The Brief History Of The Dead (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
Rating: 3.9* of fiveThe Book Description: From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out. Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.My Review: I am simply appalled that my cynical shell has been breached by a man who has an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and who has been published in McSweeney's, Crazyhorse, and suchlike Writerly Venues.Appalled. But then there's this:Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.That, laddies and gentlewomen, needed saying and needed Brockmeier to say it. It's just that true, and just that beautifully crafted.I hate that.I make merciless fun of, and throw lots of rotten eggs at, the Writerly Writers like Eggers and Franzen and Foster Wallace for their pretty sentences going nowhere new or even all that interesting. Their self-congratulatory cadres, nay myrmidons, attack anyone who dares say, "yeah, so?" of the myrmidons' ikons. Why can't Brockmeier have inspired such a slavish, culty following, so that I may point and say, "but him! He's a good one! He's a Writerly Writer with something *interesting* to say!"Life is unfair.But anyway. The story is a good one, of dislocation in time and space with all that implies for identity...how do we survive as ourselves even knowing that we aren't in any space ever known to us?...so we're already of to a pleasing start. The Writerly Writing is an enhancement of the basic story, because the sentences being self-consciously pretty and profound make a point about the afterlife. It's a well-used technique in this instance, and doesn't feel show-offy as normally it could or even would.The ending. Well, now, all things have flaws. The important question is, is it a raku pottery crazing-type flaw, or an inclusion-in-the-diamond-type flaw? This will greatly depend on one's point of view of the afterlife. I'm on the fence with this book's ending...and I come down on the raku-pottery side only because I like the rest of the book so much. A different mood, and this would be a three-star review with a sad, impatient growl about the sentimentality of the ending.Lucky Brockmeier. I had Thin Mints before I wrote this review.
The book certainly has an intriguing premise. Brockheimer's idea of the afterlife is a strange metaphysical situation whereby people end up in a large city seemingly doing precisely what they had been doing in their previous lives. If this is purgatory, it certainly is a strange one. This is where the story begins to intertwine with the "real world" which is embodied by the story of a young woman on an Antarctic expedition. The book was certainly captivating at the beginning, but I began to grow weary of it towards the end. John Sutherland has suggested that one of the defining characteristics of fiction is that it is "revelatory". Of course, this can be more subtle than your crime thriller, whoddunit kind of revelation, but the idea is that you read on because you want to find out more. [On a sidenote, I wonder what is the appeal then of a novel like Hunger by Knut Hamsen where the narrator slowly starves and where nothing very much seems to happen - perhaps the key is that there is revelation in the very idea of this kind of nihilism which runs so much against the norm).In that sense, the novel definitely runs out of steam and Brockheimer perhaps reveals his cards a tad too quickly. It would be forgivable if not for the fact that the author seemed to fall in love with his own prose which got rather too description filled and turgid towards an end which the description anti-climactic doesn't even begin to cover. Perhaps that is the idea - a slow fading out to what we already know, a sense of inevitability in a way but one that I found mainly tiresome. Perhaps the book is too long as is often the case with attempts to expand books from successful short stories (the first chapter appeared in the New Yorker)In sum, interesting ideas, intriguing initial developments, some lovely descriptions, anticlimactic end. Rather [book:like life|] itself perhaps.
What do You think about The Brief History Of The Dead (2007)?
TOTALLY agree. started out strong, then it sorta just sat there and became stagnated by great prose and style, but no momentum. I stopped reading it for now.
—Trudi
I picked up this book after listening to an episode of KCRW's To The Best Of Our Knowledge entitled "Apocalyptic Fiction" (mp3).I had just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," and felt myself compelled to read a bit more "apocalyptic fiction." Unfortunately, the brutal grandeur of "The Road" set the bar too high. It seems unfair to compare the two books, but because I read them in succession I feel I must.Where "The Road" was almost liberatingly sparse and hopeless, "The Brief History of the Dead" seemed, at points, weighed down by triviality. Where "The Road" was unrelenting in its voice (its coarse, dessicated voice), "The Brief History of the Dead" seemed, at points, to waiver between a beautiful fantastic realism, the supernatural, and a future reality that seemed a bit trite."The Brief History of the Dead" itself is set on a beautiful premise: a land where those who have died yet remain in the living's memories reside...and the real-world events the shape a collective understanding of its inhabitants. The story is peppered with beautiful imagery (people's travels to the world of the dead, the fractured pieces of memories, the confused acceptance of existence) but sometimes is too bogged down in a weird simplistic futurism (big bad corporations involved in Brazil-esque schemes).It's a good book, just don't read it after reading "The Road."
—Tim
This was an interesting read, mainly because of the way the story is told.The book uses an alternating narration between the here and now on Earth and the City of the Dead. However both narrations are connected and reveal parts of the story. We get a piece of information that makes sense much later in the parallel narration.I really liked how the story put itself together. However it was not very mysterious and rather obvious what was going on. Overall I thought the ending dragged on and was not a big surprise.In general I enjoyed the book, but would not call it a must read.
—Wiebke (1book1review)
