How the Dead Live- Will Self

[Amanda]

Well, at least I can say I liked this one better than Great Apes lol.

The plot follows the surprising pedestrian and banal afterlife of a woman named Lily Bloom who has recently died of breast cancer. In this conception of the afterlife, it is essentially exactly the same as the world of the living and lived parallel to them outside of their perception. The real differences are, in the community of the dead, they no longer need to eat, there's a weird amount of focus on her getting her teeth back, and people's deceased children and even miscarriages hang around with them.

Lily is accompanied by a 9 year old son she calls 'rude boy' who got hit my a car during her first marriage, and a stone-like lithopedion foetus she calls "Lithi" for short. Yes, it sings and speaks to make things more creepy. Rude Boy is stuck in the mindset of a defiant boy from the American 50s (even though Lily ends up settling in and dying in London), which feels like an excuse to add edginess points by having him shout a litany of racial and homophobic slurs throughout the book. In fact (I swear this is true) the author has him stuck in permanent mud-based blackface because he was playing something called the "*n*****game" when he ran into traffic and died. I didn't feel this contributed to the book in any substantial way other than shock factor, which made it seem instantly lamer to me.

Lily is also such an awful person to spend the book with. However, this didn't bother me as much as I felt it was meaningful to the point. She's racist against black people, she's Jewish and antisemitic at the same time, she's bitter about everything, she spends her life mostly concerned about her weight and body image, she foists all of these issues onto her daughters from her second marriage, and her biggest regret is not having more unprotected sex with awful men. She deeply sucks. But, this bland middle class English purgatory does summarize the closest to an idea of both heaven and eternal judgement that such a person as her can both conceive of and deserve. In the end she is kind of reincarnated as one of her daughter's babies, which seems a fitting end to how people like her perpetuate their own issues onto the next generation. She does have a line somewhere that essentially says "nothing makes you so complete as a man" and I was about to go "of course a man wrote that" but then thought about it for a second and just because it is BS, doesn't mean there aren't LOADS of women out there (including many I've met) who are exactly like Lilly Bloom, and it is sad. That part was largely well done.

But to give one more critique her "spirit guide' in the land of the dead is a stereotypical Aboriginal named Phar Lap Jones who "wears a Stetson hat and smokes a hand rolled cigarette"...of course he does. The audiobook version attempts a bad Oceania accent on him which is...borderline minstrel.

So, some parts were great, some parts were awful. Overall, 3 stars.

[Kristel]

Reason read: reading 1001, Word of the month. This is the first book by the author Will Self for me. I was actually surprised that I liked a lot about it and even more surprised that in general, people do not like this book. I guess what took me in is the fact that this is about an old lady dying and dead of cancer and it reviews her life as she lived it as well as her life as dead. I found this did not seem like too much of a stretch for me. It makes perfect sense to be that there is a dimension where the dead might hange out. I didn't like how much Lily swore and the words of her swearing but I felt like her voice "fit" the character of Lily. What people hate about the book; overly detailed (and I think repetitive), grotesque (death and life often are grotesque), too morbid (it's about death and drug abuse and, pregnancies), and insensitive (a little humor helps to make horror a bit more tolerable. Themes include loss, death, grief, identity, and afterlife. Another criticism is that Self uses too many literary devices. I confess - I didn't notice. I am going to rate this book 4 stars because obviously I didn't hate it as much as others have hated it.