Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Readers all over the world are buying books about epidemics right now. Sales of Albert Kamu's nineteen forty seven novel The Plague have tripled in Italy, They're up in the UK and in France. Stephen King's nineteen seventy eight novel The Stand about a Killer Virus saw a fifty eight percent increase in online sales last month, and among scholars of literature, some of the classics of Western writing, like Boccaccio's famous collection of stories The Decameron, which are set in a time of plague, are drawing renewed and indeed almost obsessive potension. Maybe we're turning to books for answers that we can't get from scientists and politicians, or maybe we're trying to find another way to make sense of our world. We also might be just trying to get out of it and escape. To discuss the literature of pandemics and what we can learn from it. I knew I wanted to hear from Marta Fikorovich. Marta as an associate professor of comparative literature and of English at Yale University. It's not just that Martha has read every book there is to read. It's that she's consistently clear and at the same time profound in her thinking about literature and how it affects the way we think and experience the world. Marta, thanks for agreeing to talk to me, and our general topic is literature in the time of Corona. I want to start by just asking you, how irritated are you by this question? I mean, have we already entered the realm of cliche in this subject. That's a funny question. I think if we get to Boccaccio in the next five minutes, then yes, But hopefully we're going to go somewhere else. And thank you again for inviting me to participate. I mean, in some sense it's my parents are both scientists, and they're very much involved in the COVID effort in Poland. So in some sense I have been feeling a humanist's sense of futility for the past few weeks. I'm like, Oh, my mother is on National TV again talking about a case, and here I am reading the Collected Gutta. So I think in some ways the Poccaccio is a joke, but in another sense, the joke is at us humanists, because it raises the perpetual question of in times of crisis, what does literature do? Exactly, both literature kind of dug up from the past to help us persist, and also any literature that might come out of this moment. At the risk of them diving into cliche because you brought it up, I want them to just ask you, maybe only very briefly, about this classic work of literature, Pocaccio's to Cameron, composed in the aftermath of the thirteen forty seven plague throughout Europe, but in particular in Florence. Why do you think that becomes everybody's go to COVID literary reference. I was actually speaking about this to an Italian scholar a couple of days ago, and what he said, and I agree with this, is that Bocaccio captures something about quarantine that is about recreation in two different senses. Kind Of, under one hand, quarantine is all about figuring out what society might turn out to be once kind of everybody emerges and some people have died and the economy and politics will have shifted in ways that we cannot as yet imagine. But then in addition to that lofty sense of recreation, there's also the less lofty sense of recreation. Meaning of quarantine is all about dailiness overwhelming your life. It's all about thinking about the very large scale, within the confines of something that is kind of much smaller even than your regular professional life or regular everyday life. That huge difference in scales between the banality of what will I make for breakfast and how will it be until the peak hits. I think that's something Boccaccio captures quite well, and that's something that the pathos of the stories, which are kind of charming and funny but also often profoundly sad. And this is very quickly developed, rapidly ending way, because there's something about the stories that also captures the shortness of every person's life and also kind of how easily a life can be turned into a twist in a tail. Then will then take you through maybe ten minutes of quarantine. Marjor you said that as a humanist, you were asking yourself, you know, what do we have to contribute? And seems to me the answer is a whole lot, because it's humanists who are interested in how we process our experiences. Yes, yeah, what writers or ideas are are helping you to process the strange experiences that we're in now. Well, one thing I've been thinking about a lot is the work of Vassily Grossman, who is a relatively lesser known Russian author who lived in the time of the Soviet period, was then exiled to Armenia because the Soviet government at first really liked his novels and then suddenly turned against them. And a lot of what he tries to write about is kind of experiences of war in siege. I mean, his big novel Stalingrad is about the Siege of Stalingrad, and here again it's all about kind of different temporalities coming together, kind of the temporality of waiting for the Germans to come in the Sigi of Stalingrad, and then the rapidity with which everybody in the novel spoiler alert kind of rapidly dies in the siege. And he has that amazing book called Everything Flows, which is about a man who comes back from Goula to his home village, and is this encounter between a man who has experienced something unimaginable for over a decade and is suddenly back in a town that is, on the one hand, exactly the way it used to be and on the other hand, completely different, and he can't figure out how to re enter it. And I've been thinking about those books in part because of the question of how do you begin again and what does it mean to kind of leave the house and resume life after all of this has happened. So those are two book end ideas that you're finding there. The first is the waiting idea that we're