How the Dead Live [Hardcover]

Will Self (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000

Will Self is a novelist of world-class stature, an unparalleled literary craftsman with a ferocious insight. In How the Dead Live, he gives us his best and most important book yet, an incisive and troubling dissection of the spiritual emptiness and death in our culture. Lily Bloom is an aging American in final-stage cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital in Central London. Not that there's anything wrong with her ears -- it's just the only bed they could find for her. As her two daughters buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily slides in and out of consciousness, outraged that there's so little time left and so much hate still to go around. In her delirium she rails against everything, from the sins of those in the immediate proximity to the world at large, viewed through the lens of her paranoid bigotry. In the corner of the ward sits an impassive, middle-aged Aboriginal Australian man, who from time to time reminds Lily that it will be his responsibility to ferry her across the Styx, and that in lieu of a coin, he'll happily accept her dentures. How the Dead Live is an unforgettable portrait of the human struggle with mortality. In it, Will Self has given us a book that will change the way we talk about death, a novel that, like Underworld or Mason & Dixon, will be a literary sensation remembered for years to come.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In April 1988, 65-year-old Lily Bloom quickly succumbs to cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital. ("Where do they keep the Royal Ear, I wonder? I think of it as very large--as big as a dinner tray--and very red, angrily red.") But after life there's death. Guided by an aborigine named Phar Lap Jones, she is transported by a Greek Cypriot minicab driver to the North London dead neighborhood of Dulston. There, accompanied by her dead son, Rude Boy, she's introduced to the 12-step Personally Dead meetings, and she watches over her living daughters--the cold, ambitious Charlotte, and her favorite, the heroin-addicted Natasha. "Natasha is peculiarly charged by the drug--and even by the mere anticipation of its effects. She shifts from being vulnerable and skittish and withdrawn to being strong and steady and extrovert. She's told me before that it makes her feel 'complete' and 'confident,' and I can see what she means. When she's off heroin she's a fucking nightmare--when she's on it she's a peach."

Since Will Self's face, voice, and, notoriously, life story are familiar to many who will never pick up his fiction, there's always the risk of reading How the Dead Live as autobiography. In which case, he's clearly based Lily on his New York-born Jewish mother, and he's wittily retooled large chunks of his own much-publicized addictions, transmuting himself into the beautiful and glamorously doomed Natasha. But Lily is feisty and articulate, with a complex history spanning two continents, two husbands, and a constantly re-created personality--a great literary creation. Self's sympathetic account of Lily's decline into her morphine-laden deathbed is deeply affecting, and his long-term obsession with London provides us with the utterly convincing Dulston. His treatment of modern Jewish life in North London (rather than New York) will find its fans and critics, but the novel grows beyond such local concerns. Ultimately, it is about the vexed relationship between the worries of contemporary Western life and a more transcendent spirituality--signaled by Self's opening gesture to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and by the all-seeing Phar Lap Jones. How the Dead Live is a big book with big ideas, and quite definitely Will Self's most ambitious and mature work to date. --Alan Stewart

From Publishers Weekly

HScathingly satiric and prophetic, this unsettling novel by Great Apes author Self will inevitably inspire comparison with Martin Amis's era-defining London Fields. Running on a vatic rage that is almost Swiftian in the totality of its objectDthe damned human conditionDit sweeps across the charnel-fields of contemporary existence. The enraged center is held by narrator Lily Bloom, a Jewish-American transplant to London. Harsh, unforgivably anti-Semitic, extreme, Lily is a larger-than-life character. In fact, she is literally dead when the reader first meets her. She's biding her afterlife in Dulston, the dead "cystrict" of London. In the first part of the book, she harks back to her terminal illness, when her 30-year-old daughter, Charlotte, arranged for her care. Dutiful, responsible and all too English, Charlotte reminds Lily of her despised second husband, David Yaws, Charlotte's father. Natasha, her younger daughter, is a beautiful drug addict, "far too selfish," as Lily comments, "to think of doing anything for herself. She's entirely centered on what others might do for her." Lily's nine-year-old son, David, or "Rude Boy," a profanity-spouting child crushed by a car in 1957, is reunited with her in the afterlife, as is her petrified still-birth, the "lithopedion," and the fat she lost dieting. Her afterlife guide, Australian aborigine Phar Lap Jones, advises her to give up desire, but Lily wants another turn on the cycle of life and death. Self brilliantly uses Lily's marginal position to comment on a culture structured by the desire to desire. Through Lily's eyes, the reader is granted a vision of the West as a vast, glittering junkiedom. Lily's objection is not political, howeverDit is existential, an accusation of the inevitable failure of the flesh itself. Self's novel will surely figure on best-book lists this year. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr; 1ST edition (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080211671X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116710
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,455,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good story in need of some trimming, June 8, 2005

