- Hardcover: 179 pages
- Publisher: Harcourt; First Edition edition (Nov 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 015181192x
- ISBN-13: 978-0151811922
- ASIN: 015181192X
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 12.7 x 3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,839,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Synopsis
A collection of essays that look at mortality from the cold-blooded perspective of morticians and embalmers, with a visit to a Mexican hospital on that country's lively celebration of death.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Interesting stories, banal reflections
16 Feb 2011
Format:Paperback
There are some interesting stories in "The Day of the Dead," but I almost didn't get to them. The writing is so affectedly literary and clunky that at page 15 I was debating whether to continue. I am moderately glad to have pressed on.
The framework concerns a BBC documentary about dead people in which Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a Chicago pathologist born in Mexico, was a participant. Each essay was set off by an episode in the filming, but the book is not about the documentary.
A Mexican was a natural subject, since that country's attitude toward the dead is distinctive. The Day of the Dead (All Soul's Day) has a long European heritage, but nowhere today is it marked with such vigor as in Mexico.
Each essay is marked by Gonzalez-Crussi's ruminations about the mystery and permanence of death, and these are banal.
The stories, though, are baroque and fascinating. And true.
In the first, a president of Argentina is tortured to death to make him reveal the whereabouts of the embalmed corpse of Eva Peron.
The second explains how Aztecs ripped out hearts from living victims.
The third reviews the history of anatomical specimens.
The fourth, and most interesting, sends 9-year-old Gonzalez-Crussi on a school field trip to view the rotting body of a small child.
The fifth recounts the autopsy of a child who died of AIDS, and the nervousness of the participants. This one resonated deeply with me, since the week I read it our esteemed county medical examiner died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (which in our obituary we delicately did not call mad cow disease), which he possibly got while doing an autopsy. Despite agitation to the contrary, AIDS is not the trivial infection some would have, and concerns about inadvertent transmission have not been misplaced. On the other hand, the courage of medical professionals should not be scouted, and Gonzalez-Crussi gives a good discussion of the moral, as well as mortal, reflections of encounters with implacable diseases.
Regrettably, he follows with a last essay about death and the visual arts that is not merely banal but misinformed.
He contends that "works of art never instantiate the aesthetics of death. Works of art are rather the exclusion of death. For art truly to represent death, it would have to include death's reality as part and parcel of the work."
I don't understand what that means, but death as reality in art was demonstrated at a Berlin gallery a few years ago.
A woman jumped off the building and landed at the entrance. Art aficionados stepped nonchalantly around her corpse, under the impression that it was part of the "installation," although one wonders if they were not surprised by the attention to detail, so unusual in modern art.
The framework concerns a BBC documentary about dead people in which Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a Chicago pathologist born in Mexico, was a participant. Each essay was set off by an episode in the filming, but the book is not about the documentary.
A Mexican was a natural subject, since that country's attitude toward the dead is distinctive. The Day of the Dead (All Soul's Day) has a long European heritage, but nowhere today is it marked with such vigor as in Mexico.
Each essay is marked by Gonzalez-Crussi's ruminations about the mystery and permanence of death, and these are banal.
The stories, though, are baroque and fascinating. And true.
In the first, a president of Argentina is tortured to death to make him reveal the whereabouts of the embalmed corpse of Eva Peron.
The second explains how Aztecs ripped out hearts from living victims.
The third reviews the history of anatomical specimens.
The fourth, and most interesting, sends 9-year-old Gonzalez-Crussi on a school field trip to view the rotting body of a small child.
The fifth recounts the autopsy of a child who died of AIDS, and the nervousness of the participants. This one resonated deeply with me, since the week I read it our esteemed county medical examiner died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (which in our obituary we delicately did not call mad cow disease), which he possibly got while doing an autopsy. Despite agitation to the contrary, AIDS is not the trivial infection some would have, and concerns about inadvertent transmission have not been misplaced. On the other hand, the courage of medical professionals should not be scouted, and Gonzalez-Crussi gives a good discussion of the moral, as well as mortal, reflections of encounters with implacable diseases.
Regrettably, he follows with a last essay about death and the visual arts that is not merely banal but misinformed.
He contends that "works of art never instantiate the aesthetics of death. Works of art are rather the exclusion of death. For art truly to represent death, it would have to include death's reality as part and parcel of the work."
I don't understand what that means, but death as reality in art was demonstrated at a Berlin gallery a few years ago.
A woman jumped off the building and landed at the entrance. Art aficionados stepped nonchalantly around her corpse, under the impression that it was part of the "installation," although one wonders if they were not surprised by the attention to detail, so unusual in modern art.
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