How the Dead Live (ISBN 080211671X)

Amazon.com Review:
In April 1988, 65-year-old Lily Bloom quickly succumbs to cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital. ("Where do they keep the Royal Ear, I wonder? I think of it as very large--as big as a dinner tray--and very red, angrily red.") But after life there's death. Guided by an aborigine named Phar Lap Jones, she is transported by a Greek Cypriot minicab driver to the North London dead neighborhood of Dulston. There, accompanied by her dead son, Rude Boy, she's introduced to the 12-step Personally Dead meetings, and she watches over her living daughters--the cold, ambitious Charlotte, and her favorite, the heroin-addicted Natasha. "Natasha is peculiarly charged by the drug--and even by the mere anticipation of its effects. She shifts from being vulnerable and skittish and withdrawn to being strong and steady and extrovert. She's told me before that it makes her feel 'complete' and 'confident,' and I can see what she means. When she's off heroin she's a fucking nightmare--when she's on it she's a peach." Since Will Self's face, voice, and, notoriously, life story are familiar to many who will never pick up his fiction, there's always the risk of reading How the Dead Live as autobiography. In which case, he's clearly based Lily on his New York-born Jewish mother, and he's wittily retooled large chunks of his own much-publicized addictions, transmuting himself into the beautiful and glamorously doomed Natasha. But Lily is feisty and articulate, with a complex history spanning two continents, two husbands, and a constantly re-created personality--a great literary creation. Self's sympathetic account of Lily's decline into her morphine-laden deathbed is deeply affecting, and his long-term obsession with London provides us with the utterly convincing Dulston. His treatment of modern Jewish life in North London (rather than New York) will find its fans and critics, but the novel grows beyond such local concerns. Ultimately, it is about the vexed relationship between the worries of contemporary Western life and a more transcendent spirituality--signaled by Self's opening gesture to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and by the all-seeing Phar Lap Jones. How the Dead Live is a big book with big ideas, and quite definitely Will Self's most ambitious and mature work to date. --Alan Stewart

Good story in need of some trimming:
Having only read some of Self's short stories in the past, this novel weighing in at 400+ pages had the style, wit and great word play I expected from Self but was in need of an editor. The rambling narrative would crank up and then lose its focus, leaving us an an audience to flounder for 15/20 pages at a time. I appreciated the development given to our main character Lily as we go with her through her illness, ultimate death and boredom with death itself. Few authors can turn a phrase or link words together as interestingingly as Self and for that I am appreciative of the book. His stories are filled with such great ideas and settings but in the end a little less would have gone a long way in my enjoyment of this novel.

interesting viewpoint:
Blurb (or foreword, I can't exactly remember) of this book, presents it as a satire...In a certain way, it is right. But, in some other way it lacks few imortant imformation. When one think of a satire, one think at instant of political attacks towards rulling caste, towards media, and towards every aspect of life that you can think about. Here you will find only an old, overweight women, whose thought resemble our own in a scarry manner... All wordly struggle of good and evil does not make a sense once you are dead, all that is left s longin...longing for daughters, longing for sex, longing for food, longing for everything that makes life what life actually is... and in a ceratin way that is all satirical that this book has. Of course you'll find sarcastic remarks, of course you'll find critique of society, but that does not make this book outstanding... What does is feeling of timeliness you suddenly feel upon completing final pages. Suddenly you start to wonder - 'where have all the good times gone'

Will? Self?:
Yes, it seems that this book is a triumph of the Will and an act of unbridled Self. It is a tour de force, no doubt. Racy, witty, inventive, impressive. What it is not is much of a story. It shows all of the massive ego of a writer at the peak of his power but none of the willingness to entertain that belongs to a good story teller. The plot involves Lily Bloom (Molly's sister no doubt) who finds herself a sudden citizen of the land of the dead. Now you might think that this would be a starting point for an intricate piece of speculative fiction about a topic that's engaged everybody's mind from time to time: what happens to us when we die? But Self doesn't take the opportunity. Instead, we get 400 pages of cranky self-indulgence of Lily along with a dose of British literary anti-semitism. The ending, which could have restored some narrative grace to the 'story' is tacked on hurriedly. Given the chance to make a satisfying 'once upon a time' ending, the author goes for an act of Will and a display of Self. On the other hand: the Will and the Self in question are pretty impressive. The malevolence with which the characters are constructed and the sheer imaginative power of the language redeem this book. --Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.(...).

Death is not the end:
That comment about Kerouac's 'On the Road' being not writing but typing applies to this long novel as well. A sort of modern day Ulysses (hell, the heroine is even called Bloom) narrated by Lily Bloom, cancer raddled old lady who finds that Hindu spiritualist metaphysics have kicked in after her death and she finds herself in a grubby basement flat in Dulston (a suburb of North London where the dead live). The novel develops the conceit first outlaid by Self in his short story 'North London Book of the Dead' (in the collection 'The Quantity Theory of Insanity'). Whereas that story is a master of literary originality and economy, this novel, over the 400 page long hall is a bloated rant on just about every topic under the sun pertaining to 1990s London culture and society. Lily is a half Jewish, American woman of high middle class culture whose observational eye is like a camera - there is nothing she doesn't miss. And despise. She rants movingly against her cancerous condition, the yellowy sickly nausea of her incipient mortality. Her mind and family are sick too - her daughter Natasha, a sort of Kate Moss figure, a junkie with translucent skin and blue black hair who just has to rub up against a man to get laid. In her mortality, and beyond, Lily has opinions on London traffic, aboriginal bars, contemporary fashion, interior design of basement flats, politics in the UK and beyond. Just about every cultural incident of significance in late 1990s Britain. Will Self has always liberally slathered his pages with cultural references, but the result here is like a very, very rich oil painting. Too rich to pick out the individual tones and colours. The voice is the same, high intelligent diatribe throughout the novel. To my mind, novels of the formless, ranting style, all voice no structure don't really suit British novelists too well. There are some masterful examples of the kind in America - Portnoy's Complaint comes to mind. Even Martin Amis's 'voice' novel, Money, also a fantastic book, had to be set mainly in New York to achieve it's effect. American culture is rich and beserk enough to sustain such a book. 1990s London, much as Self would wish it to be, just wasn't. The best British novels of the period (to be fair to Self, there aren't many) had to work hard to dredge up some interesting narrative, as contemporary life was pretty much flatlining, just new bars and restaurants opening, trouser legs up in the spring, down in the autumn, a new instillation causing controversy here, a minor political scandal there. Self unleashes all his satirical canons at once in this novel - the ambition is huge, but the effect shows that much of his powder was damp.

could finish it, didn't want to:
This book was listed in some brainiac's list of 1001 books to read before you die. It was one of the entries listed under the 2000s and I liked the set up of the story, what little I skimmed, before I picked up the book. Never having read Self before, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but I was willing to give it the old college try. I loved the intro. That was about it. I'm sure there's a place for work like this in the world, but it isn't in my head. I read the first 60 pages trying to figure out what exactly was going on and if I needed a cultural reference book to understand it. But I was able to figure it all out. The protagonist, Lily, didn't have a good life, nor a good death and she holds it against everyone she's ever met. They tolerate her, she silently (and sometimes not so silently) hates them. Nevertheless she wants another go around. I read the next 40 or so pages, got to know the characters better, got to know Lily better and then realized I didn't like any of them. I struggled with whether I should be a literary snob and slog through to the end because One Should Finish Books, or should I give it back to the place I got it from? I gave it back. I could have spent a week or so finishing the book, but I just didn't want to. Life is too short to bathe oneself in that much vitriol.