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r0b3rta's review against another edition
4.0
A Poet who happens to be an undertaker takes you through the life, death and everything in between.
applegnreads's review against another edition
4.0
Death and how we treat it and those associated with it from about as close to the inside as you can get and still write a book. Pretty fascinating.
lpm100's review against another edition
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
"The Undertaking"
Thomas Lynch
5/5 stars
"Brilliant prose craftsmen and wordsmiths are hidden in plain sight--a funeral director, in this case."
*******
This is a book written by a funeral director right here in Michigan that was so good, he had a PBS special made about his line of work.
I also believe that this book is an antidote to the very popular Jessica Mitford book "The American Way in Death." (I don't think it's exactly novel that funeral homes or businesses like any other and they need to turn the profit to stay alive.)
******
What I see here are multiple threads, all of which are connected by some inner necessity of the author to write.
1. A philosophical / spiritual journal.
2. A memory journal of someone one with decades of experience and multiple generations in the funeral industry. (Who wouldn't think there'd be a story there?)
3. A book of poetry.
4. A travelogue. (The author is first generation American and still has family and property back in Ireland.)
No one of them is enough.
Any two could potentially be enough.
But three or more come together to create a splendid structure.
*******
Who knew that a funeral director could talk like this?
I will let the writing in the book speak for yourself.
QUOTES:
1. Heartbreak is an invisible affliction. No limp comes with it, no evidence scar. No sticker is issued that guarantees good parking or easy access. The heart is broken all the same. (p.64)
2. But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of muses, by 30 they grow wary and by 40 regard it as an invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won't be muses. They have their own version of the story. (p.62)
3. When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we sometimes imagine better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.... But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves in the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. (p.51)
4. In the room where Mrs Regan's body was, despite the candles and the flowers in the February chill-- a good thing in the townlands where no embalming is done - - there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs Regan's belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Later I heard comment in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs Regan..... had made her dinner the day before unboiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half pints of lager. (p.39)
5. I sometimes think the only firms to put their names on what they do anymore are firms that make toilets and direct funerals. (p.34)
6. But seeing him, outstretched on the embalming table with the cardiac blue in his ears and fingertips along his distal regions, I thought, this is what my father would look like when he's dead. And then, like a door slammed shut behind you, the tense of it all shifted into the inescapable present of: this is my father, dead. (p.23)
7. Embalming my father I was reminded of how we bury our dead and then become them. In the end I had to say that maybe this is what I'm going to look like dead. (ibid)
8. He was sharing a condo with a woman who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the two years of consortium that followed, he'd had a major heart attack every 6 months like clockwork. He survived all but one. (p.19)
9. There is a belief that I, being the undertaker here, have some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead..... And I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad teeth, the doctor to your rotten entrance, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. (p.8)
10. Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the Mrs or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It's not your day to watch it, because the dead don't care. (ibid)
11. The doctor pressed the stethoscope in the usual places, and after considerable silence pronounced his diagnosis: "Eddie, I can't find a thing wrong with you." Whereupon Eddie, ever contentious, slumped to the floor, turned purple, and died in an instant, proving for all in attendance, once and for all, the fallibility of modern medicine, and the changeability of life in general. (p.140).
12. If the past is a province the aged revisit and the future is one that the child dreams, birth and death are the oceans that bound them. And midlife is the moment between them, that frontier when it seems as if we could go either way, when our view is as good on either side.
13. It happened for me one night some years ago. Is it needless to say we had just made love? I was propped on my elbows looking out of the window.... We had buried my mother that morning..... And there, for a moment, I could see it all that night. Between the dead body of the woman who had given me life and the live body of the woman who made me feel alive, I had a glimpse of my history back to my birth at a glimpse of the future that would end in my death. (p.148)
14. Revision and prediction seem like waste of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. (ibid)
15. In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time. Reality is customized just to fit the person or the situation. There is your reality and my reality, the truth as they see it, but what is real and true for us all eludes us. (p.159).
