Customer Reviews

Miss Corpus

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

So yes, we can all agree that this book is definitely not for everyone. But my God, when the right people find it... they'll be in for one heck of a good read. It's a motley crew of characters, but all have heart -- which is why what they do doesn't matter as much as why they do it in the first place. I'd say this is an author who's going far... and it all starts here.

When I started this book, I was very intrigued with the personification of the Southern United States as a woman's body. I read it agressively hoping the whole book would be so poetic and captivating as the first five pages, but I was wrong. Several sections in the book dragged on too much for too long, even for a relatively short novel. My interest began to wane after half the book when I realized it was getting -quite bluntly- boring, but I held in there. Although it was written nicely with very complex character developement, there was no one central storyline or plot which sometimes makes you wonder "Where is he going with this?" The ending was abrupt and brought the book to an unsatisfying end.

I am struck by how many of the positive reviews for this book were written by people from the author's hometown. I wish I'd noticed this before forking over my dough because this bird don't fly. It's a real turkey. Less a book and more a spec script for an unproduced X-Files episode. Take a pass.

When we first heard Clay Chapman's voice, it came with a Southern Gothic accent out of the mouths of extreme characters, or characters in extreme circumstances. In his exceptional debut collection of short stories, REST AREA, he created a cast of storytellers that included, among others, a woman who held a rabid fox at arm's length for 12 hours, a man crooning to a woman's corpse like she was a mermaid; and a ventriloquist's dummy who was particularly jealous of his owner's new wife. However, his shocking content did not overshadow his stunning turn of phrase; he was obviously a writer to watch.

With his first novel, he has added to the accomplished body of his previous work-literally. MISS CORPUS features the voice of some body indeed, the voice that bookends the novel, the voice of the South: "There's a pulse beneath your feet, radiating through the rest of this country," she says. "More bodies have been buried into me than anywhere else, weighing me down with the heft of humanity." Chapman traces the stories of two men who follow that pulse, and end up at the conclusion adding their bodies into that "heft."

Will comes home from the sea to find his wife dead on the floor. He lies down next to her, pulling a map she had been using over them, so that "North Carolina covered her chest, her chin pointing toward Winston-Salem."(The author attended the North Carolina School of the Arts.) Then, he starts south on the honeymoon that she was planning, taking her along-in plastic coolers. As he sails southward, he sprinkles her body parts along the way, until he could feel her "...sprouting out from the South already, the bits of her body taking root within the people I met on our honeymoon." Along his way, he casts light on the lives of other refugees from the "real" world-the turnpike attendant who gives birth in the tollbooth; the boy who tosses live animals into the paths of passing cars, making them pull into his dad's motel; and others like them. Onward he hurtles, into the embrace of his northbound mate, Philip.

Philip has held vigil for years, waiting for his asthmatic son to return home with his van full of friends. During the wait, his marriage sank deeper than the van where the cops found it, submerged just off the road in a swamp. Chapman goes about as long as he ever has without shocking us here, but he makes up for it when Philip opens the van after it is winched out of the swamp: "Kevin's head fell forward, the neck snapping, his skull dropping. It landed directly into the cup of my hands." Philip takes off with his son on that road trip they never took, following the pulse northward.

As the two men head toward each other, Chapman turns the narrative over to MISS CORPUS. With that switch, he creates a narrative device which transforms a tale of dismembered bodies and dysfunctional lives into a story about the birth of a book, about life. In his best sustained writing, Chapman takes us into the making of the book, "Getting to the heart of what I have to say-the words circulating through my body, cover to cover. You're raising me with your imagination. Your eyes are my lifeblood, every turn of the page another pulse perusing through my body." With the collision imminent, all the elements whirl around-the incident that sparked the book, characters "...staining the bedspread with patches of paragraphs," I-95 as an umbilical cord-until out pops a "bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked tome." As the two cars collide, the coming together becomes not an end, but a beginning-the point at which this story really started. Like a literary big bang, we are back where every moment MISS CORPUS was "destined to live" has been pinpointed for her, and now, for us. Chapman actually produces a moment of exhilaration as the two men lying by the road recognize their part in the production. They smile, knowing that the reader is giving MISS CORPUS life: "When you read me, I can feel my heart beating," she says. Although not a taste for every literary palate, MISS CORPUS will satisfy those with a hankering for the unusual. Those are the people who read this and say as she does: "Sounds like a good read to me."

Mr. Chapman has written a horrifying road novel with things touching things that shouldn't and body parts in laps and on the road. Just when you think it's getting really gross there's a tap on your shoulder in the bathtub. The perfect gift for Mother's Day.

Chapman weaves us a tale of death, regret and hope in this gorgeous story of trying to tie up loose ends. I didn't like the book at first but I got sucked in and deeply moved by the author's imagery and heart. With a compassionate voice, Chapman takes on this journey through the South with two men in search of some understanding of what to do now that the fate of their loved ones has been sealed. He is a brilliant author who actually does NOT work for Bacardi by day but I understand that this belief may be more comforting to far less accomplished "writers".

Clay Chapman fuses the emotional intensity of dramatic monologue with a more traditional tale of epic journey. While its plot seems to focus on two men who are unable to let go of the past, the focus is on the shifting landscape of the country across which each is travelling. The result is riot of voices, each fighting to tell its own story. Clearly this book, has generated a lot of debate-- That alone, proves the work thought-provoking and deserving of a reader's attention.

miss corpus is a difficult book disguised as an easy read. This is defeinitely a page-turner, but perhaps it's highly entertaining nature is its own downfall, as the prose can perhaps be better appreciated if the pages turn a little more slowly. Chapman's use of language is terribly beautiful; he creates images that call upon the reader to dig into his/her own memories and senses, crafting a novel that is bound to affect readers in very personal ways.

The novel requires readers to suspend their disbelief a bit, to insert themselves into the its own culture, and think about the literary devices before jumping to the conclusion that the author had fallen into the dreaded land of cliche. Readers should put in just a bit of effort that they didn't think they'd have to with this slim book in order to get a little deeper into what seems merely a quick read. At the end of the day, miss corpus is a exciting and fantastical work about love (is that a cliche?) and is worth a read.

miss corpus is a difficult book disguised as an easy read. This is defeinitely a page-turner, but perhaps it's highly entertaining nature is its own downfall, as the prose can perhaps be better appreciated if the pages turn a little more slowly. Chapman's use of language is terribly beautiful; he creates images that call upon the reader to dig into his/her own memories and senses, crafting a novel that is bound to affect readers in very personal ways.

The novel requires readers to suspend their disbelief a bit, to insert themselves into the its own culture, and think about the literary devices before jumping to the conclusion that the author had fallen into the dreaded land of cliche. Readers should put in just a bit of effort that they didn't think they'd have to with this slim book in order to get a little deeper into what seems merely a quick read. At the end of the day, miss corpus is a exciting and fantastical work about love (is that a cliche?) and is worth a read.

Miss Corpus is a wonderfully dark, articulate, vivid, well-written, captivating novel. Every sentence left me hungry for the next. Chapman's incredible narrative drive will throw you into a highly imaginative world that shuttles between present and past with an extremely diverse range of characters. This carefully crafted book is a unique treasure and I highly recommend picking it up.