The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins [Hardcover]

Midas Dekkers (Author), Sherry Marx-MacDonald (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2000

A wonderfully witty, erudite, and insightful book about the way "things fall apart" -- about the inevitable ruin of everything from bodies and works of art to ideals and whole societies

In The Way of All Flesh Midas Dekkers argues that things are at their most beautiful when they decay, provided they are given the chance. Old buildings are usually pulled down or restored. Aging people desperately try to act and look young, becuase novelty, youth and beauty are equated in our minds with what is desirable. Only mankind is bothered by the realization that "life is a way of dying slowly." By ignoring or evading the lure of decay, which has its own attractions, are we simply trying to escape from the truth?

With the idiosycratic erudition of the european intellectual -- Roberto Calasso
and Umberto Eco come to mind -- Dekkers stresses that our aversion to decay and mortality makes our lives shallow. This is the meditative essay as written by Fellini; Dekkers that ancient Rome's days of decline were its finest, and The Way of All Flesh is a profound and entertaining meditation on what it means to outlive one's usefulness, when the wheel of fortune has gone full circle.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dutch biologist-writer Dekkers offers an extended, quirkily charming meditation on Yeats's insight that things fall apartDfor everything, Dekkers says, is bound to do just that. Though we postmoderns, he contends, are obsessed with propping things up, from faces to buildings, we should recognize not only the inevitability but also the beauty of decayDone can find it in all manner of decayed things, from a South American train graveyard, where rusting axles and wheels lie piled on top of one another, to willow trees. Dekkers turns his sharp (at times savage) tongue on many Western attempts to stave off decay. He doesn't approve of conservation: he would rather we take care of and "cherish" things, but when their "final days arrive," let them deteriorate. In a chapter called "Souvenirs," Dekkers turns his fire on mementos: if your dog passes on, don't take him to the taxidermist, but simply remember him fondlyDand get a new dog. Dekkers even criticizes the impulse to "build to last." Many things, he argues, from ugly buildings to evil dictatorships, should come to an end. What we often portray as decay is really fulfillment: we should revel in autumn, treat old people with respect. (On a somewhat less convincing, more scatological note, Dekkers suggests we should even delight in defecation, which he terms a pleasurable "creative process.") Despite his apparently grim subject and occasionally abstruse style, Dekkers writes delightfully (he calls dandruff, a sign of physical decay, "skin confetti from your hair") and emphasis on his book's quirky, combative nature could help this catch on in a big way with savvy readers. 140 b&w illus. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Popular Dutch writer and biologist Dekkers is unsentimental, knowledgeable, and wry, and there's no telling where his lively discourse will go. He begins by disparaging Western society's obsession with youth and newness. Both are fleeting conditions, he explains, since life is motion and change. Our fixation on advancement, too, is based on delusion, since life, basically, "has no goals." Having disabused his readers' notions of permanence and progress, Dekkers embarks on a jolly, illuminating, and counterintuitive paean to decay and aging. He celebrates the beauty of ruins and delights in the fact that most of the foods we eat, meat and cheese, for instance, taste good because they're in the process of rotting. This leads to discussions of the busy world of microbes, the effects of acid rain, and, in his most riling passages, a harsh critique of the foolishness of restoration either of art or nature, as wilderness preservation and cosmetic surgery. Dekkers' motto could be "let it rot," and he concludes his unusual inquiry with a thoroughly fascinating, if faintly dismaying, account of the mechanics of death. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374286825
• ISBN-13: 978-0374286828
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,700,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Meandering black humor, August 21, 2001

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"sin-disruption" (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins (Hardcover)

My only semi-negative comment about this book is that if you're a person who expects/requires an essay writer to start with a thesis, prove it through argument and then return to it (i.e. have a point) you may find this book somewhat frustrating. I however am not one of those people and found Dekkers' morbid ramblings quite entertaining. (Especially when he goes on about rotten foods being delicacies and how his grandmother was an expert carrion-eater.) Recommended for goths. ;)