sitting around. We know something bad is almost certainly going to happen, we know it can involve death, and we're just sitting here. The other end of the book end is what will happen afterwards? Yes, what about the in between? I think in the in between? One thing I've been thinking about as an academic and a writer is kind of how the monastic ideal of the solitary writer is such a lie. I mean, even monasteries are usually full of people. That's the point of a monasteries. You have a lot of people who have nothing else to do but pray and talk to you. And I think one thing I've been thinking about is just universities and how much as we scholars fetishize the notion of getting to go away on sabbatical, which is where COVID currently finds me, there's also the beauty of getting to go talk to people. And so many of our best ideas actually happen in conversation with people in a way that it just makes this myth of disappearing into yourself to come up with a magnum opus seem all the more like a kind of romantic individualists mirage. And the other thing I've been thinking about is just the realist novel in its capacity to think about the every day and make us notice the every day. I think it's no accident that we're all reading very long novels, or at least everybody I know one has been reading very long novels. And it's not just to pass the time, which is why novels used to be long in the first place, back in the day, because you had to go off into the countryside and there would be winter, there would be only one neighbor to talk to a horse right away, So what were you going to do? You're going to read the long Dickens novel, but there's also something about them that celebrates that day lead us, and sometimes, as Inflabet is really pessimistic about it and treats it as this thing that will eventually grind you down, but also kind of makes you realize that most of your life does actually happen within your house in a certain sense, and the people whom you touch most intimately are often to people whom you live with. Anything in that sense, the genre is like the poem or the novel that could have tried to get you back into that place are kind of precious in a very different way because rather than kind of getting us back into this place of contemplation, they kind of accompany us in what has become constant contemplation of the living room and then the kitchen and the living room. Again. That's super interesting to me because my instinct before you said that was sort of like the point that you were initially making, I think, in part to disparage it, namely that one reason we might feel able to take on long novels is that the pace of our lives feels different. But I think you were saying sort of the opposite. I think you were saying that that's not what's going on that it's really has to do more with the idea of a novel about our inner worlds and our inner lives corresponds to the fact that we are stuck in our rooms. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And in that sense it's also making me appreciate at least how much Beckett is engaged with realism in a very serious way. Kind for all is absurdity, and absurdism is actually just like the slowing down of realism. It was ultimate degree. When you think about the Beckett of the long novels, which are all about a person slowly losing mobility. There's Molloy, where Malloy initially as a bike and then he loses the bike, and then he goes lame in one foot, then then in both feet, and by the end of the novel he's just a crawling somewhere, sort of forgetting where it was he was crawling to in the first place. And then Malone Dies, which is about a character who may or may not be related to the characters of Molloy lying in bed, dying, trying to write his diary of being stuck in this room, occasionally getting food, and he keeps dropping his pencil. So a lot of the novel is just about like I found my pencil again. It has been two weeks since I have seen my pencil. Pure in is again, so I will write about the last two weeks. You make it seem so thrilling. It's fascinating, Marta. What about escapism and the novel? One of the experiences that most of us have when reading novels is to not be where we are. It seems especially valuable when you can't get out of the place where you, in fact are. Are there any escapist novels that seem to you particularly suitable to the moment. Well, I think it depends to me on what you mean by escapism, because I often find that what I initially think of escapism is actually something like a parallax, meaning it doesn't so much get me out of reality that it transposes it by a couple of degrees, so I can think about it a little bit more freely, which is what daydreaming off it is fundamentally. And I when we daydream, it's not like we're coming up with something from scratch, like what would that even mean? Is that we're trying to imagine a version of the people we know in the lives we go in a different country, or from a different perspective, or with a slightly different balance of power. When COVID first hit, I found myself obsessively thinking about the zombie movies of Roberto, particularly the one that takes place in the super market, Dawn of the Dead, which is all about kind of the fascination of going into the supermarket and being like, oh, I could survive here forever if I could only give the zombies out. And then they do give the zombies out, and then they collapse because they can't agree with each other. And I think it's not accidental that, like a lot of other people I know, we're looking to the dystopian literature of surviving and scarce resources. Like most of the children I know and I've been hearing about during the epidemic have been making a little self isolation forts in the living room, which is sort of adorable. And you would think they would be doing something else, like