By 

E. M. Dawson (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How the Dead Live (Hardcover)

Having only read some of Self's short stories in the past, this novel weighing in at 400+ pages had the style, wit and great word play I expected from Self but was in need of an editor. The rambling narrative would crank up and then lose its focus, leaving us an an audience to flounder for 15/20 pages at a time. I appreciated the development given to our main character Lily as we go with her through her illness, ultimate death and boredom with death itself. Few authors can turn a phrase or link words together as interestingingly as Self and for that I am appreciative of the book. His stories are filled with such great ideas and settings but in the end a little less would have gone a long way in my enjoyment of this novel.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Nasty & Uncompromising Flow of Thought, August 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: How the Dead Live (Hardcover)

There comes a point about midway through Will Self's new novel when one realises that his prose isn't actually going anywhere--but stick with it. This is one, long, vile rant from the dying and then dead protagonist, Lily Bloom, who is undeniably a product of her times (coming of age in the '50's, hedonist in the '60's, etc.) and her experience (upper middle class Jewish/American living abroad, several marriages, etc.). It's a pretty repugnant, though darkly, darkly humorous, depiction. She's dying of cancer. Then she's dead. But every page just crackles w/ Self's boundless (and almost blinding) verbal energy and dexterity; the author is never self-censoring though his wordplay does get a bit cheeky. Self also doesn't do himself any favours having his anti-heroine summarising her life through an endless list of historical events that doesn't shed any light on either subject. But overall, it's a provocative and imaginative reflection of the anti-thesis of the title: it's about how we live (an alternative title: It's a Not So Wonderful Life). The novel sprints to the finish line in it's final quarter w/ a fascinating and well-written account that can only be described as Carlos Castenada Goes To The Outback; the reader suddenly and unexpectedly starts to realise the riches of this work, primarily, a bizarre meditation on the nature of parenting and the responsibilities inherent in being a mother and a child. HTDL is merciless and compellingly unsentimental. Well worth reading-a must for Self enthusiasts, a great place to start for newbies.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Caustic and Poignant Post-Death Masterpiece, December 20, 2001

By 

Dan Witte (Chicago area) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How the Dead Live (Paperback)

If you enjoy Self's surreal mindscapes and jackhammer wit, you will appreciate this addition to his literary canon. All of the Self trademarks are here: the awesome imagination, the caustic commentary and the subtle and ingenious wordplay. And, for me at least, there were several added bonuses that make this easily my favorite Will book: a fully drawn character (narrator and protagonist Lily Bloom) with whom to identify and empathize; and a certain level of authorial compassion for the character that wasn't evident in previous works like "My Idea of Fun" or "Great Apes." The result is that, as a reader, I found myself drawn to the character rather than simultaneously fascinated with and repelled by her...which is a more typical response to previous Self characters. The "plot," such as it is, is described ad nauseum here, so another summary isn't necessary. Let me just say that as a reader, I was captivated from start to finish, and find myself recalling certain bits of narrative and imagery even as I've moved on with my life and read other books. I'm actually looking forward to attaining a little bit of objective distance from this book and reading it again, maybe in a year or so, with the hope of discovering new insights and nuances I didn't catch in my first reading.