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"Muske-Dukes
has shaped an exquisitely written tale with raw emotional appeal,
a deeply humanistic story of death, grief and survival."
-- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Intelligent,
sometimes luminous."
-- Kirkus
Life
After Death
Carol Muske-Dukes |
Random
House is pleased to publish the beautifully written seriocomic
new novel by acclaimed poet and writer Carol Muske-Dukes, LIFE
AFTER DEATH (Random House; $23.95; June 19, 2001). Writing
with the exquisite grace one would expect from a poet, Muske-Dukes
tells the heartrending story of one woman's search for the meaning
of life.
Boyd Schaeffer knew Russell had trouble with the truth when
she agreed, impulsively, to marry him. "Russell was a liar
- so relaxed and so appealing a liar that his lying seemed less
like deception than a kind of good cheer, a revisionist's optimism:
Life should be the way I'm telling you it is" After years
of putting up with bad behavior excused by boyish charisma,
Boyd has had enough. One day Russell leaves their young daughter
in a park and wanders off -- his excuse: during a game of hide
and seek he'd become stuck in the statue of Sneezy the Dwarf.
After hearing this story, Boyd tells him, "I'd prefer you
dead. Throw yourself out that window, for God's sake
You
left her in the park? ... Do me a favor, Russell. Die".
He does. Of heart failure the next morning. Afier Russell's
death, Boyd begins to find out who he really was and what her
own feelings about him really are. And so LIFE AFTER DEATH
becomes a meditation on the border -- the unknown, undefined,
powerful line -- between life and death. Boyd embarks on a journey
of grief, self-reproach, and self-discovery so profound and
surprising that her individual life in its quiet small town
setting takes on mythic proportions. With a lonely undertaker,
a very serious embalmer, a mother-in-law who refuses to face
the truth, and her four-year-old daughter, Boyd begins to reclaim
her life and to understand that endings often turn out to be
beginnings.
Powerful, comic, harrowing and, finally, redemptive, LIFE
AFTER DEATH is an unforgettable read.
-- Random House


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