16. Assisted suicide and abortion are as near to mirror images of the same existential concerns as life in this century will provide. And if a review of the last quarter century living with safe and legal abortion did not tell us exactly how to settle the current debate, it surely tells us how we shouldn't..... Left to chance, if we cower from the difficult issues, we get Kevorkian or a variation on his pathological if oddly cartoonish theme. (p.170)
17. "The slippery slope argument!" someone always says--as if to say it is to nullify it. As if things don't go from bad to worse. As if gravity did not exist.
18. When someone dies, we try to get a handle on it. This is because dead folks don't move. I'm not making this part up. Next time someone in your house quits breathing, ask them to get up and answer the phone or maybe get you some ice water or let the cat out. He won't budge. It's because he's dead.(p.181)
19. On the subject of money: you get what you pay for. Deal with someone who's instincts you trust. If anyone tells you you haven't spent enough, tell them to go piss up a rope. (p.196)
Verdict: recommended. Probably about 3 to 4 hours of reading time.
*******
Vocabulary
epithalamium
carillon
gerundive
sepia colored
intellection
vale (vs. veil)
domain
somatic death
metabolic death
shirred
coffin vs casket
PietÃ
"The Undertaking"
Thomas Lynch
5/5 stars
"Brilliant prose craftsmen and wordsmiths are hidden in plain sight--a funeral director, in this case."
*******
This is a book written by a funeral director right here in Michigan that was so good, he had a PBS special made about his line of work.
I also believe that this book is an antidote to the very popular Jessica Mitford book "The American Way in Death." (I don't think it's exactly novel that funeral homes or businesses like any other and they need to turn the profit to stay alive.)
******
What I see here are multiple threads, all of which are connected by some inner necessity of the author to write.
1. A philosophical / spiritual journal.
2. A memory journal of someone one with decades of experience and multiple generations in the funeral industry. (Who wouldn't think there'd be a story there?)
3. A book of poetry.
4. A travelogue. (The author is first generation American and still has family and property back in Ireland.)
No one of them is enough.
Any two could potentially be enough.
But three or more come together to create a splendid structure.
*******
Who knew that a funeral director could talk like this?
I will let the writing in the book speak for yourself.
QUOTES:
1. Heartbreak is an invisible affliction. No limp comes with it, no evidence scar. No sticker is issued that guarantees good parking or easy access. The heart is broken all the same. (p.64)
2. But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of muses, by 30 they grow wary and by 40 regard it as an invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won't be muses. They have their own version of the story. (p.62)
3. When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we sometimes imagine better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.... But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves in the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. (p.51)
4. In the room where Mrs Regan's body was, despite the candles and the flowers in the February chill-- a good thing in the townlands where no embalming is done - - there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs Regan's belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Later I heard comment in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs Regan..... had made her dinner the day before unboiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half pints of lager. (p.39)
5. I sometimes think the only firms to put their names on what they do anymore are firms that make toilets and direct funerals. (p.34)
6. But seeing him, outstretched on the embalming table with the cardiac blue in his ears and fingertips along his distal regions, I thought, this is what my father would look like when he's dead. And then, like a door slammed shut behind you, the tense of it all shifted into the inescapable present of: this is my father, dead. (p.23)
7. Embalming my father I was reminded of how we bury our dead and then become them. In the end I had to say that maybe this is what I'm going to look like dead. (ibid)
8. He was sharing a condo with a woman who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the two years of consortium that followed, he'd had a major heart attack every 6 months like clockwork. He survived all but one. (p.19)
9. There is a belief that I, being the undertaker here, have some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead..... And I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad teeth, the doctor to your rotten entrance, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. (p.8)
10. Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the Mrs or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It's not your day to watch it, because the dead don't care. (ibid)
11. The doctor pressed the stethoscope in the usual places, and after considerable silence pronounced his diagnosis: "Eddie, I can't find a thing wrong with you." Whereupon Eddie, ever contentious, slumped to the floor, turned purple, and died in an instant, proving for all in attendance, once and for all, the fallibility of modern medicine, and the changeability of life in general. (p.140).
