REVIEW
“The Brief History of the Dead”
Kevin Brockmeier, Vintage paperback January 2007
272 pp.
Two parallel stories in this book converge ultimately as the last person alive on earth, Laura, begins to freeze rather slowly to death.
One of the two stories gives us Laura’s thoughts in those last days of life, her mind flitting randomly across her life’s experiences and all the people she knew or encountered.
The second story follows the dead, who continue to exist in a vast city, “alive” in some transitional fourth dimension, as long as someone still alive on earth remembers them.
When no one is left alive to remember them, the people in this netherworld vanish. But until then, they interact and lead fairly full lives, often for a very long time.
Brockmeier’s book imagines a slightly skewed present, where, for example, from time to time bombs just fall on New York City and people go on about their lives with this commonplace interruption just a blip on the day’s business.
It’s a present where a major international beverage producer (I won’t spoil it by telling you the name) sends marketing teams to the Antarctic for what amounts to a stunt, only to have them almost completely isolated from the rest of the world when a pandemic sweeps the planet and kills everyone except Laura. She’s the one member of the marketing team finally isolated by herself far from McMurdo station, far from any other human contact.
As long as she’s alive, everyone she’s ever known remains in that other world. Over several weeks, millions of dead appear in the netherworld and vanish at once as the pandemic empties the earth first to this transitional place, then to whatever comes after. For millions, there is suddenly no one left alive to remember them.
Laura, isolated in the Antarctic, is finally the only person alive to remember anyone, so all those left in the netherworld are connected in some way, through her, to each other. They piece together how each knew her. And they know that when she finally dies (we know she’s freezing to death), their world will vanish forever.
Brockmeier’s prose is crisp, his characters compelling. The reader may find herself asking, “How many people do I remember? How many remember me? How quickly would I vanish from that netherworld?” A lovely book.
Avid Reader Judith B. is a bibliophile of the first order. For years she owned a bookstore in the sunny Southwest. Now she prefers to collect, read and recommend.
