Summary:
Mariana Enriquez has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She visits them frequently on her travels around the world, a goth flaneur among the headstones “where dying seems much more interesting than being alive.” But when the body of a friend’s mother who was disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship is found in a common grave, Enriquez begins to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest.
Travel with Enriquez as she journeys across North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris’s catacombs, Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans’s above-ground mausoleums, the opulent Recoleta in her hometown of Buenos Aires, and beyond. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead.
Review:
Man, this book was not what I thought it would be. Based on the title and the description, I thought this would be about someone exploring historic cemeteries with the idea of comparing and contrasting them, or looking at them in historical context, or hell, even just using time in cemeteries to reflect on life. After her friend’s mother was found, the stated goal of examining the meaning of cemeteries certainly seemed to be leaning in that direction.
What I got instead was lists of dead people and stories of their lives, some cemetery history with little other context, and a lot of unrelated talk about bands and singers that I’ve never heard of and don’t care about. The whole thing felt self-indulgent and scattered. The visits aren’t even organized chronologically, so there’s no sense of the passage of time or of a coherent “journey”, like the subtitle “My Cemetery Journeys” says. If you enjoy cemeteries, fine, but that’s not a scaffold that you can hang an entire book on. Plus, some of her behavior absolutely horrified me–she stole a bone from the Paris catacombs. That’s not a souvenir, that’s a person, you freak.
Honestly, I should have DNF’d this book, but I got stubborn and forced myself to finish it. I’m a person who has found that I enjoy exploring the old cemeteries of Ireland and the UK, so I kept hoping to find something of interest, but I really didn’t. There was too much that I found off-putting or boring. There are much better books about cemeteries out there.
