Publishers Weekly
06/28/2021
D’Aguiar (Children of Paradise) takes a powerful and intimate look at his experiences battling cancer during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, a UCLA literature and creative writing professor, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in October 2019 and was still fighting his disease when California went into lockdown, leaving him gripped by the thought that the crisis was “another manifestation of my cancer, a pincer attack on my life from outside and from within.” In lyrical, meditative passages, he describes the comfort he found in poetry, relying on Keats’s wisdom to “stay with insecurity rather than run back to certainty.” In addition to shouldering the weight of his diagnosis—which he hid from friends and family to avoid burdening them with another worry during the pandemic—D’Aguiar recalls how he reckoned with his private jeopardy in the face of America’s virulent racism after the murder of George Floyd. Dashes of humor—as when D’Aguiar discusses flatulence, an act which, thanks to his meds, “must announce itself like the big bang”—offer brief respites from the grim subject matter, and, throughout, the author’s resilience inspires. This makes the fragility of life devastatingly palpable. Agent: Jeffrey Leinman, Folio Literary. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"This makes the fragility of life devastatingly palpable." — Publishers Weekly
"An unflinching narrative and a remarkable read...D’Aguiar offers keen and candid insights into the complexities of the human condition in the here and now." — Booklist
"A visceral account of personal illness and social ills." — Kirkus Reviews
"D’Aguiar’s memoir is intensely personal and candid, technically informative, and, as a result of its range and inviting style, far from morbid or dry." — Library Journal
“Fred D'Aguiar is in possession of one of the most agile literary voices I've encountered, at turns playful, lyrical, philosophical, and always moving. Year of Plagues is about undeniably harrowing experiences - both personal and political, endemic and pandemic - and yet the experience of reading it is dazzling, provoking, and ultimately enlightening. I couldn't put it down.” — Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“Exquisite, Orphic, filled with dark music, Year of Plagues sings the body nuclear. This unflinching memoir weaves history, race, culture, art, fear, and love into an unforgettable journey. As much about poetry as it is about infirmity, Fred D’Aguiar’s conversation with cancer resounds in a bounding, graceful dance with death and life.” — Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Life Without a Recipe
“Sophisticated, funny, far-ranging... Fred D’Aguiar interrogates intersectionality in a time of crisis, personal, national, global and human, to find moments of grace. Nimbly contending with cancer, the pandemic, micro and macro implications of the Black Lives Matter movement, Year of Plagues manages to wring moments of illumination and reasons to hope out of this terrifying time.” — Mona Simpson, author of Casebook
"Fred D’Aguiar’s brilliant Year of Plagues is harrowing yet exhilarating, secular yet spiritual, scientific yet lyrical—a devastatingly frank memoir about wrestling with deadly prostate cancer even as the coronavirus began to overwhelm life as we knew it. Augustinian in its clarity and honesty, Year of Plagues offers the reader a meditation on mortality, race, faith, and fatherhood, even as it explores with great humanity what it means to be an artist in a world deep-shadowed by illness. Masterful, inspiring, essential, this book is a must-read." — Bradford Morrow, author of The Forger's Daughter
"Year of Plagues is a study of the body beset by the twin enemies of disease and racism. Wryly confronting death in all manners with precision and historical perspective, D’Aguiar is the perfect guide to the unprecedented events of 2020 - thoughtful, curious, erudite - a prophet of our times. This is an essential book to understanding the mysteries of the human self and the world today." — Zinzi Clemmons, author of What We Lose
Bradford Morrow
"Fred D’Aguiar’s brilliant Year of Plagues is harrowing yet exhilarating, secular yet spiritual, scientific yet lyrical—a devastatingly frank memoir about wrestling with deadly prostate cancer even as the coronavirus began to overwhelm life as we knew it. Augustinian in its clarity and honesty, Year of Plagues offers the reader a meditation on mortality, race, faith, and fatherhood, even as it explores with great humanity what it means to be an artist in a world deep-shadowed by illness. Masterful, inspiring, essential, this book is a must-read."
Diana Abu-Jaber
Exquisite, Orphic, filled with dark music, Year of Plagues sings the body nuclear. This unflinching memoir weaves history, race, culture, art, fear, and love into an unforgettable journey. As much about poetry as it is about infirmity, Fred D’Aguiar’s conversation with cancer resounds in a bounding, graceful dance with death and life.”
