17. The Brief History of the Dead

TBR #17.  The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.

First sentence: “When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand.”

The city is Limbo, where those who are dead live while someone alive on Earth still remembers them.  But a viral epidemic is threatening not only the extinction of all humanity on Earth but also the end of the inhabitants of the city.  Untold numbers die and disappear until there is only one woman left alive on Earth and less than a hundred thousand in Limbo.

Laura Byrd was on Antarctica when the pandemic devastated the other continents.  To keep from dying, she stays on the move, trying to find signs of other humans.  Laura’s journey and the journey of those she remembers meet in a vividly imagined and movingly written story of those who live in each other’s memories.

Though I was a bit frustrated by the novel’s ending, I couldn’t honestly expect Brockmeier to explain all the mysteries of life and death.  I liked the Laura-Antarctica chapters a lot.  On the other hand, sometimes it wasn’t immediately clear why or how the in-Limbo stories connected to Laura or to each other, which gave this book the feel of a short story collection.  A first-rate story collection, it’s true, but not as successful a novel as it might have been if plainer lines had been drawn between those dead and those alive.