From THE LITERARY REVIEW, Review by Cassie Hay. Excerpt below:
Translated from the Afrikaans by the author
(High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire: And Other Stories, 2015)
First signs include sudden onset of fever, fatigue and muscle pain, a sore throat that can be easily confused with the flu. The virus, not living itself but consisting of proteins and DNA and described as an organism “on the edge of life,” worms its way through the blood. Vomiting and diarrhea come next, the body’s attempt at expelling a killer is that is by now already too strong. Yet the fight continues: secretions ooze from the gums, blood seeps from below, until at last the organs shut down and death arrives.
I’m speaking of Ebola here, but even as I write that description my words already seem antique. Across the wires comes an announcement that Dr. Michael Salia has died in an Omaha hospital; his death signals that the Ebola crisis has quietly come to an end in the United States. Active cases in this country now number zero. As Russell Berman puts it in The Atlantic, “For now, the borderline hysteria that began with the arrival, diagnosis, and subsequent death, of Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas is resembling so many other crises of the moment, in with a bang and out with a whimper.”
Only time will tell how this era will be remembered (likely the Ebola crisis will not be) but it seems to me that the general uneasiness lurking beneath the surface is a reverberation of the old Victorian concerns. The evidence is there: a fear of germs, general xenophobia, a certain prudishness; and it’s worth considering that Dallas has grown by over a million people in the past ten years, Texas by five million, and the old maize fields and squat mesquite trees have been replaced by ribbons of concrete. The world simultaneously shrinks and expands, as it has since the days of Eden. It was a cause for neurosis in eighteenth century England; in 1960s California, Joan Didion called it atomization. Today, the rate of acceleration seems to be increasing the spaces between us, pulling us apart from every direction.