"The Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade" by Thomas Lynch ***

• National Book Award Finalist
• Non-Fiction, Essays
• Michigan author of the year, 2001
• US author
• A poet and an undertaker
• Vocabulary:
• aubade: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn, usually as a compliment to someone.
• obsequies:  funeral rites
• Preface:
• xvi....."Then and now we age with the grace (in Cummings' careful metaphor) of polar bears on rollerskates."....LOLOL! 
• xvii..."Faithless, hopeless, untutored in love, they make babies for the sake of company and kill themselves with unspeakable violence in staggering numbers--suffering from a deficiency in meaning acquired from pop culture, pop psychology, feel-good religion, that tells them don't worry, be happy, take care of yourself and your self-esteem.  The stand to inherit, along with the spiritual void their parents have left them, the bill from the card it was charged to."......just a typical cynicism about the younger generation or is he astute or is he being unintentionally critical in an effort to be witty?
• xviii..."Thus, undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather, and the blinding dark.  It is the voice we give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer."
• "The Undertaking":
• p.3..."Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople."  I never thought of it that way....
• p.13...."Milo had become the idea of himself, a permanent fixture of the third person and past tense, his widow's loss of appetite and trouble sleeping, the absence in places where we look for him, our habits of him breaking, our phantom limb, our one hand washing the other."
• "Gladstone":
• p.18...."...he loved to quote Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal who sounded lik a New Age Republican when he wrote that he could measure twith mathematical precision a people's respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead."
• p.21....."So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is 'just' anything rings as tinny in its attemp to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was 'just' a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy."
• p.22..."The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence.  They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents.  It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.
• p.25...."They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions--only those who do it well and those who don't"...what is not doing it well?
• "Crapper":
• Epigraph:  "Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face." - La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
• p.30..."It was my first taste of Liberty--to crap out in the open air on the acreage of my ancestors, whilst listening to the sounds of morning: an aubade of birdwhistle and windsong."
• p.33...."Since4 Crapper's marvelous invention, we need only pull  the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance.....having lost the regular necessity of dealing with unpleasantries, we have lost the ability to do so when the need arises.  And we have lost the community well versed in these calamities.  In short, when shit happens, we feel alone.".....introduction of the toilet.....interesting
• p.36..."Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out."
• p.37..."
• This is also why the funerals held in my funeral parlor lack an essential manifest--the connection of the baby born to the marriage made to the deaths we grieve in the life of a family."
• p.47..."Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship.  Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy."....LOLOLOL
• "The Right Hand of the Father":
• p.51...When we buy the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited.  Memory it she overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort."
• p.54..."The poor cousin of fear is anger."
• "Words Made Flesh":
• the artichoke poem written by a friend and published in the New Yorker
• p.72..."I tell Robin a version of what the old doctor, William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote that men die everyday for what they miss in poetry.  I tell him people are born, and reborn, everyday, who owe their very beings to poems"
• p.74...marriage poem
• "The Golfatorium":
• idea for combining a golf course and a cemetery
• p.80..."A reviewer of mine quite rightly calls poets the taxidermists of literature, wanting to freeze things in time, always inventing dead aunts and uncles to eulogize in verse."
• p.82..."Whether we bury the dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them."
• p.84...."And to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral."...an undertaker's concept
• "Mary & Wilbur":
• the rebuilding of a local bridge giving direct route to the cemetery, championed by local actress
• the author wrote a poem for the dedication of the new bridge
• "Sweeney":
• his friend, the hypochondriac...or is it a gift of understanding that we will die
• "All Hallows' Eve":
• the night he buried his mother
• "Uncle Eddie, Inc.":
• addresses the issue of assisted suicide and its impact on the undertaker's profession in the future
• "Jessica, the Hound and the Casket Trade":
• how to be sensitive as well as profitable
• "Tract":
• addresses his own wishes for his funereal
• Review:  I enjoyed this essay collection.  Lynch blends a combination of wit, sensitivity, and insight about the culture of death from a variety of perspectives.  I laughed out loud a few times and read while slowly nodding a few times as well.  It is not that he brings something new to light, rather that he faces the familiar head on.  I like that.

"Godforsaken Idaho: Stories" by Shawn Vestal ****

• Early Reviewer edition for LibraryThing.com
• US author, raised as a Mormon
• Debut
• Originally published in 2013
• Short Stories
• Epigraph:  "And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin.  If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness.  And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness.  And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery.  And if these things are not there is no God.  And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.".....The Book of Mormon
• "The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death"
• Author's vision of heaven
• p.1..."You eat from your own life only."
• p.2..."Your age at death becomes your age forever."
• p.3..."If you want peace, you have to find it in the life you left behind."
• You're allowed to re-live moments/events as many times as you want to.  "But you find it hard to land in a single untroubled moment.  Every second is crowded with life, with misery and anxiety that just won't be stomped down."
• p.27...narrator's perfect moment of peace...."I hear the wind sound of planes.  The air smells like sweet hay and cow shit.  My mind hums.  I light one cigarette off another and watch the butt tumble out of sight into the canyon below.  I am entirely alone.  The emptiness makes a sound that takes in everything."
• p.8..."You know it when people you love die."
• "About as Fast as This Car Will Go"
• Paroled father takes on his teenage son....life of crime begins
• p.29..."I never wanted to be a criminal until I was one."....the son
• p.37..."...some part of fearing is expecting."
• "Families Are Forever!"
• Pathological liar
• p.51...."That's why I lied to her so much.  Out of love."...narrator has something to hide about his life before meeting Gina.....we never find out what it was
• p.70..."There are times when your groove and the groove of all things just line up and become the same groove."...Like that
• "Pocket Dog"
• a pocket dog is one of the tiny designer dogs often carried around by beautiful, rich women
• p.72..."Out here we're bound to feel a dog like that is just wrong."
• Grandma (rancher). Lanny (hired man), and Simon (dissolute grandson)
• p.74..."Grandma said the problem around here started with the death of work.  The place just doesn't run on work any more--it runs on leisure, on fly fishing and mountain biking and skiing.  People moving in with their money already made."
• Grandma and Lanny save Simon from himself, from being a "pocket dog"
• "Godforsaken Idaho"
• Pressure builds until narrator commits act of violence
• Life of social isolation
• "Winter Elders"
• p.110...."It was the smile of every man he had met in church, the bishops and first counselors and stake presidents, the benevolent mask, the put-on solemnity, the utter falseness."...missionaries who come to the door relentlessly
• p.111..."...Bradshaw kept waiting for it to happen.  The flash of light.  The surge of joy.  Some brightness shining through the visible world.......The thing behind the thing.  Cheryl called it 'an animating force.'"
• Anger at the faith of the missionaries.  "It was that Pope had something he could not have, and he would spend his life not having it."
• Again, pressure to believe results in act of violence
• "Opposition in All Things"
• Narrator dies and returns inside another person, a navy veteran who cannot forgive himself for killing despite the Mormon congregation saying killing and war were not the same thing
• Another tale of social isolation leading to violence
• p.145..."I was waiting along with Rulon for an opposing force, for something to press against.  Something in this world, some person or idea, was the opposite of me, and I needed to crash into it to become whoever or whatever I was."
• "Gulls":
• Locusts descend on Idaho farm.....Mormon community faces terrible losses
• Sara, has visions, seeks truth
• p.169..."She wanted to believe in it like her father and mother did, wanted to hear the voice of revelation herself."
• p.176..."This is how the voice of the Lord stays silent on Earth."....picking and choosing what God is responsible for
• "Diviner":
• Joseph Smith's scams in many communities
• He marries a skeptic's daughter
• Father lives with them in disbelief, but chooses it over isolation and lonliness
• Review:  Hmmmm...definitely an interesting collection of stories.....definitely some dark tales.....definitely a theme about questioning faith and/or organized religion......definitely a sense that faith is individual and we also compromise to be part of the greater whole of our communities......definitely some godlessness......but no definitive decision on my part about the collection as a whole.  I like Vestal's writing.  It packs an emotional punch which is the reason it gets four stars.  I suggest taking a chance and reading it.  I am interested in future work by this author.

