Friday, March 27, 2020

Plague Stories

Books, Inq. notices a mention in the Texas Monthly of Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a fictional treatment of her bout of the Spanish influenza of 1918. It is an excellent novella, one that I have read more than once. Yet my complaint against considering it as a novel of the pandemic is that it shows the delirium of the patient and the bereavement of one who has lost a loved one; but the caregivers, those who administered medicine, changed the bedclothes, and generally tended to hygiene, is absent. I say the same of the few pages given to the same epidemic in Ivan Doig's Dancing at the Rascal Fair.

This may simply be a matter of what makes for better reading or more interesting writing. The eponymous protagonist of Roderick Random gives a more memorable account of his own sufferings from yellow fever than of his tending to the sick as surgeon's mate before he fell ill. (To be sure, this is quite in character: somewhat later, Random complains of the hard duty of serving as physician on a slave ship on a voyage from West Africa to Argentina.) In War and Peace, one reads gathers that Natasha Rostov was an assiduous nurse. One reads rather more--not that I would omit a line--of Prince Andrei's thoughts, delirious and otherwise, while under treatment.

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