Mona Simpson
Sophisticated, funny, far-ranging... Fred D’Aguiar interrogates intersectionality in a time of crisis, personal, national, global and human, to find moments of grace. Nimbly contending with cancer, the pandemic, micro and macro implications of the Black Lives Matter movement, Year of Plagues manages to wring moments of illumination and reasons to hope out of this terrifying time.”
Zinzi Clemmons
"Year of Plagues is a study of the body beset by the twin enemies of disease and racism. Wryly confronting death in all manners with precision and historical perspective, D’Aguiar is the perfect guide to the unprecedented events of 2020 - thoughtful, curious, erudite - a prophet of our times. This is an essential book to understanding the mysteries of the human self and the world today."
Justin Torres
Fred D'Aguiar is in possession of one of the most agile literary voices I've encountered, at turns playful, lyrical, philosophical, and always moving. Year of Plagues is about undeniably harrowing experiences - both personal and political, endemic and pandemic - and yet the experience of reading it is dazzling, provoking, and ultimately enlightening. I couldn't put it down.”
Booklist
"An unflinching narrative and a remarkable read...D’Aguiar offers keen and candid insights into the complexities of the human condition in the here and now."
Booklist
"An unflinching narrative and a remarkable read...D’Aguiar offers keen and candid insights into the complexities of the human condition in the here and now."
Library Journal
07/01/2021
Ominous symptoms led D'Aguiar (English and creative writing, Univ. of California Los Angeles; Children of Paradise) to the health care system for answers; he was soon diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, which would impact his testing and treatment. As one means of navigating his unexpected circumstances, D'Aguiar wrote this memoir, using the tools of his many careers (novelist, poet, playwright, professor). Here he describes in detail his symptoms, diagnostic tests, and treatments, including surgery and its aftermath, and shares his thoughts, fears, mood swings, and coping strategies. Along the way, D'Aguiar meditates on his early life and familial influences in Guyana and England. He personifies his cancer and converses with it as a sentient foe; he places his illness in the context of the culture of his Guyanese family and calls on poetry, philosophy, music, pop culture, and literature, from Brer Rabbit to Shakespeare. While D'Aguiar recovered from surgery in spring 2020, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police; the events compel D'Aguiar to contemplate anew his own identity as a Black man and his role in a complex society. VERDICT D'Aguiar's memoir is intensely personal and candid, technically informative, and, as a result of its range and inviting style, far from morbid or dry.—Richard Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver
Kirkus Reviews
2021-05-21
A chronicle of a year of trauma.
In the fall of 2019, British Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright D’Aguiar, a professor of English at UCLA, was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the first of three plagues that he recounts in a memoir notable for its uncommon candor. If cancer was the most immediate threat to his life, Covid-19 proved no less fearsome. To undergo tests in a hospital, he had to enter “spaces dominated by the pandemic.” The virus, he writes, assumed “the role of an aid to my cancer.” Equally assaulting was the “society-cancer” of anti-Black racism, as evidenced by the police killings of George Floyd and others. D’Aguiar reports in detail the trajectory of his illness from the time he first noticed bladder problems through the tests that confirmed the existence of cancer. He also writes about the four drugs—and their insidious side effects—that he took to control it and the eventual surgery to remove his prostate and the lymph nodes to which the disease had spread. Cancer affected both body and spirit: Because one of the drugs blocked the production of testosterone, for example, he began to experience hot flashes and to develop breasts, a disturbing side effect that challenged his “male gender outlook.” Trying to marshal “restorative powers” of mind, the author took to chanting, singing, and dancing to create an atmosphere conducive to cure, hoping to stop the disease from metastasizing “with a firewall of meds and positive vibes.” Writing poetry, he realized, had the power to rescue him “from catatonic shock and stasis” by opening up “a psychic space of awareness” of the world around him. Interwoven with his illness narrative, D’Aguiar shares some of his poems along with recollections of his childhood in Guyana, tales of the trickster god Anansi, and reflections on inequality in the health care system and the plight of Black men in America.
A visceral account of personal illness and social ills.
