Breu història dels que ja no hi són

What if those enjoying the afterlife require for their continuing existence being remembered by Earthlings? ... Since the afterlife, as depicted here, is never believable (the denizens show little stress about their temporary status), the stakes of Laura’s sledding aren’t what Brockmeier hopes. ... In this speculative fiction, perhaps the most interesting element to wonder about is how Brockmeier will get away with blaming Coca-Cola for causing the pandemic. After a charming first chapter that imagines highly individual “crossings” to the other side, a novelistic virus called “The Flicks” debilitates the rest.

Brockmeier's epigraph and the publisher's blurb spell out, pretty much, the connection between the doomed quest of Laura Byrd in the even-numbered chapters, and the denizens of the anomalous city in the odd-numbered ones. Such is his sensitivity and skill that Brockmeier contrives a mystery that is nonetheless subtle, absorbing, and ultimately satisfying. As befits a writer whose stated influences include Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping alongside JG Ballard and Italo Calvino, The Brief History is both formal and heartfelt, an elegiac fabulation on the fragile, ignorant beauty of human life.

Between earth and whatever lies beyond, the inhabitants of a benevolent purgatory known simply as The City have realised that death can be a wonderful restorative. ... Just as they had originally believed that The City owed its existence to the memories of the living, so now the citizens are increasingly convinced that Laura herself sustains it. ...The prose spreads a patina of whimsy over even the most urgent emotions: the characters are sometimes hearts that think rather than people who feel. But for all its foibles, The Brief History of the Dead must be accounted a prodigy of imagination, insight and overwhelming tenderness.

Nobody in the novel is remotely interesting, even in their responses to their extraordinary predicaments. And the plot, although rich in dramatic possibility, limps along through various tedious digressions and flashbacks, failing to stimulate any real imaginative or intellectual excitement. The bold premise at the heart of "The Brief History of the Dead" could have offered the best sorts of complex pleasures, narrative and metaphysical, that science fiction has to offer. Instead it merely flounders, a waste of a perfectly good idea.

...the brilliant question fueling the book is: What happens to the land of the dead-but-not-forgotten when the land of the living is destroyed? ... This conceit is also the book's primary weakness. The first half of The Brief History of the Dead is compelling and fascinating, full of interesting characters, lyrically restrained prose, and amusing bits of satire. The structure Brockmeier has created, though, limits him, making the second half of the novel a clever puzzle but not much more ... The weaknesses of the second half cut the wires suspending a logical reader's disbelief and let it drop to the ground and sprout questions about the way this afterlife is configured.