Saturday, March 19, 2022

Nine books to read at the end of the world

Sasha Fletcher is the author of the novel Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, a book of poems, several chapbooks of poetry, and a novella.

At Electric Lit he tagged nine books about apocalypses, including:
Eureopeana by Patrik Ouředník, translated by Gerald Turner

Eureopeana is about the world after World War I. The book opens by telling us the average height of the people in several nations participating in World War I and how far the bodies of those fallen troops would span laid head to toe, then it tells us about the invention of chemical warfare (gas attack!) and how everyone hoped they’d be home for Christmas. I’m not certain I’m doing this book justice here. It moves fluidly across the 20th century, showing us how it sprang from a war that broke the world, something so vast and terrible millions thought we’d never come out of it alive, only to see it happen again and again, and it talks about this the same way it talks about the invention of the bra, and of Barbie, and of the way movies showed sex. Everything happens at once, in an order dictated organically by the author. Worlds and lives and wars and hopes and dreams collapse over and over only to be born again and die again. I’ve never read anything like this.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue