How the Dead LiveWill Self has one of literature's most astonishing imaginations, and in How the Dead Live his talent has come to full flower. Lily Bloom is an angry, aging American transplanted to England, now losing her battle with cancer. Attended by nurses and her two daughters -- lumpy Charlotte, a dour, successful businesswoman, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie -- Lily takes us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. From '40s career girl to '50s tippling adulteress to '70s PR flak, Lily has seen America and England through most of a century of riotous and unreal change. And then it's over. Lily catches a cab with her death guide, Aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, and enters the shockingly banal world of the dead: the suburbs. She discovers smoking without consequences and gets another PR job, where none of her coworkers notices that she's not alive. She gets to know her roommates: Rude Boy, her terminally furious son who died in a car accident at age nine; Lithy, a fetus that died before she ever knew it existed; the Fats, huge formless shapes composed of all the weight she's ever gained or lost. How the Dead Live is Will Self's most remarkable and expansively human book, an important, disturbing vision of our time. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - PilgrimJess - LibraryThing'Grant me the stupidity to deny there's anything I cannot change, the temerity to neglect the things I can, and the ignorance to be incapable of distinguishing between the two'' ''How the Dead Live ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - William345 - LibraryThingSome thoughts on Will Self’s How The Dead Live. The first 280 or so pages deliver the constant narrative pleasure of some illicit drug. One is constantly buoyed along by the wonderful storytelling ... Read full review
Contents
Chapter One | 29 |
Chapter Two | 53 |
Chapter Three | 71 |
Chapter Four | 93 |
Chapter Five | 111 |
Chapter Six | 133 |
Dead | 153 |
Chapter Seven | 155 |
Chapter Ten | 221 |
Chapter Eleven | 249 |
Deader | 275 |
Chapter Twelve | 277 |
Chapter Thirteen | 297 |
Chapter Fourteen | 315 |
Chapter Fifteen | 351 |
Chapter Sixteen | 379 |
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Common terms and phrases
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