![]() ![]() Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago.” (Bird doesn’t tell her he’s picturing book bonfires, but she intuits it.) “Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. “We pulp them,” a helpful librarian tells Bird. ![]() In Ng’s version of the American Nightmare, there’s no need to burn books. ![]() Now he works in a library, shelving books. (We’re given more details about this Crisis than we actually need.)īefore the Crisis, Bird’s father was a linguist. His mother is a fugitive, on the run because she wrote a supposedly subversive poem titled “All Our Missing Hearts.” America is living under PACT - the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act - which became law during a confused and economically disastrous period known as the Crisis. Noah Gardner, known as Bird, is a 12-year-old Chinese American living with his father in Cambridge, Mass. In “Our Missing Hearts,” Celeste Ng’s dystopian America is milder, which makes it more believable - and hence, more upsetting. In “1984”’s infamous Room 101, Winston Smith is finally broken when a cage filled with rats is dumped over his head. The firefighters in “Fahrenheit 451” incinerate books instead of saving them. “The Handmaid’s Tale” deals with state-sanctioned rape. In “The Time Machine,” the Morlocks feed and clothe the Eloi, then eat them. The definition of “dystopia ” in the Oxford English Dictionary is bald and to the point: “An imaginary place in which everything is as bad as possible.” ![]()
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