Product Description

“Remember me when I’m gone”
just took on a whole new meaning.

The City is inhabited by the recently departed, who reside there only as long as they remain in the memories of the living. Among the current residents of this afterlife are Luka Sims, who prints the only newspaper in the City, with news from the other side; Coleman Kinzler, a vagrant who speaks the cautionary words of God; and Marion and Phillip Byrd, who find themselves falling in love again after decades of marriage.

On Earth, Laura Byrd is trapped by extreme weather in an Antarctic research station. She’s alone and unable to contact the outside world: her radio is down and the power is failing. She’s running out of supplies as quickly as she’s running out of time.

Kevin Brockmeier interweaves these two stories in a spellbinding tale of human connections across boundaries of all kinds. The Brief History of the Dead is the work of a remarkably gifted writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1469169 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 8
• Binding: Audio CD

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A deadly virus has spread rapidly across Earth, effectively cutting off wildlife specialist Laura Byrd at her crippled Antarctica research station from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the planet's dead populate "the city," located on a surreal Earth-like alternate plane, but their afterlives depend on the memories of the living, such as Laura, back on home turf. Forced to cross the frozen tundra, Laura free-associates to keep herself alert; her random memories work to sustain a plethora of people in the city, including her best friend from childhood, a blind man she'd met in the street, her former journalism professor and her parents. Brockmeier (The Truth About Celia) follows all of them with sympathy, from their initial, bewildered arrival in the city to their attempts to construct new lives. He meditates throughout on memory's power and resilience, and gives vivid shape to the city, a place where a giraffe's spots might detach and hover about a street conversation among denizens. He simultaneously keeps the stakes of Laura's struggle high: as she fights for survival, her parents find a second chance for love—but only if Laura can keep them afloat. Other subplots are equally convincing and reflect on relationships in a beautiful, delicate manner; the book seems to say that, in a way, the virus has already arrived. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–In a not-so-distant future, a deadly virus kills off every human on Earth, except for Laura Byrd, a wildlife specialist on an expedition to the South Pole. Readers quickly learn that the dead move on to another life in a fantastic city on another plane of existence; there, they live out a second life free from aging and disease until every person who knew them on Earth dies. The chapters alternate between Laura and those in the city of the dead, often showing how these individuals connect to her. The elegiac, thoughtful tone of the writing is balanced by the survivor's adventure-filled travels across the frozen landscape as she hopelessly searches for signs of others. A crisis develops in the city as the only ones who remain finally realize that they continue to exist because Laura is still fighting for her life on Earth. Brockmeier's style–elements of fantasy mixed with a strong sense of character and a wonderful lyricism–will remind readers of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (Random, 2004). Although lacking some of the far-reaching depth of Mitchell's work, Brockmeier's haunting reminder of how connected people are to one another will appeal to readers of fantasy yearning for a bit more to think about than the usual fare offers.–Matthew L. Moffett, Ford's Theatre Society, Washington, DC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
"Which do you like better," one characters asks another in The Brief History of the Dead, "the idea of the past or the idea of the future?" In Kevin Brockmeier's modest but inventive novel, we have both: a story set in the near future where people seem always turning to small moments from their past. They exist, all but one, in an afterlife called the City.

The City looks like a European capital filled with Americans -- think Prague. It even has "movie theaters, gymnasiums, hardware stores, karaoke bars, basketball courts, and falafel stands." Brockmeier does a wonderful job of conjuring up the dead as they move about in this familiar setting: "They might go weeks and months without thinking of the houses and neighborhoods they had grown up in, their triumphs of shame and glory." A rumor claims that they exist only as long as they are remembered by living people on Earth -- about 60 years or so -- and then they disappear from this kind of second life.

But as the novel starts, the city is beginning to empty alarmingly fast. Some citizens, like the newspaperman Luka Sims, a young woman named Minny and a blind man, fear they may be the last of the dead. Slowly, we hear rumors that a virus has been sweeping the Earth. (" 'What happened to you?' Luka asks Minny. 'The same thing that happened to everyone else,' she said. 'The Blinks.' ") Meanwhile, on Earth, a research scientist named Laura Byrd is all alone in Antarctica, trying to fix a communications malfunction after her colleagues have left to seek help. One of the great pleasures of reading this novel is slowly coming to the realization that those remaining in the City are all remembered by one person: Laura Byrd. Just as they are the last of the dead, she is the last of the living.

