The leftovers tom perrotta pdf merge11/26/2022 But I’m not sure - I think people rally when the crisis is happening, but I think the trauma after is often extremely irrational and destabilizing.īooks: Often, great crises become the source material for great art. I’d love to see that it actually restores people’s faith in scientific expertise and maybe make skeptics look again at global warming and think about how we prepare. So I don’t know, I honestly don’t know, how this plays out. But it’s happening at a time when lots of people had started to question science anyway, so there’s this ongoing desire to find some explanation that isn’t scientific, and usually that’s paranoid political conspiracy these days. What’s so interesting about this, and what makes it an imperfect parallel to “The Leftovers,” is that we know what’s happening: We know what a virus is, we know what a pandemic is. So it was like all of our systems for making sense of the universe had fallen apart. The scientists had no idea what happened. It looked like the rapture, but it wasn’t the rapture it didn’t choose Christians over anybody else. In “The Leftovers,” there was this event that had no scientific or religious explanation. Perrotta: This is the thing that’s so interesting to me. What do we do when we face this kind of fear and loss? I’m wondering if you think people will have similar instincts as we face this crisis, depending on how bad it gets. It was kind of flipping that, saying how little did it take to really shake our faith in the future and in ourselves?īooks: In “The Leftovers” when this event happens, religion is one of the ways that people try to make sense of it. But if it all just happened in a single day, without any explanation, what would that mean? I was definitely pushing against this convention in apocalyptic fiction, which is that 99 percent of humanity is wiped out and this small band of survivors is left to kind of preserve society. And so it’s clearly a number that we can withstand in the normal order of things. Perrotta: I think - I hope I’m right about this - it’s something like the annual death rate for global humanity. Perrotta spoke to the Globe by phone from his Belmont home.īooks: In “The Leftovers” it’s 2 percent of the population that disappears without a trace. In the midst of our coronavirus pandemic, we talked to him about loss and fear, and what happens after a great crisis. In his 2011 book “The Leftovers,” the novelist Tom Perrotta wrote about the aftermath of a world-changing loss when 2 percent of the world’s human beings vanished inexplicably in one day.
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