The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead is based on an old African belief of the "living dead" - an idea that as long as there is someone alive who personally remembers you, you won't be truly dead. Only after the last person who remembers you dies, do you actually cease to exist - your name might be remembered and songs may be sung of you, but once the personal connection is gone is a person truly gone.

Scenario is following: there is only one person in the world left alive after an epidemic that has swept every corner of the world. The last living dead are the people Laura Byrd remembers, and they live in a mysterious city trapped in time as the people they were when they died. Laura's parents are there, her former best friends from school, her former lovers, the blind man who used to beg in front of her building and hundreds and hundreds of other people who have left some kind of mark on her. She herself is fighting for her life in Antarctica trying to get sense of what's happened and if there's anyone left alive in the world.

When I started listening to this book I was completely mesmerized by the fantastic idea and the storytelling - nothing much happens as such, but the story slowly unfolds when characters in the city interact with each other and tell their stories. Until pretty much very end I wasn't sure how it was going to end: if Laura would die and take the living dead with her, or weather she would find other people and survive. It's well written and I think it retains the tension until the very end, and I did care about most of the characters and what happened to them.

But then something happened and I got thinking about death. I mean real death, and it's finality. How remembering someone will never be like being with them, and how even memories will fade. How I still sometimes painfully miss my grandfather who died over 10 years ago, and how I wished there was some way I could still meet him and talk to him... and at the same time knowing that it will never be, and that my memories are the only thing left.

This book is a fun bit of speculative fiction, but it pales in comparison to real life. And I can't find the depth in it that I did in the beginning.

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