The Afterlife: a Memoir [Hardcover]

Donald Antrim (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (1980)
• ASIN: B000N7BXOW
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Metaphors for Mother, June 5, 2006

By 

M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Afterlife: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Consisting of seven eloquent autobiographical essays, many featured in The New Yorker, The Afterlife is Antrim's stunning chronicle of his tormented relationship with his mother, a pseudo mystic, parnanoid, often manic alcoholic who believed that she and her son, Donald, were creative avatars in a world of philistines. Antrim describes how inextricably connected he is to his mother even in her death and my favorite episode is how after his mother dies he embarks on a chimerical quest for the Ultimate Bed. He obsesses over "coil counts," pillow tops, top-of-the-line beds that are called "sleep systems." Clearly, the bed becomes a metaphor for his contradictory relationship with his mother. The bed becomes the Womb, the Mother, the Crypt, Death, a New Life. The quest enlivens him but his eventual acquisition of The Bed (costing as much as a small car) results in despair. His anguish reminds me of a Kierkegaard proverb: "Fulfillment is in the wish."

What's amazing about this memoir, is if you were to tell someone that the book focuses on a man's guilt and torment for not being "supportive enough" as his mother faces death, you would have a tough sell. But the writing style, the irony, the layers of absurdity, and the scintillating anecdotage create surprising humor.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poweful, July 12, 2006

By 

Zen Poet (Ontario, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Afterlife: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I bought this book, never having read anything by Antrim before, in an effort to understand my son's perspective on our relationship. I found it searing and exceptionally well written. The first few chapters seem so odd and quirky to me but even when it gets into more conventional memoir stuff it is completely without self pity or rancour.

As a recovering alcoholic, his description of his mother's descent into the pit of the disease was better than a meeting.

Very intelligent.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, deeply felt, July 10, 2006

By 

K. Conley (CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Afterlife: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Antrim writes the best sentences of any writer now working: balanced, complex, digressive, surprising, dynamic, seemingly self-supporting (that is, existing for their own beauty and born of a unique inspiration that you too would follow if you had his gift for expression), but, as you find when you read on, what you thought were grace notes or jokes or just unforgettable and sheer oddball observations are in fact keenly plotted essentials subtly woven into the plot of the book. The style can sound with grand resonance--his prose is haunted by rhythms of great prose stylists like Thomas de Quincey and writers like Henry Green with an ear for both casual and telling dialogue--but his eye is contemporary and in the darkest of family scenarios both deeply felt and comic. With his great powers of observation he can move through landscapes you couldn't have seen--Florida coastal towns in the seventies, Black Mountain North Carolina in the final years of the past century--and see it so keenly that you can be tricked into thinking you grew up there too: this too is a function of his style, which can arrest your attention at key moments, the way Scorsese can move the camera so you never forget the shot.

The material here is of the darkest you can venture through--the broken legacy of artisty and alcoholism--and Antrim doesn't shy from any of its most painful moments. But for all that, the book is achingly light and filled with love however undeceived --silk out of pain. Read this book. It's one of the few that will speak to the ages of our age.