The Brief History of the Dead (2006)

I really thought I was going to like this but instead was ambivalent, bordering on hostile.* It's like Brockmeier read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and thought, as we all did, that any one of those haunting and delightful cities would make a great setting for a full book. And then went off and wrote one, but somehow failed to add any of the poignancy, beauty, and philosophy that Calvino captured in two pages of his city of the dead. It's a book that feels at once too brief and too broad; there are so many--too many--characters, all grasping towards something meaty and moving about relationships, death, memory, even consumerism, and not managing to fully own any. I felt that the setting--both of them, deadcity and antarctica--were anemically described, rife with squandered potential. Actually "squandered potential" was how I felt on the whole--putting aside discontent about suspected inspiration, how can you go wrong with such an intriguing concept? Saramago could have done it perfectly. A story like this would probably be fantastically disturbing in the hands of Chris Adrian. Calvino already wrote it, in two pages or so. Kevin Brockmeier, however, utterly failed to convince me, and I will not be reading any more of his books.

*Full disclosure: I read this during and immediately after the death of one of my favorite people in the universe so perhaps I was just not in the headspace for a book like this. ( )

So, I read this book about a year ago and just re-read it because I loved it so much. It has kind of an off putting title...sort of makes you think it's about the occult or zombies or something but that couldn't be farther from the truth. In its essence, its about the amazing qualities of the human memory. It's also a great deal about loneliness and a virus, a little bit about corporations, substantially human relationships, and somewhat about different philosophies people have even after death. It is immensely creative and I was really toying with giving it 5 stars, which I rarely ever do. This is recommended reading for just about anyone that is interested in all of the people one can remember and how that changes and fulfills us, making us what we are. It is essential how our memory can keep us company in the bleakest hour, even when we are the last person on Earth.

I really feel it's difficult to give this novel justice in a review but any book that is unique in this day and age and really makes you think about your own life and your own mind is really something in my opinion. This book brought out an extreme amount of emotions in me. I felt the isolation of the main character and the sense of her whole life waiting for her...first confused and then routing for her. I thought about one's personal journey through the after life and I started making a list in my own head of all of the people I could remember. And, Kevin Brockmeier is correct..once you start remembering someone, you remember all the people connected to him/her and all of their connections multiplied over and over again. It would probably take me quite some time to make my own personal list and I'm quite sure if there was a between world depending solely on my survival of all those I could remember, just like in this novel there would be some I inadvertently remembered there that I have no explanation why I remember from the rest and some I'd like to forget but can't.

This book is really complex emotionally and that is why I think reading it a second time helped me gain a little more of a deeper understanding and handle on both the characters and the philosophies. I was very shook up by it the first time around. This second time was great but it was also a more rational reading where I felt I had more perspective.


Memorable quotes:

pg. 3 "He said that the desert was bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake"

pg 109 "I think you're confusing God with a genie."

pg. 113 "By the time he reached his home, the moon was shining like a Wiffle ball in the highest portion of the evening sky."

pg. 139 "How many people was any one human being likely to remember?...pg. 141 "When he tallied up the list he had made, the number he came up with was forty-two thousand, but the next few days he kept discovering little pockets and byways of extra people-where did they all come from? -and if he had to guess, he would say that the number was probably closer to fifty thousand, or maybe even seventy."

pg. 196 "At some point, when you were fourteen or fifteen, before you reached adulthood or knew who you were, you had to determine whether you were going to be the sort of person who held tight to every single thing that passed through your life, no matter how insignificant it was, or the sort of person who set it all adrift. Life was easier on the people wo were willing to relax their grip, but she had decided to be the other sort of person, the sort who wouldn't let go, and she had done her best to live up to that decision."

pg. 207 "Her mind was a roulette wheel, rattling and spinning in endless circles, and there she was standing beside it, watching the bright silver ball of her consciousness as it bounced first one way and then another.

That was what insomnia was, after all-an excess of consciousness, an excess of life."

pg. 215 "Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Suffering..."

"man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Coffee.."

pg. 220 "Clumps of snow fell from the trees and the hoods of the cars. astonishingly white int he light of the sun. A couple of birds had landed on her ledge and then flown away. She could see the hieroglyphs of their footprints in the snow."

pg. 224 "She wondered why she had ever been cold in the first place, why she had ever decided to be cold. Such a strange choice, she thought. And the world, this world, was all about choices."

pg. 228 "She was close enough to the open water that herds of leopard seals lay sluggishly about on the ice, groaning and whistling and bubbling and grunting. They were calling out to one another or to the universe, she wasn't sure which. Their voices were so animated that she almost believed she could understand them.

Let the fish swim through the traces, one of them said,

Where as the moon gone? Where have the stars? said another.

All worlds are one world, said a third."

pg. 233 "Wat was clear to her was that something had happened. Her sense of time had broken apart into two equal halves and fallen away from her like the shell of a walnut."

pg. 233-234 "Seven shades of blue poured into her head, and a moment later she was threading her way right through the center of them. She could shuffle the colors at will. It was like her word association game-one word, one color, leading inexorably to the next, by a process that was largely but not wholly within her control, a process of whim and chance and improvisation. Everything depended on the fluctuations of her mind, and her mind was not entirely her own.

...

"The sun was bigger than it had been when she started her walk, a terrible white sphere that took up half of the sky. It was so bright that she imagined she could hear it sizzling. It have off the sound of an egg sputtering in a frying pan, an egg that was just beginning to go crisp at the edges, and because she was hungry, she poured the egg off onto a plate and ate it with a knife and fork, but she did not eat the sun, and she did not stop walking."

pg. 252 "And they would wait for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories."

( )

Fascinating, mesmerizing, and indeed un-put-down-able. (I may possibly have edged over my lunch break to get this finished.) ( )

I really loved this book--beautiful writing and a thought provoking cosmology. ( )

The prose is strong in this book. The chapters and the characters are interesting. But for a book where interconnectedness seems to be the whole point, I really wish the author had, well, connected the characters a bit more to each other. I figured out the twist far before the characters did, which would have been okay if once it had been revealed something had been done with it. Instead, the book carried on in the same manner, revealing nothing more about its characters, before finally coming to a slow, rolling stop like a rolling rock reaching a plateau and losing momentum about a mile before it gets to the cliff's edge. All I wanted all through the book was to finally reach the cliff, which I could plainly see waiting ahead. I was excited about that cliff, and its fascinting premise kept me going; however, because we never got there the whole experience of reading the book becomes an overall disappointing experience. ( )