"The Phantom" by Jo Nesbo. ****

●  Audiobook
●  Norwegian author
●  #9 in the Harry Hole series
●  Originally published in 2012
●  Review:  This installment of the Harry Hole series is excellent!   Once again Jo Nesbo creates a great blend of emotional dynamics and complex thriller.  Tension continues to mount regarding the degree of corruption in the city police and council members in Oslo. Great read!

"The Ploughmen" by Kim Zupan ****

• Early Reviewer edition for LibraryThing.com
• US author
• Scheduled for publication October 2014
• Debut novel
• Setting:  Great Falls, Montana, current date
• Characters:  
• Valentine Millikaki (Policeman, orphan, Gload's guard)
• John Gload (Serial killer, orphan, prisoner)
• Epigraph:  "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers; our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding."  --  1 Chronicles 29:13
• Vocabulary:
• shelterbelt:  hedge or fence of trees designed to lessen the force of the wind and reduce erosion 
• umbles: "edible inner parts of a deer or other animal, 
• Quotes:
• p.12...."Presently he saw John Gload appear in the first circle of light and fade and reappear in the next, progressing this way along the concrete catwalk, incorporeal as a phantom.".....like Dante's circles of hell
• p.124...."But he was at home with them, she was right.  And whether they sought the open country for their death, or death sought them there, it little mattered.  In either case kindred souls, Millimaki and the dead, met under a companionable sky and the encounter was good for all.
• p.205...."The world for these men was reduced to floor, ceiling, walls, and bars, and his own differed little--an unfixed cubicle of solitude that, like a carapace, went with him everywhere and was impervious to the warming sun or the wind in the trees or even the unconditional affections of a sister who seemed not to care he did now write in return and send his love, which she deserved."
• p.217..."Because it's hard to be alone, Millimaki thought.  That's what I've figured out, Red.  In this country, it's just hard to be along."
• Notes:
• Parallels between Val and John:
• both have the dead in their head all the time, one from search and rescue with his dog, Tom...the other his victims
• both imprisoned, John in jail, Val by his past
• Review:  I want to start by saying how much I enjoy reading when the author's command of language is clearly demonstrated.  I really like Zupan's use of expansive vocabulary!  This is the tale of two men whose history is not far different, and for whom there are numerous parallels.  However, one becomes a serial killer and the other is a policeman.  In the course of the killer's incarceration they are thrown together.  The rest is for you to discover.  I read the whole novel during one cloudy day on vacation and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It is a bit grisly, but that aspect is minimal. The author beautifully conveyed the sense of isolation experienced when living in the beautiful, yet stark, Montana landscape.  I think this author is going places!