12. If the past is a province the aged revisit and the future is one that the child dreams, birth and death are the oceans that bound them. And midlife is the moment between them, that frontier when it seems as if we could go either way, when our view is as good on either side.
13. It happened for me one night some years ago. Is it needless to say we had just made love? I was propped on my elbows looking out of the window.... We had buried my mother that morning..... And there, for a moment, I could see it all that night. Between the dead body of the woman who had given me life and the live body of the woman who made me feel alive, I had a glimpse of my history back to my birth at a glimpse of the future that would end in my death. (p.148)
14. Revision and prediction seem like waste of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. (ibid)
15. In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time. Reality is customized just to fit the person or the situation. There is your reality and my reality, the truth as they see it, but what is real and true for us all eludes us. (p.159).
16. Assisted suicide and abortion are as near to mirror images of the same existential concerns as life in this century will provide. And if a review of the last quarter century living with safe and legal abortion did not tell us exactly how to settle the current debate, it surely tells us how we shouldn't..... Left to chance, if we cower from the difficult issues, we get Kevorkian or a variation on his pathological if oddly cartoonish theme. (p.170)
17. "The slippery slope argument!" someone always says--as if to say it is to nullify it. As if things don't go from bad to worse. As if gravity did not exist.
18. When someone dies, we try to get a handle on it. This is because dead folks don't move. I'm not making this part up. Next time someone in your house quits breathing, ask them to get up and answer the phone or maybe get you some ice water or let the cat out. He won't budge. It's because he's dead.(p.181)
19. On the subject of money: you get what you pay for. Deal with someone who's instincts you trust. If anyone tells you you haven't spent enough, tell them to go piss up a rope. (p.196)
Verdict: recommended. Probably about 3 to 4 hours of reading time.
*******
Vocabulary
epithalamium
carillon
gerundive
sepia colored
intellection
vale (vs. veil)
domain
somatic death
metabolic death
shirred
coffin vs casket
PietÃ
mikelchartier's review against another edition
2.0
What? Huh? Not only does this guy not really tell any story, he spends far too much time either degrading any generation other than his own or not really telling us why he thinks abortion is bad. BOREEEENG. The only reason it's not 1 star is because there are a few excellent decent quotable sentences and perspectives. Otherwise, pretty flat.
audaciaray's review against another edition
2.0
Summer reading for grown up goths: a memoir by a poet/undertaker.
I enjoyed reading this book; it was a good read. It won't, however, stick with me much.
The writing is well-crafted and savory, but it doesn't take you anywhere. The first fifty pages were the best, and it really could've been a tightly written essay instead of a 200 page book.
That said, there is a really radiant passage in the beginning of the book about American space and life, with this lovely little thought-provoking paragraph:
"Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out. And if the family that prayed together stayed together in accordance with the churchy bromide, the one that shits together rarely sticks together."
That's the crux of the book - and though some of the other characters and townspeople that Lynch introduces throughout the book are somewhat compelling, I just didn't feel like through and through there was much here.
I enjoyed reading this book; it was a good read. It won't, however, stick with me much.
The writing is well-crafted and savory, but it doesn't take you anywhere. The first fifty pages were the best, and it really could've been a tightly written essay instead of a 200 page book.
That said, there is a really radiant passage in the beginning of the book about American space and life, with this lovely little thought-provoking paragraph:
"Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out. And if the family that prayed together stayed together in accordance with the churchy bromide, the one that shits together rarely sticks together."
