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A review by christygoldsmith
The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
5.0
I doubted whether my choice to read a book about death and trauma in the 1918 pandemic during the 2020 pandemic was an apt one, but I appreciate Donahue's prose, so I embarked on The Pull of the Stars regardless. It turns out that this book is the exactly perfect book to read during this bizarre and terrifying year. Much like Room, her previous text, the beauty of this book is that it's plotted in nearly real time. It takes place in one maternity influenza ward over the course of just a few days. Although it's circumscribed in time and place, it's thematically universal, which is really quite the marvel.
The fact that Donoghue finished this book just before March 2020 makes it even more remarkable. She highlights the seeming randomness of who influenza kills, and she includes government propaganda signage with lines like "INFECTION CULLS ONLY THE WEAKEST OF THE HERD." Whew, timely and terrifying, indeed.
Early in the book, Nurse Julia Powers, narrates, "As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs. We had it no worse here than anywhere else; self-pity was as useless as panic." If those pithy sentences don't draw a common thread from the last century to our own, then nothing does. Reading about the intersection of the First World War, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and the stark poverty of Dublin's urban core, I couldn't help but draw comparisons. Sure, we ran out of toilet paper, but war rations left these folks--many in abject poverty to begin with--with nothing, with tea made of wood shavings and porridge of unknown ingredients. Somehow the confluence of traumas in this book (and there are many--I wouldn't pick this one up as a pregnant woman or someone who had lost a child) made feel better? Well, as Julia says, "everything was entirely arsewise." So it goes.
There were some minor flaws--some wonky pacing, a few too sentimental parts -- and I had read this one in non-pandemic times, it'd be a four star read. But for this moment? Five stars, indeed.
The fact that Donoghue finished this book just before March 2020 makes it even more remarkable. She highlights the seeming randomness of who influenza kills, and she includes government propaganda signage with lines like "INFECTION CULLS ONLY THE WEAKEST OF THE HERD." Whew, timely and terrifying, indeed.
Early in the book, Nurse Julia Powers, narrates, "As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs. We had it no worse here than anywhere else; self-pity was as useless as panic." If those pithy sentences don't draw a common thread from the last century to our own, then nothing does. Reading about the intersection of the First World War, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and the stark poverty of Dublin's urban core, I couldn't help but draw comparisons. Sure, we ran out of toilet paper, but war rations left these folks--many in abject poverty to begin with--with nothing, with tea made of wood shavings and porridge of unknown ingredients. Somehow the confluence of traumas in this book (and there are many--I wouldn't pick this one up as a pregnant woman or someone who had lost a child) made feel better? Well, as Julia says, "everything was entirely arsewise." So it goes.
There were some minor flaws--some wonky pacing, a few too sentimental parts -- and I had read this one in non-pandemic times, it'd be a four star read. But for this moment? Five stars, indeed.