"The Dark" by Sergio Chejfec *****

• Open Letter publication
• Argentinian author
• Originally published in 2000, translation published in 2013 
• Quotes:
• p.8...."Accustomed to the world of the factory, where truth is measured, counted, and classified, she was confused by the thought of becoming the object of something at once definite and intangible, as emotions tend to be."
• p.11...."A unanimous lie turned into truth."
• p.17...."In the same way, just like at work, Delia surrendered a part of herself when she withdrew; someone observing her might think that at any moment she might cease to be herself, that she might succumb to a force that would isolate and take over her body.  But something kept her from crossing that threshold, and this was how Delia was able to maintain the delicate balance between absence and communion."...Are we all like this sometimes?
• p.48..."Reduced to acting on a few instincts, an animal of any species has a more tangible effect on time than man does."
• p.48..."A person closes a book and is surprised by the abyss of the day to day, with the varying scales and speeds of time, fast or slow, which leave a fine, invisible layer on the surface of things."..........wow
• p.51....."Each breath, every mouthful of air drawn deep, brought with it the scent of the dusk from his childhood."
• p.57...."She transported herself with her mind, just as she seemed to be somewhere else now, as she walked beside me.  And it was this gift, this ability to withdraw without absenting herself, to abandon me without leaving my side, that was most aligned with her nature."...loneliness
• p.59...."For obvious reasons, the night is more profound and more cosmic than the day, but it's also the moment when the scent of the earth, from elemental waste to the scents brought out by the dew, prepares to reveal itself.  And it's this combination of opposites--the breadth and impassivity of the celestial sphere, the galaxy following its distant course at full speed through the middle of the universe, and the singular labor of the earth, opening seeds and decomposing bodies, as persistent as an obsession--that is sometimes called the murmur, or the pulse, of the night."
• p.63..."At night we're the center of things, just as happens when we look into the past."
• p.67..."Because depth is found not in darkness, but in contrast."....he writes with his eyes closed.....
• p.77...."After the most extravagant and dramatic incidents, what remains with us of other people is always a face etched in the dark.  Not in real darkness, but in the dark of evocation.   Memories, strangely enough, have no light of their own."
• Notes:
• p.8 - workers having direct contact with the product of their labor, as opposed to the merchant who measures the abstract notion of change...interesting
• p.58..."proletarian disposition"...tendency to go elsewhere in the mind, habit developed in factories but carried forward into relationship
• p.72....the paradox of workers who had been in debt becoming the ferocious moneylenders....makes sense for the vulnerable to want to become the strong
• p.76...workers encouraged to "become one" with their machines....the agent of their production
• p. 80....workers will keep everything on the line functioning even in crisis....seemingly holding onto the routine for security
• p.140....It has often seemed to me that much of a person's life is filled with thoughts that have no future."......like my journal?
• Review:  Don't even consider reading this book unless you are prepared for a serious intellectual workout!  Personally, I think I pulled a few muscles during this one!  Enter the interior monologue of a man trying to understand the nature of relationship.  What relationship, you might ask?  Well, between man and woman, between social classes, and between man and machine.  The narrator dissects his relationship with the mysterious factory worker, Delia.  Throughout the dissection are allusions to the dark, the darkness, the night.  "...Definite and intangible..." are words he uses to describe relationship, and that is at the beginning of the book.  I think those are the two best words to describe the experience of reading this astute and intense novel.

