JuniorHighBookReport

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier is now out in paperback. If you didn’t pick it up in hardcover, you should definitely pick it up now.

It is riddled with corporate intrigue and layered with environmental, apocalyptical, futuristic and globalization themes, which makes it an excellent page turner. It is the kind of book that you cannot put down and every time you are done with one chapter you must start the next.

But, its core narrative concept is what makes this such an excellent book (that those who have died have a conscious existence while they are in memory of the living). As long as someone who is still alive remembers you, you remain alive in a place called the City. In the City people work and vacation and carry on in a “normal” way.

One of the characters in the book tries to figure out how many people any given living person has ever known (basically to get an idea of how big the City actually is). It is the kind of thing that, after reading the book, I am tempted to figure out (by comparison, it kind of reminds me of Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. In Citizen Vince the protagonist tries to count up the number of people who he knows that are dead under the suspicion that he knows more dead people than living.).

Anyway, The Brief History of the Dead is a page turner and is thought provoking, but what makes it so great is the fantasy that somehow all those that we have known (and perhaps loved) have a second chance at opportunities that they missed in life. They have this chance, because we remember them.

It is a pleasant thought. Or, as Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises:

Isn’t it pretty to think so? (251)