My Life With Corpses: A Novel [Hardcover]

Do not be put off by the title. "My Life With Corpses" is an allegorical amusement park ride through the haunted house. We are all Dorothy, transported to a magical and mystical world, by the narrator, "Oz". Just like Dorothy, we will learn about ourselves, our relationships with others, and what is truly important. The book is cleverly written, thought provoking and potentially life altering.

I really loved this book. "Corpses" is one of those rare books that change your life forever. There is the way you see the world before and the way you see it after. The "after" is a whole lot more interesting and a lot bigger than the "before." I am still having the book pop in my mind every day to alter the way I view something that happens or something that I see. I don't think that is going to stop any time soon. Dunbar's first book had this same quality.

The book is truly unique and difficult to describe well without ruining the story and the surprises. Paul Auster readers will love it, same for people who like Jonathan Safran Foer (who praised the book highly) and, I would say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Men and women will both like the book, although maybe for different reasons. If you like a different way of thinking, dry humor, letting your imagination run-any of these-then there is no question that you have to read this book.

I'm writing this because I noted in the "official" reviews that the book has given some critics fits. Some thought it's great, some were confused and some outright mad! I do want to say that anyone who thinks this incredibly brainy book is "rote, etc," wasn't up to the reading. There is no disputing the great writing style-Dunbar's first novel won a prize-but the content may elude those who are afraid to think or are already "dead" themselves. With this book, you can't categorize or summarize neatly. The reader has to either match Dunbar's brainpower or trust it to take them along for the ride. Most will have to trust and just enjoy. The book has so many levels and topics woven in-a missing body, walking corpses, teenage sex, philosophy and physics, to mention a few-and so many casual, but deeply meaningful, references. It will probably be challenging graduate seminars in the future.

Still, the story is also just plain fun. I laughed out loud many times, cried a couple of times, and went back umpteen times to reread parts for the sheer pleasure of it. I certainly know a few corpses myself, but the best part was having my own life tweaked a little. This book "turned up the volume" on it, as she says. I am recommending MY LIFE WITH CORPSES to everyone, including my teenage friends. There's a lot of wise counsel sprinkled throughout, and my guess is that it's going to be read for as long as there is anyone alive to read it.

The corpses of Wylene Dunbar's title are probably not what you think. Her book is indeed populated in part by the dead, but her corpses are most often mobile beings, difficult to distinguish from the living even for someone with a practiced eye, such as Dunbar's protagonist and narrator Oz. Oz grew up the only living member of a family of corpses, her mother and sister having died before Oz was born, her father perhaps shortly thereafter. It is difficult, in Dunbar's world, to determine precisely when the transition from life to death occurs. The process of dying can be a lengthy one, and besides, corpses tend to retain the characteristics they enjoyed in life: "...a southern corpse does not forget her manners just because she is dead, any more than a midwestern one suddenly learns how to carry on a charming conversation about nothing at all."

Dunbar's story begins with an appealing mystery: the grave of Oz's childhood neighbor and friend Winfield Evan Stark has been found to be empty, Oz's own published account of her childhood among corpses lying in the grave in its place. This discovery prompts Mr. Stark's relatives to exhume a nearby grave in the hope of finding the missing body, a task over which Oz is for some reason set as overseer. While workmen dig up the grave, Oz writes a continuation of her earlier account, in part as a warning to the rest of us. As Oz discovered in adulthood, her family of corpses was not as unusual as she had supposed. There are corpses everywhere--vacationing in Canada, publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals, meeting with friends at coffee shops--and if you're not careful you may get the life sucked out of you as well.

Oz's narrative--Dunbar's novel--is punctuated by keen observations and patches of lovely writing:

"He was quite thin and I would say he was tall and lean, but you would think of Gary Cooper in High Noon when what I mean is that he was a rather beat-up stick; a long, emaciated collection of bones and skin supporting a large bearded head. Everything about him was that way, even his hair, which was slicked down and lightly grayed, above a long wolfhound face."

But Oz's philosophizing slows the narrative down, and neither she nor the characters she describes ever become real enough to make readers care what happens to them. What is maddening about the book, however, is that Dunbar leaves so many questions unanswered: why can people other than Oz see some corpses but not others? how did Stark "rescue" Oz from her family of corpses, and why did he bother rescuing her subsequently from her perfectly normal foster family? why is her book found in Stark's grave? And so on. This is evidently meant to be a thinking person's book, inspiring in us ideas about the loss of spirit that can precede corporeal death, but the imperfections of the premise around which Dunbar's serious narrative is constructed are too distracting for us to take the book very seriously. An ostensibly absurd premise can be made to work if it is logically consistent, if all the loose ends are tied up, but Dunbar leaves too much unexplained.

While My Life with Corpses disappoints, however, Dunbar is clearly a very good prose stylist. There are passages in this book that merit rereading. It will be interesting to see what the author offers us in the future.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

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