It's a striking premise and, for much of the novel, deftly told through hints and rumors. But as Brockmeier alternates between Laura's story of survival in Antarctica and the daily lives in the afterlife, he uses Laura's memories as a transition between the two worlds. As Tolstoy said, art is in the transitions, and here Brockmeier's seams are showing. Just after Laura survives a harrowing accident, we hear that "for reasons that were inexplicable to her, she began thinking about the small neighborhood park that was located just down the street from her apartment."

Inexplicable indeed; it's an unlikely survival instinct. Similarly, after a major disappointment on the ice, Laura "couldn't help thinking of the secret fortress she had played in the summer she was ten years old." Disappointingly, the memories that follow these sudden flashes illuminate little about Laura; their sole purpose is to connect to characters in the afterlife, to prove they are remembered. These now-dead characters, however, are no more deeply developed; some, like a God-fearing homeless man ("There was one part of him that believed that God truly was love"), verge on cliché. These small connective memories can add bones to characters, but Brockmeier keeps providing them, always with new characters, until the very last pages of the novel, a time when readers expect echoes, not introductions.

But the storytelling can be thrilling, particularly in the Antarctica section (taken from real explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard's memoir), and the writing is often clever. ("Dying had changed Marion Byrd.") Just as often, however, Brockmeier loses his nerve and hands us a diary spelling out events we would have enjoyed piecing together, or he fills a page with description that illuminates neither character nor theme ("She watched Phillip drink the last of his coffee and return the spoon to his cup with a tiny clink, pushing them both to the side of the table" and so on.) Such elongations can stretch a novel too thin. What we long for is feeling.

Brockmeier has teased some intriguing new ideas out of the last-man-on-Earth genre -- especially tying in the fate of the afterlife to the fate of those living -- but he has missed out on the great beauty of imaginative literature: metaphor. When we read José Saramago's The Stone Raft, a novel about the Iberian Peninsula floating off from Europe, we are faintly aware that we are talking about something more than geography. But The Brief History of the Dead rarely feels larger than the pages in your hands. Brockmeier gets close when describing some penguins Laura comes across: "The ones that didn't have eggs were balancing egg-sized lumps of ice there, dead little worlds that they protected as avidly as though they were real." This image at last echoes what should be the center of the book: the hollow sadness of memory. A big-titled novel about the afterlife and the dead is an opportunity for such sublime imagery; it is also a trap for sentimentality, and Brockmeier has, perhaps too cautiously, chosen to avoid both.

Reviewed by Andrew Sean Greer
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Great idea, but plot & characters underdeveloped
Like many who have reacted to this novel, the first chapter knocked me out. I had already read two disparate critiques in newspapers of the book that led me to seek the book out, so I knew that after the opening the initial thrill might not sustain itself. This hesitation was, after I read the novel straight through in two sittings, shown to be true. The long polar trek of Laura does borrow from the well-titled "The Worst Journey in the World," but I found these sections, after a while, rather pat and uninvolving most of the time. It's difficult to stay interested in Laura's predicament after a while, with nobody else for her to talk to or to keep us alert. She has not led that exciting a life for her to have a lot of recollections to fall back upon that make her any more than ordinary. And, in a novel, we don't want to be stuck with the mundane girl-next-door as a protagonist, even if she is in dire straits in a terrible place. The scene-setting of the first cabin and her growing peril sets up this phase of the narrative promisingly, but once she's out on the ice the plot holds no surprises. Like her, we get drowsy in this lonely stretch of the novel.

