"Cuando mueres te mudas a otra parte de Londres, y eso es todo". Esa fue la explicación que recibió el narrador de "The North London Book of the Dead" de parte de su madre, quien se suponía había sido reducida a cenizas unos días antes en el crematorio de Golders Green. Porque en el imaginario de Will Self (Londres, 1961), la muerte no es muy distinta de la vida. Primero, un difunto agente de bienes raíces te muestra tu nueva casa, luego consigues un empleo. No tiene que ser en una necroempresa: muchos de los dependientes que atienden a los vivos son muertos no identificados. Y si no acabas de entender tu nueva condición, hay cursos para principiantes que podrán ayudarte. Los motivos presentados en ese cuento, incluido en The Quantity Theory of Insanity (Bloomsbury, 1991), son recuperados y ampliados por el autor en la novela Cómo viven los muertos, publicada en el Reino Unido en el año 2000 y traducida al castellano tres años después.

Cómo viven los muertos es el monólogo de Lily Bloom, una anciana americana que agoniza en hospitales londinenses durante el primer tercio del libro. Después viene su mudanza a Dulston, un suburbio para muertos, donde asistirá a las reuniones de un grupo de apoyo (los Personalmente Muertos, con sus doce pasos y doce tradiciones) y obtendrá trabajo en una agencia publicitaria. Además, le endilgan una simpática familia disfuncional: tres fantasmales gordas, formadas por la grasa que tanto luchó por perder en vida, su insufrible hijo, muerto en la infancia, y un litopedión (feto calcificado) con un gran repertorio de canciones de los sesenta y setenta. Con semejante hogar, no es de extañar que el vicio de Lily sea escaparse de su barrio para fisgonear a los vivos.

Suena ingenioso, pero el libro es arruinado por la intención de Self de hacerlo su "novela del siglo", tentación en la que cayeron muchos autores en el ocaso del XX. Tanto en su agonía como en el limbo, Lily dedica todas sus fuerzas a hacer mofa de cada figura pública, de cada hecho histórico y de cada individuo común de los que tuvo noticia. La ironía e incorrección del personaje habrían hecho de ese recuento de calamidades algo interesante, pero las páginas avanzan sin que haya mucho más que esa actitud, sin nada con que contrastarla o confrontarla. Un sermón monótono y gris. Y es tal el exceso de metáforas, aliteraciones y juegos de palabras (algunos de ellos pueriles), que termina por aburrir.

A Will Self se le compara frecuentemente con Burroughs y Ballard. La gran diferencia es que estos dos supieron abrir canales de euforia y plenitud (erótica, lisérgica, lúdica) en los escenarios desconsoladores de su obra. Self, queriendo ser lúgubre y mordaz de tiempo completo, queda como un ingenuo. Si insisten en darle una oportunidad, escojan las distancias cortas: es mucho mejor cuentista que novelista.
Sonitus Noctis No. 9 (Marzo 2005) ( )

Lily Bloom, mujer antisemita de 65 años muere en Londres de un cáncer. Sin embargo, tras el fallecimiento, continúa viva en cierto modo y decide convertirse en relaciones públicas para poder seguir viva en la muerte.

The 12 steps of personally dead
1. We realized we were dead and that our lives were over.
2. We came to disbelieve everything.
3. We made a decision to painstakingly remember our former lives.
4. We made a searching and fearful inventory of our nervous tics and mannerisms.
5. We shared this inventory with our death guides, and subjected ourselves to their ridicule.
6. We became entirely ready to abandon ourselves.
7. We waited for nothingness.
8. We made a list of all those we hated.
9. We remembered them.
10. We continue to make a daily inventory and when we notice disturbing personality traits we embrace them.
11. We sought the meditation to improve our unconsciousness and isolation.
12. Having spiritually annulled ourselves as a result of working these steps, we carry this message to the newly dead. And:

