The First Draft Of The Reincarnationist

The honest truth is that, while I appreciate literature, my literary standards are not that high when it comes to an interesting plot or theme. And, as far as great plot devises go, it is hard to get better than reincarnation (deals with identity and spirituality with a bit of inherent time travel – hard to get better than that).

The Reincarnationist by MJ Rose (which I was fully expecting to be a great read) might possibly be the worst book that I have ever read. Truly. The plot devise is good, but the characters are flat and make no sense, the storyline is interesting, but doesn’t hang together and the book should be edited in a big way. It really should be about half as long as it is.

At best, The Reincarnationist is a first draft!

The Uncertain Hour

The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Being Dead by Jim Crace are two of my all time favorite books. When I saw that both Cunningham and Crace endorsed a new book, I bought it immediately.

The Uncertain Hour by Jesse Browner is a masterpiece and it is impossible to put down. Based on the basic description (a “vivid portrait of life in Rome” and “a gripping entrée into the mind of a great man during his final hours”), I thought there might be parts of it that would be like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (not in terms of the narrative, but in the sense that the main character in both books are confronting their own death).

It is not. In general, I liked Never Let Me Go (I wrote about it here), but the narrator in The Uncertain Hour is far more philosophical and his anguish more palpable and so the book forces the reader more fully into the story.

I generally require narrative first and writing second (I learned that from Only Revolutions which I wrote about here), but in this book the reader gets both. Plus, it is filled with numerous excellent quotes so these are just a few of my favorites.

On living and death:

We owe so little time to life, and all eternity to death, so let’s pay off our small debts first, Petronius. (32)

On reputation:

A man’s reputation is a delicate vase, vulnerable in equal measure to the malice of enemies, the prurience of strangers, and the clumsiness of friends. (44)

On civilization:

“When it comes down to it, he thought, isn’t all civilization just an exercise in measuring time, in pacing off the foundations on which to build a model of the universe of oneself?” (138)

On love and empire:

“I believe in love just as I believe in empire. They’re both transactions between partners of unequal strength, dressed up in heroic rhetoric.” (170)

It is not often that I read a book and have no complaints, but, in this case, I am unable to think of even one.

The Brief History Of The Dead

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier is now out in paperback. If you didn’t pick it up in hardcover, you should definitely pick it up now.

It is riddled with corporate intrigue and layered with environmental, apocalyptical, futuristic and globalization themes, which makes it an excellent page turner. It is the kind of book that you cannot put down and every time you are done with one chapter you must start the next.

But, its core narrative concept is what makes this such an excellent book (that those who have died have a conscious existence while they are in memory of the living). As long as someone who is still alive remembers you, you remain alive in a place called the City. In the City people work and vacation and carry on in a “normal” way.

One of the characters in the book tries to figure out how many people any given living person has ever known (basically to get an idea of how big the City actually is). It is the kind of thing that, after reading the book, I am tempted to figure out (by comparison, it kind of reminds me of Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. In Citizen Vince the protagonist tries to count up the number of people who he knows that are dead under the suspicion that he knows more dead people than living.).

Anyway, The Brief History of the Dead is a page turner and is thought provoking, but what makes it so great is the fantasy that somehow all those that we have known (and perhaps loved) have a second chance at opportunities that they missed in life. They have this chance, because we remember them.

It is a pleasant thought. Or, as Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises:

Isn’t it pretty to think so? (251)