That's the crux of the book - and though some of the other characters and townspeople that Lynch introduces throughout the book are somewhat compelling, I just didn't feel like through and through there was much here.
juliebcooper's review against another edition
3.0
Read half of this before I had to return it to the library. What I read I really liked, but it wasn't a book that I couldn't put down. That said, I enjoyed the short essay format and am looking forward to the bookgroup discussion of this book tomorrow.
blathering's review against another edition
4.0
Alternately moving and annoying, timeless and dated. This book of essays definitely shows its 1997 publication date and the baby boom sensibilities of the author. And yet... there are bits, sections, phrases that will worm their way into your heart and brain.
traciemasek's review against another edition
3.0
I think I misunderstood what this book is about. I thought it would be all sort of gory, creepy, gruesome anecdotes about working as an undertaker, but instead I think it's just going to make me cry a lot. It's really good, though.
bhsmith's review against another edition
2.0
Books make their way to my shelf for a variety of reasons: they've been a bestseller, they've been recommended by friends, the author had an interesting profile written about them, or the book just seems like something quirky and fun to read. Since "The Undertaking" was written in the late 1990s, I'm guessing that I didn't notice it on a bestseller list or read any recent press about it. So, it probably made it's way to my shelf based on the "quirky and fun" criteria. I was expecting a few hundred pages where you mix the writing style of Mary Roach, the real-life (to an extent, I know) behind-the-scenes look at a funeral home of Six Feet Under, with a dash of "this is what really happens behind closed doors" of Anthony Bourdain. Put all that together in some form or another and you've got a book I'd love to read!
Sadly, "The Undertaking" was nothing at all like that. It was essentially a few hundred pages of philosophizing about life and death with a few anecdotes about the funeral home trade thrown in to the mix to bookend the soliloquies about life. Thomas Lynch certainly has an interesting outlook on life since his professional puts him so close to death every day. His overall message - which I think is a good one - is that a funeral and everything that takes place after someone is dead is really not about the recently deceased, but all about those left behind to mourn them. It may be nice that you want your favorite song played at your funeral, but if playing that song doesn't do anything for the people there to mourn you, then why play it? It isn't about you anymore. There are probably plenty of people in this world - maybe myself among them - that need to hear this message and realize what exactly the funeral home trade is there for... getting the dead body out of your house, sure, but really more about helping the living.
It was mentioned repeatedly throughout the entire book that Lynch is a poet, likes poetry, hangs around with poets, has people request him to write poetry and is a published poet. I certainly don't mind poetry (though, to be frank, I don't read much of it), but the prose in this book was trying just too hard to be poetry, and it really didn't work. It often meant that the stories and lessons and sermons Lynch was sharing about his life and (a little) about the funeral home business were neither interesting and easy to read (if he were to err on the side of being less poetic), or outright poetic and thought-provoking (if he were to err on the side of being more poetic). Instead, most of the book was caught in the awkward middle.
Sadly, "The Undertaking" was nothing at all like that. It was essentially a few hundred pages of philosophizing about life and death with a few anecdotes about the funeral home trade thrown in to the mix to bookend the soliloquies about life. Thomas Lynch certainly has an interesting outlook on life since his professional puts him so close to death every day. His overall message - which I think is a good one - is that a funeral and everything that takes place after someone is dead is really not about the recently deceased, but all about those left behind to mourn them. It may be nice that you want your favorite song played at your funeral, but if playing that song doesn't do anything for the people there to mourn you, then why play it? It isn't about you anymore. There are probably plenty of people in this world - maybe myself among them - that need to hear this message and realize what exactly the funeral home trade is there for... getting the dead body out of your house, sure, but really more about helping the living.
It was mentioned repeatedly throughout the entire book that Lynch is a poet, likes poetry, hangs around with poets, has people request him to write poetry and is a published poet. I certainly don't mind poetry (though, to be frank, I don't read much of it), but the prose in this book was trying just too hard to be poetry, and it really didn't work. It often meant that the stories and lessons and sermons Lynch was sharing about his life and (a little) about the funeral home business were neither interesting and easy to read (if he were to err on the side of being less poetic), or outright poetic and thought-provoking (if he were to err on the side of being more poetic). Instead, most of the book was caught in the awkward middle.