Lockdown Lovers

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Lahore, Pakistan: Lakir Art GalleryEvent: Lockdown Lovers, Lakir, 108 A Block, Faisal Town, Lahore, Pakistan. John Mandel’s Station Eleven some years earlier and couldn’t wrap my imagination around the post-pandemic sections of the book. Under these circumstances, it makes sense that it would produce a virus to protect itself and its species. The illusive and unreal Hong Kong, so fitting for the flâneur, has now become so regulated as to be almost unrecognisable.

Kristal meets Lisette on the last night of her trip to Australia, and the pair share a one-night stand. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Each diner, worker, and loiterer is representative of everyone else and is yet still wonderfully distinctive.The virus provides a pathogen that can be named and resisted, solutions that can be purchased and hoarded: the trolleys “full of sanitary towels” and “alcohol disinfectant”. The Cork setting may seem convenient only because it’s O’Sullivan’s own home town, but, as it turns out, he adds a fascinating Hong Kong connection to this part of the story. We meet John, who sits in a 24-hour McDonald’s in the Hong Kong suburb of Sai Kung, sipping warm water and ruminating on the state of the city.

More than a third of people newly living with a partner believed that two months of lockdown felt like the equivalent of two years of commitment. One of O’Sullivan’s three narrators is John, who is an Irish professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In Part I, set in Hong Kong and China, forty-something academic John Ryan goes to the local 24/7 McDonalds every day to record events around him.It’s that kind of need that you have when you feel under a lot of cortisol stress, and you want to feel as safe as possible next to somebody. He delivers groceries and medicine to his parents’ porch but the pain is too much when he sees them staring at him from twenty feet away behind the porch door. Kwok-ying is a government health worker who also ends up in the Lamma quarantine centre and who mentions in passing a politician named Carnie Lim in Hong Kong and a leader named Shi in China. Instead, the stories of Kwok-Ying, Phoebe and John are understated, authentic, and unwaveringly real.