Book Review: Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk
by Amy Rogers. Writer. Scientist.
In 2006, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2016, he started writing a novel about an epidemic of bubonic plague on a fictional Mediterranean island set in 1901 during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. In this novel Nights of Plague Pamuk explores the devastating and unexpected consequences of the plague. Society, religion, local and global politics, interpersonal relationships, schools, commerce-all are rearranged and put into conflict as the state and civil society grapple with whether and how to resist the spread of the disease, and to manage the dead and those left behind.
As I read Nights of Plague, I wondered over and over again that this brilliant author had created much of this work before the coronavirus pandemic happened in the real world. It is a profound testament to his understanding of human nature and human relationships that much of what I read in his historical fiction book directly parallels what I observed in my own 21 st-century society when confronted with decisions about “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (quarantine, isolation, etc.) to hamper the spread of infectious disease. The same conflicts still exist: hunger/commerce vs risk of exposure; faith vs reason; individual vs society; freedom vs state control; the need to act based on…
