Customer Reviews

My Life with Corpses

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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

To say that "Oz" had a unique childhood would be a drastic understatement. The memories she carries with her are unlike any held in the hearts of other children. Why so different? Oz was raised by a family of corpses.

Her mother and older sister were already dead when Oz was born, but her father was still somewhat alive. Having existed in a household of corpses, however, he was forgetting more and more how to live and one day he just crossed over into death. It happened with such subtlety that Oz isn't even certain when her father died.

While some may think this lifestyle odd, Oz never gave it a thought. When a person is raised in a particular manner, and knows no other, it is impossible to think of it as being abnormal.

At the request of a friend, the man who saved her from her life with corpses, Oz has written the account of her childhood. And now, she sits at his graveside, ten years after his death, and writes a further account as she awaits the exhumation of what some believe will be Mr. Stark`s empty coffin.

This new memoir, of sorts, will take Oz's first tale and expand upon it to share the valuable lessons she has learned since she was "saved" from her family. She tells of realizing that there are more corpses in existence than even she could have imagined and she relates her struggles with falling into the trap of becoming a corpse herself.

Rather than write of corpses as the gruesome entities that fiction fans are used to, Wylene Dunbar has brought them to a new level by instilling a philosophical aspect into their existence. My Life With Corpses is a provocative tome that, though requiring a sizeable suspension of belief, will have its readers picking between the lines to relate certain aspects to reality.

I didn't get as excited about this book as the other reviewers have. I did not get much out of this book. The author is trying to blend the fantasy with the real, and it somehow misses the mark. I understand the metaphor of the "waking dead" and how she tries to juxtapose merely being alive with living life. But it just doesn't stir me. Something seems to be missing. I don't think the book is a waste of time, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, either.

"You've heard the story of the boy who was raised by wolves," writes Wylene Dunbar in her second novel, MY LIFE WITH CORPSES. She plays off the idea of the feral child in intriguing and surprising ways: her protagonist and narrator, known only as Oz, is raised by corpses. Oz's parents and older sister have all died, yet they still reside on their Kansas farm and still commingle with the living, who can see them but can't see that they're deceased. They live, but without warmth or desires or any kind of distinctiveness. Oz is the only person who can see them for what they truly are --- the walking dead.

Coming seven years after Dunbar's celebrated debut, MARGARET CAPE, MY LIFE WITH CORPSES begins with Oz declaring her intentions to tell her strange life story as honestly as possible: "What I write you now is not a fiction or even half-true but, instead, the whole of what I know, if long concealed." While this limited point of view can be a little bit disconcerting, especially early in the novel, the technique works only because Dunbar so quickly and effectively establishes Oz as a dynamic, unpredictable, and tough-minded character, our Virgil through the land of the dead.

Oz's life with corpses has surprising consequences. For instance, since the dead cannot feel, Oz grows up more or less without emotions: "My mother taught me how to live without feeling," she writes, neither lamenting nor whining. "More than stoicism or the courageous bearing of plain, I was taught not to feel at all." Also, Oz's family raises her as a boy, so it's a shock both to her and to the reader when she later realizes that she is in fact a girl.

However, given Dunbar's wild imagining of the differences between life and death, it's no surprise that Oz becomes a philosophy professor, finally settling into a decidedly abnormal life in Oxford, Mississippi. Here she sees corpses all over campus, in her students (one of whom has decomposed so much that she is little more than a skeleton) and in her colleagues. These corpses, however, are not metaphorically dead, nor are they zombies or ghosts. Their deathliness is somewhere between literal and figurative, between real and unreal, and Dunbar has a lot of fun developing her own personal mythology of death. She is intrigued by the logistics of it, the philosophy of death as well as the science. For her death seems to exist as a condition as much of the soul as of the body. The corpses that stumble through the novel seem to have lost their life-fires and so only maintain the appearance of the fully human. Inside, however, they are cold.

MY LIFE WITH CORPSES is most interesting when it takes its title as its mission and describes the lives the dead lead. Corpses don't have to eat, yet they must do so regularly for practical purposes: "their ethereal nature gives them a tendency to float above the earth unless they are weighted down." Also, they don't like to touch, but experience intimacy through sheer proximity. As Oz observes, "this accounts for the fact that we bury our dead collectively in cemeteries and that couples and relatives express the desire to be buried side by side."

Later in the novel, however, Oz describes an "unexplained breathlessness" that results from the presence of too many corpses, even recollecting that she would eat alone instead of with her dead family. This detail, however intriguing, contradicts her earlier memories of long road trips with her parents and sister, when proximity was not just unavoidable but desired. While such inconsistencies may seem inconsequential individually, they accumulate into something a bit more damning by the novel's conclusion, revealing the holes in Dunbar's imaginative mythology.

Regardless of such flaws, underneath the surface whimsy of this outlandish conceit lies a current of inevitable loss and pain. MY LIFE WITH CORPSES is tragedy through comedy, or perhaps comedy through tragedy. Either way it serves as a reminder that "living must be learned, and it can only be learned in contact with those who are living."

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner