206 pages
English language
Published Dec. 1, 2021 by AK Press.
A tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world.
Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the …
A tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world.
Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.
Contemplative pandemic novella, weaving in loss, racial disparity, resilience, sitting and walking with grief, and an undercurrent of hopeful action.
Content warning Narrative spoilers
The most common comparison is Parable of the Sower, but the closer comparison in my opinion is Ling Ma’s Severance. Their setups are similar, a disease of unknown origin and behavior begins to wipe out urban populations, and both work as easy metaphors of the real pandemic, with all the fear and unknowing that we felt reflected back onto us from the protagonists.
The differences are tonal. Severance's Candace found her purpose in documenting the newly found emptiness of New York, and her moniker of "NY Ghost" reflects the ephemeral nature of her journey. Sans any defined methodology, she comes to embody a ghost in light steps and intermittent shots, posting online to an unknown number of survivors. The disconnect is the point.
Grievers' Dune's journey feels like the inverse. She's starts as a ghost, an outsider, and it takes the events unfolding to find her place in the world, to find purpose in chronicling the people afflicted. Her heart opens to the memory of her parents, to her relationship with her grandmother and to the tragedy that is affecting only black folks and only in her city. The pain is so pointed, so defined, and she moves toward it. Doing so heals her and gives her definition.
It is warm to Severance's cool. It's textural, with the clutter and ephemera of her home working as both narrative tone and as Dune's method of seeing the world outside. She doesn't just document. She catalogs and honors, and in doing so builds a kind of shrine to people she can never truly understand.
It's a beautiful meditation on family, loss, and what ideas like "justice" looks like within a changing social structure. It ends a little abruptly, but it only made me want to read the second one sooner.
Content warning covid-19
it is a book about (generational) grief, loneliness and depression. i think. and there seems to be some sort of allegory about the first year of the covid-19 pandemic.
but, ultimately, i don't know what the story is actually about. i mean, i probably do, but is it compelling? not to me. i hope that someone else could say otherwise though.
the reasons why i managed to finish it is that the writing in itself is good and it's a novella after all so wasn't going to waste too much time.
on a positive note, i liked the quieter (and more realistic?) approach to an "end of the world" scenario humans take in this story. it felt more true and relatable with what was going on (unlike most of the dystopic looters/scavengers/gangs that overcrowd most of these kind of stories).
Un très joli roman d'anticipation, où un étrange syndrôme mortel frappe les habitants noirs de Detroit. C'est l'occasion pour l'autrice de nous parler de deuil, d'inégalités raciales, de gentrification, et de dédadence du capitalisme. Le style est fluide et poétique, on se laisse emporter par une plume qui accompagne parfaitement un récit qui oscille entre tragédie, pessismisme et optimisme.
Un très joli roman d'anticipation, où un étrange syndrôme mortel frappe les habitants noirs de Detroit. C'est l'occasion pour l'autrice de nous parler de deuil, d'inégalités raciales, de gentrification, et de dédadence du capitalisme. Le style est fluide et poétique, on se laisse emporter par une plume qui accompagne parfaitement un récit qui oscille entre tragédie, pessismisme et optimisme.