imagining, like I don't know, like huge villas or world travel, but no, it's always like I am in this timy place. We have three pieces of bread, let's share them together. I love that zombie movies come to your mind as a motive escapism. My instinctive reaction to that is to say that, yes, I recognize the form of escapism that just changes things by a few degrees. And I also identify that very much with science fiction, as the genre where you just tweak a few a few assumptions and you get something different out of it. What about the form of escapism though, that, at least on the surface, isn't just tweak a few things, but is move yourself to an entirely different environment. I mean the sort of radical escapism. I mean, so for me, if I am at my lowest point, if I open Conan Doyle, you know, and I'm at two twenty one B Baker Street, I am instantaneously in escape. And that's not because my life is just a few twists and turns away from those of Holmes and Watson. It's that's so radically disjunct from my world. And that's a different form I think of escapism where you literally want to just get out of your head. I don't want to think about what's going on. I want to think about something completely different right now. Not going to psychoanalyze pattern, but I'm very tempted too. Oh go for it. No, just in the sense that could of the crime narrative and the clue narratives, also the fundamental form of imagine control, of imagining that the world is actually legible, and if you only look for enough clues and put them together, it's long going to be okay, and everything's going to be clear again. You can send me a bill. I mean, that's a great psychomanalytic insight of why I love mystery novels. They embody the fantasy of putting it all together and making sense of it and then being in control again. We'll be back in just a moment. Magical realism got The first Corona shout out has to have been within a couple of days of people starting to talk about sociation that everyone was saying love in the time of Corona, Love and the time of Corona. And I remember the first person who texted that to me. I thought, oh my god, this person is the cleverest person I've ever met, And then very quickly I realized that, you know, the hive mind had thought of this. And I don't know if anyone's actually out there reading Marquez now, but there is something about the kind of slowing of pace in magical realism, and something about the slight tweaks to the world that does seem just almost intuitively appropriate for the moment, right. And it's also funny because put the question that collected and magical vitalism is also interesting because on the one hand it's about the individual author's imagination. On the other hand, it's about juxtaposing certain traditions that are non imperialist Western traditions and bringing them into the world of the novel, kind of showing that the novel doesn't have to be realist in the sense that's the nineteenth century British and French novel imagine it to be. And how does that angle kick in here? Because I have this instinct that one of the weirdest things about COVID is that people in broadly speaking, the rich West or North, or call it whatever you wish, are accustomed in our era to thinking of pandemics as things that happen all the time to other people Zeka in Latin America, or Ebola in Africa, or earlier versions of stars in China. So if you think of Marquez or something like that, you're thinking of again non Western quote unquote literature as the more contemporary literature of pandemic. You're talking about it in terms of past and present and future. Is always fascinating to me, in part because like I don't quite identify with that Western subjectivity I guess as a Polish person, and because part of my impetus for moving to the United States those fifteen years ago now was because I kind of wanted to live in the future. I didn't want to wait until gay rights were okay at some point in the future in Poland, so I thought I could could have jumped a decade. And that's how it felt at first. And how does it feel now, especially with reference to the pandemic. Is it if there's a sort of flattening we're all sort of in the same situation. Yes, And I think there's a kind of big difference in kind of what kinds of memories to spring back, because my family in Poland, I find myself talking to them a lot about my grandmother's memories of the war, which, for her and for a lot of the people I know who were the people survived, was all about trying to wait it out and occasionally having something very dramatic happened, which would become the story that you told to people that most of the time you were just kind of trying to be in the potato field when the planes came and not to be seen. Yes, I think it's weird and interesting what kinds of transgenerational memories that brings up, and with parts of my heritage, it makes me feel close to because in some senses it's been making me feel more connected to a certain part of my Eastern Europeanist that I have been in a while. It is really really interesting that the experience of waiting is a common thread. You know, we're waiting for something and we're sort of hoping to hoping to get through it to the other side. Yeah, Kamu is my last topic to bring up. I mean, I think then we've hit all the big three of the on a literature discussion. Have you heard or read anything or thought of anything around the Kamu that was a value or of interest. I think I've been thinking about Mu in great part in relation to the notion of the plague is a time of trial, meaning kind of people's real character comes out and what it means for that to be quote unquote your real character like. Emergencies certainly bring to the foreground certain parts of ourselves, and they're valuable parts of ourselves, but how do they relate to the