the 12 traditions of personally dead
1. Our common annihilation comes first - individual dissolution depends on dead unity.
2. for our group purposes there is no ultimate authority, our leaders are usually Petty bureaucrats.
3. The only requirement for membership is death.
4. Each group is out autonomous--After all, frankly, who gives a damn?
5. Each group has but one primary purpose - to carry the message to the newly dead.
6. A PD group ought never endorse, or lend the PD name to, any living facility or Enterprise, lest we scare them to death.
7. Every PD group is fully self - supporting, incapable of receiving outside contributions.
8. Personally Dead is non- professional, although our death guides - who belong mostly to traditional peoples--may be appeased with cowrie shells, bullroarers, penis sheaths and whatever other tat appeals to them.
9. PD is over - organized, consisting largely of purposeless and inefficient bureaucracy.
10. PD has so many opinions, that they should - all things being equal - cancel one another out.
11. Our public - relations policy is based on deception. We must always maintain the illusion of being alive at the level of press, radio and films.
12. Individuality is the basis of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place personalities before principles.

And the prayer at the end of the meeting:
then it was over, we all stood, held the shape of each other's hands and muttered the prayer: 'Gog grant me the stupidity to deny there's anything I cannot change, the temerity to neglect the things I can, and the ignorance to be incapable of distinguishing between the two.'

Self writes a book that contemplates what the afterlife is. Lily Bloom was a full time and a half smoker. Thus, she contracted cancer a few months after she retired. Now she's in the afterlife and boy, she wasn't prepared for that. Everybody goes to the cafe in Dulton (the suburb in London where the dead go to live) to eat, and along with your food is served a bucket for you to spit it out with afterwards. You can't taste it and you can't swallow it, but people still like to eat. Everybody smokes because of course you can't get cancer when you're dead. Any abortions or miscarriages or any of your kids that died will be hanging around you for eternity. You get to watch your (living) kids go on living after you're dead.

The character of Lily Bloom has much in common with me. ( )

What an extraordinary and interesting book to read.
I liked it a lot: strange yet recognizable, believable, both the afterlife part as well as the path to it.

This is a book I'd recommend :-) ( )

'Grant me the stupidity to deny there's anything I cannot change, the temerity to neglect the things I can, and the ignorance to be incapable of distinguishing between the two''

''How the Dead Live'' is narrated by Lily Bloom, an American lying in a hospital in London, dying of cancer. Mind you, narration is probably putting it rather mildly because as she describes her lonely, isolated life in London with a philandering husband and two daughters,now grown up, one of whom Natasha is a drug addict with designs on her mother's prescription drugs; and on the cancer that is slowly eating her up it reads more like a sermon given by some Evangelist preacher.

Roughly a third of the way through the novel Lily finally succumbs to the cancer and dies from then on she takes the reader on a tour of the afterlife. Self's vision of the afterlife in London does not seem to differ greatly from real life. The dead take jobs and deal with petty bureaucrats and bureaucracy, housed in sub-standard accommodation before being moved out of the city to some even duller commuter town. An afterlife where the dead still eat, drink and smoke out of habit rather than any need of sustenance.

This seems both a somewhat disquieting but also amusing look on life, and of course death. In particular I loved the 12-step programme and the 12 traditions for the ''Personally Dead'' but was repulsed by the thought of having to spend the afterlife living with moving, talking lumps of fat gained and lost throughout life.

For me, the early part of the book feels like a long winded lead up to a joke out; where the punch line is death and there is a real lack of characterisation despite Lily revealing a glimpse of her early life in America. I also found some of the imagery used both repetitive and at times pointless. It was if Self had been given a list of words by his editor and had been told that he had to use them all at some point or other otherwise the book would not be published. It had the effect of making the text turgid rather than flowing but then perhaps that was the whole idea and I just missed it. On the flip side I wouldn't say that I totally dislike it. At times I found it intriguing and compelling but I didn't enjoy half as much as The Book of Dave, the previous Will Self book that I have read. Like that book this seems to be a back-handed swipe at organised religion and beliefs but this one fails to really hit the mark. ( )