Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection

Jim Meirose (Goodreads Author)

it was amazing 5.00 · Rating details · 1 rating · 1 review

Jamed and Wendy Davis are becoming bored with and disillusioned by the Funeral Home business. About the time Janie is born, they notice a small ad in the paper about something new called au Club de la Résurrection. (The Resurrection Club). This organization is based in Bern Switzerland and its purpose is to research and develop, over the next twenty years, the necessary te ...more

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Paperback, 376 pages

Published October 1st 2019 by Mannequin Haus

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Feb 22, 2020 George rated it it was amazing

No, I don’t speak or read French, non non, but neither is Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection written in French. When I asked the author Jim Meirose about this bilingual oddity, he explained that ‘One of the “official” languages in Switzerland [where the Resurrection Club is based] is French. Plus, intuition tells me that an unusually-covered pretty fat book with an incomprehensible title (but one with a “ring to it”) might cause the curious person to open it or flip to the back to see what No, I don’t speak or read French, non non, but neither is Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection written in French. When I asked the author Jim Meirose about this bilingual oddity, he explained that ‘One of the “official” languages in Switzerland [where the Resurrection Club is based] is French. Plus, intuition tells me that an unusually-covered pretty fat book with an incomprehensible title (but one with a “ring to it”) might cause the curious person to open it or flip to the back to see what the hell this is.’ And no, ‘overgivers’ is not a French word as such but the linguistic opposite of ‘undertaker,’ featuring as it does reformed morticians, as it were.

The obsession with death and resurrection and the science behind these phenomena echo the explorations found in Don DeLillo’s latest novel Zero K, in which people’s fear of death result in their bodies being frozen beneath ground until such time as they could rise like lazy Lazaruses. The ostensible method of the Resurrection Club (“We care about saving those worth saving.”), however, is to kill its paying members and reanimate them into a life sans morte, which sounds as seemingly homicidal/suicidal as it is biblical, for in the mind of a believer is not death necessary for the never-ending boredom of an afterlife?

Both novels ask these questions and more, phrased as it is by the fictional Charles Kinbote in his poem Pale Fire:

“What moment in the gradual decay
Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?”

And we are told near the end of Meirose’s novel “cinders and ash cannot be resurrected.” Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection differs from Zero K by a lot of course and Meirose has a keen magnifying glass which he places over the brains of his protagonists, Jamed and Wendy Davis (and other entertaining characters like Sheikh Mustaforgat Myass-Shukor), using ink and paper and Logos to create something from nothing whereas gods have been known to employ clay and mud as their not-so-secret ingredients. Meirose’s materials are of a higher order (no pun intended).

For example, Meirose’s prose is almost a kindred spirit of Joseph McElroy’s, with a consciousness of consciousness, and an eye and ear for verbal tics that relate to those you might find in the works of David Foster Wallace (“type of thing”) or Lucy Ellman (“the fact that”), starting even with the opening sentence—“Many too many too many too years.”—but of course Meirose has crafted and honed his very own style with linguistic tricks that are paradoxically baroque in their simplicity, invoking the glottis and Broca’s area. With plenty of Penelope “Yes”s to make Molly Bloom say, “Sho’ ‘nuff, sho’ ‘nuff…”

Overall, Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection is the perfect place to start if you’re unfamiliar with Jim Meirose’s corpus, a corpus that deserves animation, re- or otherwise. It shouldn’t be surprising to know that the best works being published today are those we’ve never heard of, coming out from presses we’ve never heard of, so listen and hear and as a consequence enjoy this superbly accomplished novel by an extraordinary talent. This will surely be one of the best novels you read this year. ...more

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About Jim Meirose

Jim Meirose

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Jim Meirose's short and long works have appeared in numerous publications, including South Carolina Review, Xavier Review, Phoebe, Baltimore Review, New Orleans Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, 34th Parallel, 14 Hills, Witness, Journal of Experimental Fiction (Anthology and Novel), Le Scat Noir, Optional Press (Novel), Montag Press (Two Novels), and many others.

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