rest of reality. I've been reading in my World War Two phase of my COVID reading, I've been reading Joan Juno's Occupation Journal. He's a French novelist. It's a journal from the occupation of France by the Germans, which is coming out in its first English translation, and one of the things he meditates about is kind of what those situations of emergency due to people. And he says, there are some people who think they're really strong, and then the occupation shows them to be weak. And there are people who have always imagined themselves to be weak, but a situation of crisis actually shows them to be unconsciously very strong. And then he says there's the third kind of person, which, surprise, surprise, is most valuable of all, which is stay true to themselves and who are able to act in a crisis the way they would in an everyday situation. And that's another thing I guess I've been wondering about, kind of in relation to the kind of existentialist view of COVID, which is kind of what are we to do with what it makes of us? And how do we, on the one hand, kind of allow ourselves to think seriously about the things it forces us to think about, like socio economic inequality, like our own lives, our own choices, without succumbing to the fallacy of kind. Everything I think in a period of isolation is true, or everything I do in this moment is the essential part of me, and probably those answers will be different to different people. Marta, thank you very very much for the conversation. I really I learned a huge amount. As always, it's so fun to talk to you. My pleasure. Listening to Marta really brought home to me two pretty different aspects of our inner experiences of sitting at home and reading books during Corona. On the one hand, that there's the individual experience. Marta talked about being Polish coming to the United States and how that affects her experiences in engaging with literature and with ideas. Each of us has our own individual path to follow, and indeed, our conversation about existentialism puts the individual's judgment and the individual's ability to make a choice front and center. In our experiences. Yet at the same time, Marta also brought home that there's a universal collective experience they were undergoing in relation to the coronavirus, and literature is a mechanism whereby we collectively process and think about experience. Books are meant to be read by more than one person. There are ways of engaging the world that are shared at least between the writer and the reader, and ideally of many more people as well. Our collective life experiences are being shaped by Corona. We're alone, but we're alone together until the next time I speak to you. Be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott, with research help from zooe Wynn. Mastering is by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com. Slash Feldman. To discus Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Readers all over the world are buying books about epidemics right now. Sales of Albert Kamu's nineteen forty seven novel The Plague have tripled in Italy, They're up in the UK and in France. Stephen King's nineteen seventy eight novel The Stand about a Killer Virus saw a fifty eight percent increase in online sales last month, and among scholars of literature, some of the classics of Western writing, like Boccaccio's famous collection of stories The Decameron, which are set in a time of plague, are drawing renewed and indeed almost obsessive potension. Maybe we're turning to books for answers that we can't get from scientists and politicians, or maybe we're trying to find another way to make sense of our world. We also might be just trying to get out of it and escape. To discuss the literature of pandemics and what we can learn from it. I knew I wanted to hear from Marta Fikorovich. Marta as an associate professor of comparative literature and of English at Yale University. It's not just that Martha has read every book there is to read. It's that she's consistently clear and at the same time profound in her thinking about literature and how it affects the way we think and experience the world. Marta, thanks for agreeing to talk to me, and our general topic is literature in the time of Corona. I want to start by just asking you, how irritated are you by this question? I mean, have we already entered the realm of cliche in this subject. That's a funny question. I think if we get to Boccaccio in the next five minutes, then yes, But hopefully we're going to go somewhere else. And thank you again for inviting me to participate. I mean, in some sense it's my parents are both scientists, and they're very much involved in the COVID effort in Poland. So in some sense I have been feeling a humanist's sense of futility for the past few weeks. I'm like, Oh, my mother is on National TV again talking about a case, and here I am reading the Collected Gutta. So I think in some ways the Poccaccio is a joke, but in another sense, the joke is at us humanists, because it raises the perpetual question of in times of crisis, what does literature do? Exactly, both literature kind of dug up from the past to help us persist, and also any literature that might come out of this moment. At the risk of them diving into cliche because you brought it up, I want them to just ask you, maybe only very briefly, about this classic work of literature, Pocaccio's to Cameron, composed in the aftermath of the thirteen forty seven plague throughout Europe, but in particular in Florence. Why do you think that becomes everybody's go to COVID literary reference. I was actually speaking about this to an Italian scholar a couple of days ago, and what he said, and I agree with this, is that Bocaccio captures something about quarantine that is about recreation in two different senses. Kind Of, under one hand, quarantine