"The Luminaries" by Eleanor Catton ****

• Summer read with Beth
• Canadian author
• Originally published in 2013
• Setting:  1866, New Zealand, gold rush
• Vocabulary:
• astrological house:  Twelve sections of the chart wheel, derived from time-and-space related points of the chart (e.g., Ascendant,Descendant, Midheaven and IC). Each House represents a different "field of experience" or set of situations or circumstances in our lives. See table below for examples. The cusp of each house is like the doorway into that house, and each house spans the area from its own cusp to the cusp of the next house (moving counter-clockwise). Houses correspond quite a bit to the signs in their archetypal meaning, but are not the same thing. 
• twinkle:  not in dictionary, author explains it as a cheat achieved when a gambler puts a crystal in the tip of a burning cigar then wavesthe cigar into a position in which it reflects the cards in another player's hand
• judder:  : to shake in a forceful way
• fug:  stale air, especially the humid, warm, ill smelling air of a crowded room, kitchen, etc.
• homeward-bounder:  a mine whose output would allow the owner to return to England a wealthy person
• Characters:  Characters are divided into two groups. ?...stellar/planetary....
• Crosbie Wells,  terra firma,  found dead in his cabin, alleged widow showed up toclaim his estate
• Walter Moody, planetary, "presented himself in the manner of a discreet and quick-minded butler
• Thomas Balfour:  stellar, financier, type whose sense of entitlement comes from many years in which his optimism is supported by success
• Joseph Pritchard:  stellar, chemist, "....whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed,  he plunged inward, and struggled downward--kicking strongly,  purposefully,  as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies;  as if he wished to drown
• Anna Wetherell:  planetary, whore found poisoned by opium,  "her complexion was translucent, even blue,  and tendedto a deep purple beneath her eyes--as if she had been paintedin wTer olor; on paper that was not stiff enough to hold the moisture,  so the colors ran. "....."She was a silent oracle.....knowing not wisdom,  but wickedness--for whatever vicious things one might have done,  said, or witnessed,  she was sure to have witnezsed worse.
• Mannering:  goldfields magnate, stellar- tends to describe others as "reflections of, or detractions from, his own authentic self
• Charlie Frost:  banker, stellar, "He was a private hedonist, perennially wrapped in the cocoon of his own senses, mindful, always, of the things he already possessed, and the things he had yet to gain
• Quee Long:  goldsmith, stellar, ",,,now, not eight years after his death (his father), Quee Long was here, in New Zealand, profiting from the very circumstance that his father -and his country-- had attempted, vainly, to forestall.
• Emery Staines:  Anna's love
• Quotes:"
• p.135.....".....it's this twilight that's the danger,  between the old world and the new."  ......civilised world and un.....?
• p.169...."How silently the world revolved,  when one was brooding, and alone."....Pritchard
• p.193..."No man likes to be called a coward--and least of all, a  man who is feeling downright cowardly."
• p.225..."They sought these women when they looked at Anna, but only partly, for they also sought themselves:  she was a reflected darkness, just as she was a borrowed light. Her wretchedness was, she knew, extremely reassuring."
• p.260..."The drug, for Quee Long, was a symbol, signifying the unforgivable depths of Western barbarism toward his civilization, and the contempt with which the Chinese life was held, in the face of the lifeless Western goals of profit and greed."
• p.342..."The twelve men were united only by their association to the events of the 14th of January, upon which night Anna Wetherell had nearly died, Crosbie Wells had died, Emery Staines had vanished, Francis Carver had sailed away, and Alistair Lauderback had arrived in town."
• p.363...."Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become willful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood--it acquires all the qualities of common superstition--and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence."
• p.363..."For the planets have changed places against the wheeling canvas of the stars.  The Sun has advanced one-twelfth along the tilted wheel of her ecliptic path, and with that motion comes a new world order; a new perspective on the whole."
• p.390..."We spend our entire lives thinking about death.  Without that project to divert us, I expec t we would all be dreadfully bored.  We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to worry about.  Time would have no consequence."
• p.533.....Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer; will now acquire the form and substance of the real.  We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end."
• p.671...."True feeling is always circular--either circular, or paradoxical--simply because its cause and its expression are two halves of the very same thing!  Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.  Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love--not truly."....Mr. Staines
• p.714...."...if home can't be where you come from, than home is what you make of where you go.".....Paddy Ryan....Irishman who makes the briefest of appearances
• p.718...."You may have an astral soul-mate, whose path through life perfectly mirrors your own!"....Anna and Emery, explains the way they channeled each other and mirrored each other
• p.765..."...in myself I value loyalty; in others, honesty."...Emery to Crosbie
• Notes:
• the room of  12 men....an inverted pantheon.....meaning the opposite of a group of ruling gods?   P.7
• prospecting as "reverse alchemy"....transformation  out of gold rather than into it
• Significance of February being a month with no full moon?
• the planetary characters were the ones with secrets to hide?  Moody put them in pairs:  the widow and the trafficker, the politician and the gaoler, the prospector and the whore
• Review:   Reading this epic tale of hope, betrayal, loyalty, and above all destiny,  was something of a roller coaster ride.  At times the mystery of death and disappearance was completely engrossing, at times it was a little tedious.  The creative structural theme of astrology was at once a fascinating nuance and at times s bit of a nuisance.  I have a vision of this author with a computer spreadsheet in front of her to keep the facts and fictions within the story from confusing her.  I could have used one at times.  The consistently marvelous part of this book was the character development.  The planetary versus stellar characters, and their intertwined relationships were elegantly constructed.  The fact of the matter is that this novel will stay with me for a long time, yet I do not see it as a classic over time due to the confusing complexity of the plot.

"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun

●  Audiobook
●  Norwegian author
●  Nobel Prize winner, 1920
●  Originally published in 1890
●  Review:  This novel is stark, emotionally evocative and on a primal level, terrifying.  If you dare, enter the psyche of the narrator, a writer, who waivers between abject poverty and death.  Suffer along with him as Hamsun's brilliant writing takes the reader to the brink of utter madness, sublime passion, and death by starvation.  In the end, what is the hunger for in addition to food?  You will have to suffer the throes of despair and humiliation of the protagonist to find out!