Too soon? (Micro reviews 8 & 9)

 Looking back on Covid around the world - sort of.

It was inevitable that the Covid pandemic was going to spawn a lot of books, already you can see it filtering through into fiction and there have been a lot of memoirs from medical professionals published. In the past couple of months I've also noticed a few memoirs coming through from people in other countries talking about their experiences of lockdown. So far the ones I've come across have been all from English speakers and set in western cities but it has been interesting getting an insight into lockdowns around the world.

The first book I came across was These Days are Numbered by Rebecca Rosenblum (Dundurn Press/NetGalley) which is a collection of Facebook posts that Rosenblum wrote between March 2020 and March 2022. She lived in an apartment on the edge of a reasonably affluent Toronto suburb but was keenly aware how lucky she and her husband were compared to lots of their neighbours.

Being a collection of Facebook posts this book did, at times. feel overlong and repetitive but thinking back to this time in Norwich it was overlong and repetitive so this may be more accurate than annoying! 

The second book was Matthew Kneale's Roman Plague Diaries (Atlantic Books), set in Rome and focussing on the first Roman lockdown of March 2020 until early summer 2020. Again Kneale lives in an apartment in a reasonable affluent area of the city but the Italian/Roman lockdowns were more severe than others I've read and the lack of access to open spaces even for the Kneale family becomes an issue.

This book is a diary and also a meditation of being a non Italian living in the city, Italian history and politics as a whole plus also a look at how nothing in the world is actually new...

Both books were thoughtful in that they did query how people not as fortunate as themselves were coping with the rules, and they did convey the fear, oppressiveness and the way time really did seem to behave oddly. 

On the whole I preferred Kneale's taut and focussed book rather than the sprawling stream of consciousness from Rosenblum but it was great to get a more global view of the pandemic - I would like to hear more from the developing world, or even in translation to see how non English speaking world found this unsettling time.