is all about figuring out what society might turn out to be once kind of everybody emerges and some people have died and the economy and politics will have shifted in ways that we cannot as yet imagine. But then in addition to that lofty sense of recreation, there's also the less lofty sense of recreation. Meaning of quarantine is all about dailiness overwhelming your life. It's all about thinking about the very large scale, within the confines of something that is kind of much smaller even than your regular professional life or regular everyday life. That huge difference in scales between the banality of what will I make for breakfast and how will it be until the peak hits. I think that's something Boccaccio captures quite well, and that's something that the pathos of the stories, which are kind of charming and funny but also often profoundly sad. And this is very quickly developed, rapidly ending way, because there's something about the stories that also captures the shortness of every person's life and also kind of how easily a life can be turned into a twist in a tail. Then will then take you through maybe ten minutes of quarantine. Marjor you said that as a humanist, you were asking yourself, you know, what do we have to contribute? And seems to me the answer is a whole lot, because it's humanists who are interested in how we process our experiences. Yes, yeah, what writers or ideas are are helping you to process the strange experiences that we're in now. Well, one thing I've been thinking about a lot is the work of Vassily Grossman, who is a relatively lesser known Russian author who lived in the time of the Soviet period, was then exiled to Armenia because the Soviet government at first really liked his novels and then suddenly turned against them. And a lot of what he tries to write about is kind of experiences of war in siege. I mean, his big novel Stalingrad is about the Siege of Stalingrad, and here again it's all about kind of different temporalities coming together, kind of the temporality of waiting for the Germans to come in the Sigi of Stalingrad, and then the rapidity with which everybody in the novel spoiler alert kind of rapidly dies in the siege. And he has that amazing book called Everything Flows, which is about a man who comes back from Goula to his home village, and is this encounter between a man who has experienced something unimaginable for over a decade and is suddenly back in a town that is, on the one hand, exactly the way it used to be and on the other hand, completely different, and he can't figure out how to re enter it. And I've been thinking about those books in part because of the question of how do you begin again and what does it mean to kind of leave the house and resume life after all of this has happened. So those are two book end ideas that you're finding there. The first is the waiting idea that we're sitting around. We know something bad is almost certainly going to happen, we know it can involve death, and we're just sitting here. The other end of the book end is what will happen afterwards? Yes, what about the in between? I think in the in between? One thing I've been thinking about as an academic and a writer is kind of how the monastic ideal of the solitary writer is such a lie. I mean, even monasteries are usually full of people. That's the point of a monasteries. You have a lot of people who have nothing else to do but pray and talk to you. And I think one thing I've been thinking about is just universities and how much as we scholars fetishize the notion of getting to go away on sabbatical, which is where COVID currently finds me, there's also the beauty of getting to go talk to people. And so many of our best ideas actually happen in conversation with people in a way that it just makes this myth of disappearing into yourself to come up with a magnum opus seem all the more like a kind of romantic individualists mirage. And the other thing I've been thinking about is just the realist novel in its capacity to think about the every day and make us notice the every day. I think it's no accident that we're all reading very long novels, or at least everybody I know one has been reading very long novels. And it's not just to pass the time, which is why novels used to be long in the first place, back in the day, because you had to go off into the countryside and there would be winter, there would be only one neighbor to talk to a horse right away, So what were you going to do? You're going to read the long Dickens novel, but there's also something about them that celebrates that day lead us, and sometimes, as Inflabet is really pessimistic about it and treats it as this thing that will eventually grind you down, but also kind of makes you realize that most of your life does actually happen within your house in a certain sense, and the people whom you touch most intimately are often to people whom you live with. Anything in that sense, the genre is like the poem or the novel that could have tried to get you back into that place are kind of precious in a very different way because rather than kind of getting us back into this place of contemplation, they kind of accompany us in what has become constant contemplation of the living room and then the kitchen and the living room. Again. That's super interesting to me because my instinct before you said that was sort of like the point that you were initially making, I think, in part to disparage it, namely that one reason we might feel able to take on long novels is that the pace of our lives feels different. But I think you were saying sort of the opposite. I think you were saying that that's not what's going on that it's really has to do more with the idea of a novel about our inner worlds and our inner lives corresponds to the fact that we are stuck in our rooms. