, a lot of them would lose income, maybe even their jobs.  

...

"How stupid can you get?"  a teacher who'd been fired for refusing to go to work told reporters.  "Anywhere people are crowded together is bad, but with school kids we're talking about a perfect storm of contagion."

...

In city after city, all over the world, the number of people appearing in surgical masks kept multiplying. ... But -- as happened almost everywhere -- there weren't enough masks to go around.  Some made do with scarves or other pieces of cloth, or they tried taping gauze or paper to their faces. 

...

When the first college students started getting sick, some health officials called for nationwide campus quarantines.  [T]he rate of infection among college students was turning out to be drastically high -- higher than any other group except prison inmates.

Toward the end of the novel, the boy's aunt, who lives in Berlin, comes to  Indiana to persuade the boy to come live with her in Germany.  She is appalled by the American response to the virus.

"But compared to Germany, the U.S. might as well be in the Third World, especially if we're talking about health care. Why did every other advanced country get through the pandemic better than the U.S.?

... 

"And it's so weird to see everyone still shaking hands," she said. "That is so primitive."  Cole figured this meant that everyone in Germany did the elbow thing, but it turned out they preferred the Hindu gesture of namaste.

There it is.  Ten years before the event, a novelist pretty well understood the effects a pandemic would have on America, and on Americans.  Government officials, especially in the Obama administration, also understood the potential danger, and drew up specific plans for handling such a crisis -- plans that I understand Trump ordered scrapped in 2019.  

As for myself, I have 140 book reviews on the Goodreads website, the vast majority of which have been copied over from this blog.  I remember something about each of those books, some more than others, of course.  And yet, I remembered nothing about Salvation City.  Reading it just now brought back no recollections.  Nor had I copied and pasted my review of Salvation City onto Goodreads.  

If I were superstitious, I'd doubt whether I actually wrote the review.  Some spiritual being prepared it, using my unique writing style, and inserted it into my blog for ... for what?  My edification?  As a message from Heaven to be passed on to you my readers?

Luckily, I'm a totally rational being.  I guess I just have a small lapse in my memory.  I hope that any memory loss doesn't mean that I've contracted Salvation City's virulent form of  "influenza."