Doomed and Famous: Selected Obituaries

by Adrian Dannatt, Hugo Guinness (Illustrator)

An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric. In Doomed and Famous , an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality. His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology. Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences. This book is a selection of some of the best—meaning most improbable—of these miniature biographies. Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world's rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others. Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end.

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

Published February 2, 2021

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review here: https://tosh.substack.com/p/doomed-an...

[Felice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly doomed, since every little four to five page essay in the book is in essence an obituary. I'm less sure about famous, since I barely knew any of the names here. Someone in the London-New York art axis might do better with that. However, Danatt has opinions galore, and a sometimes pithy, always ironic, and occassionally admonitory tone that it is easy to enjoy. When my third book came out, my well known publisher --Richard Yates, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut were some of his other authors --said to me, "Enjoy your success. But remember, for every successful artist in America, forty others have gone under the wheels of a bus." Half a century later, he proved to be right. Entire literary movements have come and gone. That seems to be the theme here.