--Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk
Remember COVID, folks? Remember the COVID deniers? Remember the vaccine refusers and the mask opponents and the sinister Chinese who spread the the virus and the government conspiracy to trammel the freedoms of the American people and the accusation that the whole thing was a hoax, that people had not really died, that the people who did die were dying anyway and the government just said that all had died from the virus. Remember the wackos and the knuckleheads? Well, it was nothing new. The virus itself was new, but the knuckleheads were not. These same folks, or their ancestors we should say, reacted in the same way to the European plague of the early 20th century, which had required the same measures to save lives--isolation, separation, quarantine, masking. It was the same with the plague of the mid 1600s, the measures were the same. People were confined to their houses, and yet there were those who refused to be confined. The government would respond by sending soldiers to nail the doors shut where the occupants refused to join in with the common good. And still they escaped, and of course spread more infection. Orhan Pamuk tells a familiar story in this 2022 novel. It is an eerie read concerning a plague that took place a century and a quarter ago, and yet a people that have not changed from one plague to another, one century to the next.