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And in that sense it's also making me appreciate at least how much Beckett is engaged with realism in a very serious way. Kind for all is absurdity, and absurdism is actually just like the slowing down of realism. It was ultimate degree. When you think about the Beckett of the long novels, which are all about a person slowly losing mobility. There's Molloy, where Malloy initially as a bike and then he loses the bike, and then he goes lame in one foot, then then in both feet, and by the end of the novel he's just a crawling somewhere, sort of forgetting where it was he was crawling to in the first place. And then Malone Dies, which is about a character who may or may not be related to the characters of Molloy lying in bed, dying, trying to write his diary of being stuck in this room, occasionally getting food, and he keeps dropping his pencil. So a lot of the novel is just about like I found my pencil again. It has been two weeks since I have seen my pencil. Pure in is again, so I will write about the last two weeks. You make it seem so thrilling. It's fascinating, Marta. What about escapism and the novel? One of the experiences that most of us have when reading novels is to not be where we are. It seems especially valuable when you can't get out of the place where you, in fact are. Are there any escapist novels that seem to you particularly suitable to the moment. Well, I think it depends to me on what you mean by escapism, because I often find that what I initially think of escapism is actually something like a parallax, meaning it doesn't so much get me out of reality that it transposes it by a couple of degrees, so I can think about it a little bit more freely, which is what daydreaming off it is fundamentally. And I when we daydream, it's not like we're coming up with something from scratch, like what would that even mean? Is that we're trying to imagine a version of the people we know in the lives we go in a different country, or from a different perspective, or with a slightly different balance of power. When COVID first hit, I found myself obsessively thinking about the zombie movies of Roberto, particularly the one that takes place in the super market, Dawn of the Dead, which is all about kind of the fascination of going into the supermarket and being like, oh, I could survive here forever if I could only give the zombies out. And then they do give the zombies out, and then they collapse because they can't agree with each other. And I think it's not accidental that, like a lot of other people I know, we're looking to the dystopian literature of surviving and scarce resources. Like most of the children I know and I've been hearing about during the epidemic have been making a little self isolation forts in the living room, which is sort of adorable. And you would think they would be doing something else, like imagining, like I don't know, like huge villas or world travel, but no, it's always like I am in this timy place. We have three pieces of bread, let's share them together. I love that zombie movies come to your mind as a motive escapism. My instinctive reaction to that is to say that, yes, I recognize the form of escapism that just changes things by a few degrees. And I also identify that very much with science fiction, as the genre where you just tweak a few a few assumptions and you get something different out of it. What about the form of escapism though, that, at least on the surface, isn't just tweak a few things, but is move yourself to an entirely different environment. I mean the sort of radical escapism. I mean, so for me, if I am at my lowest point, if I open Conan Doyle, you know, and I'm at two twenty one B Baker Street, I am instantaneously in escape. And that's not because my life is just a few twists and turns away from those of Holmes and Watson. It's that's so radically disjunct from my world. And that's a different form I think of escapism where you literally want to just get out of your head. I don't want to think about what's going on. I want to think about something completely different right now. Not going to psychoanalyze pattern, but I'm very tempted too. Oh go for it. No, just in the sense that could of the crime narrative and the clue narratives, also the fundamental form of imagine control, of imagining that the world is actually legible, and if you only look for enough clues and put them together, it's long going to be okay, and everything's going to be clear again. You can send me a bill. I mean, that's a great psychomanalytic insight of why I love mystery novels. They embody the fantasy of putting it all together and making sense of it and then being in control again. We'll be back in just a moment. Magical realism got The first Corona shout out has to have been within a couple of days of people starting to talk about sociation that everyone was saying love in the time of Corona, Love and the time of Corona. And I remember the first person who texted that to me. I thought, oh my god, this person is the cleverest person I've ever met, And then very quickly I realized that, you know, the hive mind had thought of this. And I don't know if anyone's actually out there reading Marquez now, but there is something about the kind of slowing of pace in magical realism, and something about the slight tweaks to the world that does seem just almost intuitively appropriate for the moment, right. And it's also funny because put the question that collected and magical vitalism is also interesting because on the one hand it's about the individual author's imagination. On the other hand, it's about juxtaposing certain traditions that are non imperialist Western traditions and bringing them into the world of the novel, kind of showing that the novel doesn't have to be realist in the sense that's the