Obituarist's Diary (A Life Study of a Gloomy Industry)

Author: (American) Lynch, translated by Zhang Zongzi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: "In our town, I bury about two hundred dead every year." Poet Lynch begins his personal testimony with such a sentence. Like all poets, he takes death as his theme, but Lynch's uniqueness lies in the fact that he is a funeral director in a Michigan town, employed to bury and cremate the dead. In the midst of his work, he remains keenly attuned to the words of love and sorrow conveyed through death. This is the dual voice of the witness and the participant. Lynch stands between "the living and the dead who once lived," filled with anger, surprise, fear, and serenity, trying to glimpse the meaning of death for life that all of us will understand. This is a tribute to the deceased parents and the living children. Here are golfers swinging their clubs by the graves, foodies and skeptics, lovers, and suicides. Some funerals bring joy, while some weddings bring tears. This is a book filled with rare elegance and wit, filled with strong contrasts,, it is a warning from the dead to the living.