Itemize Books Concering How the Dead Live
| Original Title: | How the Dead Live |
| ISBN: | 0802138489 (ISBN13: 9780802138484) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Russell, Phar Lap Jones, Natalia Yaws Bloom, Charlene Yaws Elvers, Lithopedion, Richard Elvers, Lord Churchill |
Will Self
Paperback | Pages: 404 pages Rating: 3.59 | 2691 Users | 128 Reviews
Narrative In Favor Of Books How the Dead Live
Will Self has one of literature's most astonishing imaginations, and in How the Dead Live his talent has come to full flower. Lily Bloom is an angry, aging American transplanted to England, now losing her battle with cancer. Attended by nurses and her two daughters -- lumpy Charlotte, a dour, successful businesswoman, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie -- Lily takes us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. From '40s career girl to '50s tippling adulteress to '70s PR flak, Lily has seen America and England through most of a century of riotous and unreal change. And then it's over. Lily catches a cab with her death guide, Aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, and enters the shockingly banal world of the dead: the suburbs. She discovers smoking without consequences and gets another PR job, where none of her coworkers notices that she's not alive. She gets to know her roommates: Rude Boy, her terminally furious son who died in a car accident at age nine; Lithy, a fetus that died before she ever knew it existed; the Fats, huge formless shapes composed of all the weight she's ever gained or lost. How the Dead Live is Will Self's most remarkable and expansively human book, an important, disturbing vision of our time.
Be Specific About Of Books How the Dead Live
| Title | : | How the Dead Live |
| Author | : | Will Self |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 404 pages |
| Published | : | August 31st 2000 by Grove Press (first published 2000) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Fantasy |
Rating Of Books How the Dead Live
Ratings: 3.59 From 2691 Users | 128 ReviewsCritique Of Books How the Dead Live
Eerily accurate. I grew up just down the road from Crouch End, and can confirm that now the Oxfam shops are selectively stocked and every pub has pork belly on the menu, it is indeed choc-full of the living dead.All misgivings of Self being a mini-Ballard were quashed with this deeply creepy exploration of the nature and effects of addiction.
I thought they were kidding, but you really do need a thesaurus to read Will Self's writing. There's a great story in here somewhere, but it's lost amid his self-conscious effort to show you just how smart he is.
I think I'm a bit stupid for Will Self novels. I really liked the underlying concepts of the book, but this was a hard slog for me. The passages from Christmas 2001 in italics, I didn't really understand until at least two thirds of the way through. It felt like it was about 100 pages too long, I found myself skipping through the last few chapters as it didn't seem to be adding anything new to the story. But overall, the idea was an interesting and disturbing one, I'll never pass Dalston without
An old contemporary (1990s) woman (Lily Bloom) dies and is in some sort of year-long probationary bardo existence in an obscure neighborhood in London, at which end she can proceed on to annihilation or re-incarnation. The story shows how even though the woman is carrying around the detritus of her life (a lithopedeon), she persists in immersing herself in the consumerist things/concerns of life. She even has a weird Australian aboriginal spirit guide whose function is more to confuse than
Self's dark, witty word-play is on full throttle in this phantasmagorical tale of life and death and death in life and life in death and... well, you get the drift. In his usual stream-of-consciousness style, he untangles and re-tangles the story of Lily Bloom and her daughters, assorted calcified fetuses, living fat beings, drugs, alcohol, vitriol, Jewishness, and a nightmarish vision of London in which the afterlife is a demented bureaucracy of Kafkaesque proportions. I struggled to believe in
You're always going to have at least an unusual plot line setting or protagonist in a Self novel and this is no exception. You're told the story of Lily Bloom as she sees it in life death and rebirth. I often feel with Will Self that there is something brilliant he is working at but he just misses pulling it off flawlessly. That isn't to say he isn't worth reading. He definitely is and his use of language even when he stumbles a bit is beautiful. I couldn't put out of my mind how much this is
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