Mary Roach, “Stiff. The curious Lives of Human Cadavers”

  – e-book 

 

Read from February February 2^nd to 18^th 2021

My Rating : 

 The horizon of expectations induced by the title of Mary Roach’s book, Stiff. The curious Lives of Human Cadavers, is, without a doubt, fulfilled. In fact, the whole book is a very interesting and pretty original effort to encourage people to change their belief that cadavers are gruesome, eerie, disgusting or simply boring, by proving that they are in fact some sort of superheroes, working for the ‘betterment of humankind’, that is helping us to test, experiment and understand the human body: they were the first ‘victims’ of the guillotine, the first subjects of the new embalming techniques, the first passengers to wear a seat belt. Moreover, that there is nothing disrespectful in relating amusing stories about them, for a cadaver is not a person anymore, it is simply an object without much dignity left:

Being dead is absurd. It's the silliest situation you'll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it.

Mario Benedetti, "The Truce"

 –ebook

 

Read from to February 5^th 2021

My rating: 

 

The Truce is the only (I think) Uruguayan book I have ever read, but what an introduction to the Uruguayan literature I’ve been offered! Moreover, I have learned (via Wikipedia , of course) that its author, Mario Benedetti, was a prominent member of the influential Generación del 45 and that he is considered one of the most important Latin American writers. A skilled translator (the first to translate Kafka), a mighty journalist, a brilliant novelist and poet, winner of a lot of international awards, he was nevertheless haunted by the same feeling of the worthlessness felt by many of his generation, as his last poem, dictated to his personal secretary just before dying, reveals:

My life has been like a fraud

My art has consisted

In this not being noticed too much

I've been as a levitator in my old age

The brown sheen of the tiles

Never came off my skin