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
See all Editorial Reviews
