How the Dead Live by Will Self
Will Self is a skillful writer with a remarkable imagination and an apparently inexhaustible store of bizzare situations, unlikely comparisons, and amusing, often offbeat descriptions. How the Dead Live gives the story, mostly told in the first person, of Lily Bloom, who dies of cancer, goes to the world of the dead (which is integrated with the world of the living), and eventually is re-born as her own granddaughter. Along the way she talks of her past life, her marriages, her daughters, and her life in the sordid dead apartment where she passes the time from her death until her re-birth.
This skeleton plot does not seem very promising, but what sustains the book, for a while, is the virtuosic brilliance of the writing, which sparkles with witty comments, irony, clever, vivid descriptions, macabre invention, and absurd creatures. In the end, however, the density of such devices and their multiplication become cloying. The book is moderately long--400 pages--and although the writing is always engaging and sometimes quite funny, the surface brilliance does not make up, at least not for me, for the drabness of the characters and the absurdity of the plot. I found no reason to take any particular interest in Lily Bloom or her two daughters or their various husbands or boyfriends, and the device of Lily Bloom being dead for most of the book, though it provides a context for a lot of macabre situations, does not supply a reason. I was left with the impression of an intelligent man and gifted writer with nothing particular to say. Had I not been reading the book for Books 1001 I doubt I'd have finished it.
This skeleton plot does not seem very promising, but what sustains the book, for a while, is the virtuosic brilliance of the writing, which sparkles with witty comments, irony, clever, vivid descriptions, macabre invention, and absurd creatures. In the end, however, the density of such devices and their multiplication become cloying. The book is moderately long--400 pages--and although the writing is always engaging and sometimes quite funny, the surface brilliance does not make up, at least not for me, for the drabness of the characters and the absurdity of the plot. I found no reason to take any particular interest in Lily Bloom or her two daughters or their various husbands or boyfriends, and the device of Lily Bloom being dead for most of the book, though it provides a context for a lot of macabre situations, does not supply a reason. I was left with the impression of an intelligent man and gifted writer with nothing particular to say. Had I not been reading the book for Books 1001 I doubt I'd have finished it.