An audacious new read of The Decameron

IN THE ANNUS HORRIBILIS OF 2020, AS COVID-19 RAVAGED the world, a generation that had yet to experience a cataclysm of precisely this scale turned to art for insight into how we might survive it.

- JUDY BERMAN

Contemporary speculative fiction about lethal pathogens, from Ling Ma's novel Severance to Steven Soderbergh's movie Contagion, surged in popularity. Readers also turned to tales of pestilence past: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. But no dusty tome got a bigger boost than Giovanni Boccaccio's early-Renaissance classic The Decameron. Virtual book clubs sprung up to dissect it. The New York Times commissioned stories from Margaret Atwood and Tommy Orange for its own Decameron Project. "Six Centuries Later, The Decameron Is Suddenly the Book of the Moment," Vogue reported.

Set amid the Black Death that decimated Europe in the mid-14th century, Boccaccio's masterpiece follows 10 young nobles fleeing an outbreak in Florence that would ultimately reduce the city's population by half. To pass the time in their rural idyll, they tell the stories that make up the bulk of the book-one apiece for 10 days, hence the title. The consensus interpretation of The Decameron is that it illustrates the power of storytelling to buoy us through history's horrors. The author Rivka Galchen sums up this reading in her Decameron Project introduction: "Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them." Kathleen Jordan, the creator of Netflix's The Decameron, came away from her pandemic-era reading of Boccaccio with a different understanding. What if, her black comedy proposes, the book's true timeless message is that whether they're Florentine aristocrats in 1348 or Manhattan financiers in 2020, the privileged will always blithely abandon their less fortunate neighbors when the plague comes to town? Jordan has stripped The Decameron of its stories, choosing instead to riff on the frame narrative.