nineteenth century British and French novel imagine it to be. And how does that angle kick in here? Because I have this instinct that one of the weirdest things about COVID is that people in broadly speaking, the rich West or North, or call it whatever you wish, are accustomed in our era to thinking of pandemics as things that happen all the time to other people Zeka in Latin America, or Ebola in Africa, or earlier versions of stars in China. So if you think of Marquez or something like that, you're thinking of again non Western quote unquote literature as the more contemporary literature of pandemic. You're talking about it in terms of past and present and future. Is always fascinating to me, in part because like I don't quite identify with that Western subjectivity I guess as a Polish person, and because part of my impetus for moving to the United States those fifteen years ago now was because I kind of wanted to live in the future. I didn't want to wait until gay rights were okay at some point in the future in Poland, so I thought I could could have jumped a decade. And that's how it felt at first. And how does it feel now, especially with reference to the pandemic. Is it if there's a sort of flattening we're all sort of in the same situation. Yes, And I think there's a kind of big difference in kind of what kinds of memories to spring back, because my family in Poland, I find myself talking to them a lot about my grandmother's memories of the war, which, for her and for a lot of the people I know who were the people survived, was all about trying to wait it out and occasionally having something very dramatic happened, which would become the story that you told to people that most of the time you were just kind of trying to be in the potato field when the planes came and not to be seen. Yes, I think it's weird and interesting what kinds of transgenerational memories that brings up, and with parts of my heritage, it makes me feel close to because in some senses it's been making me feel more connected to a certain part of my Eastern Europeanist that I have been in a while. It is really really interesting that the experience of waiting is a common thread. You know, we're waiting for something and we're sort of hoping to hoping to get through it to the other side. Yeah, Kamu is my last topic to bring up. I mean, I think then we've hit all the big three of the on a literature discussion. Have you heard or read anything or thought of anything around the Kamu that was a value or of interest. I think I've been thinking about Mu in great part in relation to the notion of the plague is a time of trial, meaning kind of people's real character comes out and what it means for that to be quote unquote your real character like. Emergencies certainly bring to the foreground certain parts of ourselves, and they're valuable parts of ourselves, but how do they relate to the rest of reality. I've been reading in my World War Two phase of my COVID reading, I've been reading Joan Juno's Occupation Journal. He's a French novelist. It's a journal from the occupation of France by the Germans, which is coming out in its first English translation, and one of the things he meditates about is kind of what those situations of emergency due to people. And he says, there are some people who think they're really strong, and then the occupation shows them to be weak. And there are people who have always imagined themselves to be weak, but a situation of crisis actually shows them to be unconsciously very strong. And then he says there's the third kind of person, which, surprise, surprise, is most valuable of all, which is stay true to themselves and who are able to act in a crisis the way they would in an everyday situation. And that's another thing I guess I've been wondering about, kind of in relation to the kind of existentialist view of COVID, which is kind of what are we to do with what it makes of us? And how do we, on the one hand, kind of allow ourselves to think seriously about the things it forces us to think about, like socio economic inequality, like our own lives, our own choices, without succumbing to the fallacy of kind. Everything I think in a period of isolation is true, or everything I do in this moment is the essential part of me, and probably those answers will be different to different people. Marta, thank you very very much for the conversation. I really I learned a huge amount. As always, it's so fun to talk to you. My pleasure. Listening to Marta really brought home to me two pretty different aspects of our inner experiences of sitting at home and reading books during Corona. On the one hand, that there's the individual experience. Marta talked about being Polish coming to the United States and how that affects her experiences in engaging with literature and with ideas. Each of us has our own individual path to follow, and indeed, our conversation about existentialism puts the individual's judgment and the individual's ability to make a choice front and center. In our experiences. Yet at the same time, Marta also brought home that there's a universal collective experience they were undergoing in relation to the coronavirus, and literature is a mechanism whereby we collectively process and think about experience. Books are meant to be read by more than one person. There are ways of engaging the world that are shared at least between the writer and the reader, and ideally of many more people as well. Our collective life experiences are being shaped by Corona. We're alone, but we're alone together until the next time I speak to you. Be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott, with research help from zooe Wynn. Mastering is by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com. Slash Feldman. To discus Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background