The Pestilence: Part One
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Book Overview
An anti-novel set at the end of history, The Pestilence is a cautionary tale about the threat and dangers of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and autocracy, as well as an illustration of the lingering effects of colonization: the effects on the individual of the deprivation of autonomy, the destruction of self-reliance, and the disruption of self-determination.
A man, haunted by the memory of his dead wife, struggles to begin his day. However, things are not so simple. He might be the dead one. He might be the victim, he might be the murderer. The mystery deepens as the past, and the dead, interrupt and disrupt the present, and the living, as the two struggle for dominance. The dead wife refuses to be forgotten. She tries to come back to life, while the man attempts to forget her, to have her forgotten, to keep her dead. Worse for him, the small town in which he lives seems only to reflect his own increasing loss of control, as he seems to be losing his mind, and his sanity. Is he crazy, or is everyone else? Is his wife really dead, or is he? Who is the murderer, who the victim, and perhaps most importantly: why did the murder occur at all?
Exploring themes of knowledge and power; truth: the invention, creation, destruction, and denial of it; the ever-dynamic play of opposites: yin and yang, feminine and masculine, light and dark, speech and writing, The Pestilence is a portrait of the psychological effects of the confrontation and interaction of opposing and conflicting entities, often intent on mutual destruction, in the pursuit of a new creative form. The form illustrates the process of destruction that must occur for the emergence of the new: whole words are deconstructed into the small words that comprise them, eventually forming new wholes, representing transcendence and liberation from the old and emergence into the new.
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