As for the city-in-limbo, it was puzzling if, as seemed to be confirmed in the Coke executive's reverie, the city increasingly was "populated" not only by the people Laura was thinking of, but that Laura "generated" everything else in the city rather than what the inhabitants themselves did in the city. It seems that the people in the city limited what could and could not be done in the city, as their occupations seem to constrain what the city contained--not only the people, but objects. There are no salting trucks to melt the snow because Laura knew no salting truck driver: all of this background needed more clarification. Also, the reciprocation of thinking by those in the city as felt by Laura was too glossed over and marginal in the narrative that indirectly occured from her p-o-v.

Many of those found in the city proved remarkably dull: Minny, for example, considering the time spent on her by the author. The walking preacher character was necessary to show a religious fanatic's reaction to the city, but again, he failed to keep my interest. The whole place seemed more like a Edward Hopper painting of sorry urbanites rather than a place where food was cooked, papers were sold, and business seemed to go on much as before. There's a noirish air to the whole place, but it seemed less appealing than its inhabitants seemed to consider their residence. I guess there's no alternative! However, as the Antarctic marbles signal a climactic phase of the story, Brockmeier recovered his initial control of the novel and it came to a satisfactory and well-written closing.

Like so much SF and speculative literature, this would have worked better as a novella of 100 pages. At 250 pp., there's too much padding, and most of the supporting characters do not motivate the reader to want to pause and ponder their predicament. With these sorts of apocalyptic fables, it often remains a challenge for writers to keep the characterization gripping as the amount of people diminish in the bleak setting, but I still would recommend this book for, as with so much SF again, the fantastic world-view that it shares and elaborates.

Brockmeier is the real deal!
With the publishing industry fixating on the next DaVinci Code, alphabetical mysteries, and serial killers, it's a treat to find a truly original young writer. And Brockmeier is no flash in the pan, either; He's won the O. Henry Award, the Nelson Algren Award, An Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

I would imagine some readers thought Brockmeier was riding on the coattails of the LOVELY BONES, but that's just not the case. Brockmeier doles out equal portions of pessimism and optimism, and just when you think you've got this pitcher figured out he throws you a knuckleball.

The novel alternates between the adventures of Laura Byrd, a Coca Cola researcher stranded in the Antarctic, and the City of the Dead. The earth has been decimated by a virus called "The Blinks." Brockmeier's notion of an afterlife is a way station where people must stay until people whom they have known on earth have also died. Over half of them have known Laura Byrd.

The people who live in the City of the Dead are not ghosts. They will remind you of your next-door neighbors. They get up, have breakfast, and go to work, just like normal people. They appear to have corporal bodies. One of the characters, the Blind Man, wonders about this. He has a theory about the difference between the spirit and the soul. He believes the spirit connects the body and the soul, and that when the spirit dies, we move on to the next life.

Parts of the novel are definitely satirical. There's a Coca Cola executive who's still trying to cover-up Coca Cola's connection to the Blinks for one thing. It can also be funny as when one of the new arrivals, an avowed atheist, is thrilled that he was wrong. But was he? Brockmeier never really lets the reader gain a firm footing.

Brockmeier is smart enough to alternate between Laura story and the City of the Dead. Without Laura the novel might lose its credibility. When Laura strikes out on her "sledge" to find her co-researchers, Puckett and Joyce, we're hoping one of them is alive and immune and maybe Laura will start a new civilization. At least I was. But maybe that's the incurable romantic in me.

Some will find the ending a bit disappointing. It was metaphysical to say the least. It reminded me a lot of the ending in 2001 Space Odyssey. But I remember watching that movie with my dad, a farmer with his feet planted firmly on the ground, and he was just as transfixed as I was. You will be, too, if you give THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD a chance.

Read it!
"The Brief History of the Dead" is by no means a perfect book, but it IS original, thought-provoking, gorgeously written and, ultimately, very moving. Kevin Brockmeier has taken some huge risks in attempting this very complex novel and, for the most part, they pay off. At first, I thought the first part of the book "telegraphed" too much of what would happen in the second half, but I was wrong. I was riveted, waiting to find out exactly how the two parts of the story would converge, and along the way to a very satisfying conclusion, I laughed, I cried, I was frightened, and I thought a great deal. I recommend it highly.