The Brief History of the Dead
Ratings12
Average rating4.4
This is winning science fiction in my opinion. I can't write about it without giving away the whole story. Just read it.
I really wish I could give .5 stars, because I'd like to give this book 3.5 stars. One of my favorite reads in 2007. A lovely idea, well executed. I always looked forward to picking it up.
So good! The basic premise is, after you die you hang around in a city until every last person who remembers you personally has died and then you pass on. ++plague. Very well written, I was happy I ILL'd this, even if I'd forgotten why by the time it showed up. I have a feeling it was a Brain Pickings weekly newsletter mention.
As mentioned previously, I'm not a fan of narrarating-from-the-dead stories. An author really has to be on their chops to get me to read and enjoy a novel with dead people as characters. David Long did it with The Inhabited World. Kevin Brockmeier just missed with The Brief History of the Dead.
It's an intriguing idea that drives the novel: dead people “live” on in a city of the dead as long as they are remembered by someone on Earth. When the last memory dies, so do they, disappearing from the city of the dead. Unfortunately, the author doesn't have much to say beyond that concept. The dead are much like the living...except they're dead. And when everyone on Earth starts kicking the proverbial bucket and the city of the dead begins emptying out, he has little to say about what that - and being alive - means.
I enjoyed this bittersweet book about memory, family, friends, life and death and how just knowing people - even from a distance - makes a difference. I also liked the alternating chapters between the events in the City and Laura Byrd's struggles in Antarctica.
Good writing. The story wasn't that interesting for me but I did enjoy the writing.