[Book Excerpt]: My Life With Corpses

My Life with Corpses
A Novel
By Wylene Dunbar
Published by Harcourt
April 2004; $24.00US; 0-15-101015-3

Wylene Dunbar blends a sharply defined reality with a soaring, surreal leap
of imagination in this story of an enigmatic narrator we know only as Oz,
who was raised on a Kansas farm by a family of corpses.

Since she was rescued by an iconoclastic neighbor named Winfield Evan Stark,
now long dead, Oz has stayed far away from her childhood home. However, Mr.
Stark's grave has recently turned up empty -- occupied only by a pristine
copy of Oz's narrative of her early life, entitled "My Life with Corpses."
Oz, a professor of philosophy, returns to help find his body, hoping to
receive the message she knows he is trying to send her. As she waits for two
amiable workmen to dig up a neighboring gravesite to see if Mr. Stark might
have switched resting spots, Oz reveals the peculiar details of her life and
shares her hard-won experience in detecting and avoiding the living
corpsedom that has befallen her family and so many others around her.

Oz recognizes and escapes a life of being dead by the narrowest of margins.
Her story is both a triumph and a cautionary tale, revealing how life can
seep treacherously away but also showing us how it can be restored again.
Disturbing and compelling, poignant and funny, My Life with Corpses is
narrated with an irresistible combination of intellect, irony, and outright
sorcery. Indeed, if Samuel Beckett had been born in Kansas, this is the book
he might have written.

Author
Wylene Dunbar, born to a Kansas cattleman and a painter, received her Ph.D.
from Vanderbilt and her law degree from the University of Mississippi. She
has taught philosophy and practiced law. She is also the author of the
award-winning novel Margaret Cape. A longtime resident of Oxford,
Mississippi, she currently lives in Nevada City, California.

For more information, please visit www.wylenedunbar.com, or
www.writtenvoices.com.

Reviews
"Overwhelming in its beauty, emotional force, and uniqueness."
--Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated

"My Life with Corpses is an ode on the west wind to what the dead make of us
and we of them. It hurts, but it doesn't hurt that it's deadly funny."
--Barry Gifford, author of Wyoming

"Wylene Dunbar's evocative prose, her sense of humor and her deep wisdom
make My Life with Corpses a rewarding journey -- for the heart no less than
the mind."
--Steve Yarbrough, author of Visible Spirits

"This is an extraordinary work of fiction. Oz is unforgettable: her story
will stay with you long after you have finished reading the book."
--Dean Faulkner Wells, author of Ghosts of Rowan Oak

Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book My Life with Corpses
by Wylene Dunbar
Published by Harcourt; April 2004; $24.00US; 0-15-101015-3
Copyright © 2004 Wylene Dunbar

The Cemetery

Winfield Evan Stark is missing from his grave and in his place is my book.
At least that is what an entire community of plainspoken, common sensible
Kansas farmers has come to believe, that a man's coffin and the body in it
have vanished, interred in their stead a "brand-spanking-new" copy of a book
(an account, really) I wrote some years ago. Of course, I came here at
once -- to Laurel Cemetery, I mean -- and that is where I am writing this.
It is quite clear, you see, that Mr. Stark wishes that much of me, and when
a man has rescued you from both corpses and corpsedom, a great deal is owed.

I have some company. My old dog, Annie, lies beside me, and across the
cemetery, the diggers are here to work, but I mean the company of those
persons watching from outside the field wire fence. They have gathered from
a clutch of six or seven since my arrival yesterday to nearly a dozen early
this morning, and the number is growing. They watch me at Mr. Stark's empty
grave and when I tour the other headstones -- all the while as solemn as if
they were here on the usual business. Once, I approached them to exchange
greetings, but they spooked and backed away. My power to frighten these good
people remains undiminished. There was a little stir earlier, too, when they
saw I was holding the book, the very copy found in lieu of the old man's
body and given to me last evening by Evan Crews. It was Evan, as well, who
called me a week ago to say that his late grandfather had disappeared and to
ask, very delicately I must admit, whether I knew where he might have gone.

"I don't know," I lied, and then corrected myself to say, "It is difficult
to tell," the more usual case with what is so. While I did not know Mr.
Stark's particular whereabouts, you see, neither was it true to say that I
knew nothing of them at all. Half-truth is a special skill of mine, my life
having required more of it than is usual.

But that was last week. What I write you now is not a fiction or even
half-true but, instead, the whole of what I know, if long concealed. I have
done with lying and, despite the perils that telling may present, even God's
holding a finger to the divine lips would be insufficient to dissuade me
from it. Just as before, you may not believe me, but that is no matter. I
have appreciated for some time that what is right and true is rarely even
given a pat as it trots by while the flimsiest lie is welcomed indoors,
where it can take a community by the throat and never let go.

Still, knowing is not without its shortcomings and you might rather remain
ignorant. If so, I will understand. Think of it as a war -- it is almost
that -- where others will fight the battles for you. For my part, I will
tell the truth and fervently hope that it is the wise, not wrong, act. The
Holy Bible tells us, after all, that "wisdom is better than weapons of war,
but one sinner destroys much good."

Now, as you may recall, this is what I wrote you then:

*****

My Life with Corpses

S. Oscar

You have heard the story of the boy who was raised by wolves. There were
consequences: he did not learn to walk upright in the usual way; his vocal
abilities were stunted. Or different, at least -- the vocal chords being
used to bay and howl at a time other little boys were mimicking consonants.
He was not, did not, become a wolf of course. But who can doubt the
alternate perspective this child, then man, forever possessed -- was
possessed by -- as a result of his upbringing?

My story is much the same. I was not raised by wolves, but I was born into a
family of corpses: parents and a sister who, at different times, had left
the world of the living. I think my father was the last to die and, in fact,
it is only because he was still twitching in the aftermath of death when I
came along that I suspected human beings might be capable of living at all.
Otherwise, my early brushes with vitality were only through the creatures
populating our small farm -- the dogs, the cattle, pigs and horses, and the
wild animals -- that continuously drew my father. He brought home raccoon
babies, box turtles, a pair of owlets, jackrabbits, cottontails by the
score. We would, he and I, thrill to touch them (here, I am speaking
metaphorically; the dead, technically, do not thrill); and we would care for
them as we confined them and prevented their escape.

Even so, I had some notion early on that all was not as it should be in my
family. I specifically do not say, please note, that I felt the wrongness.
That is just the point. There was no feeling, or very little. It is well
known that dead people do not feel, either tactilely or in their hearts --
by which I mean "emotions." I was not dead so I suppose I could have felt
something, but I was like the wolf boy. Who could expect him to stride man,
fully on his two legs when all he saw around him were four-legged beasts? He
would eventually come to something like that, perhaps, but why should it
ever occur to him to do it in the beginning?

But I am straying from my purpose, which is to sit here and to write down,
in an orderly fashion, "what it is like" to be raised by corpses. I choose
to do this now for selfish reasons. I am often besieged with questions about
my upbringing by the curious or even by professional persons interested in
making me an object of their research. Leaving my office today and putting
my dog Maggie in the car, I was again approached by a total stranger intent
on eliciting some previously untold information from me. My hope is that if
I set it all down here for everybody to see and digest at leisure, these
constant and disturbing probes will mostly cease. If so, my most pressing
concern and burden will be made lighter. I need to concentrate now and to
concentrate I must be left alone much of the time. If I do not
concentrate -- and I am convinced absolutely that this is so -- I will die.

Copyright © 2004 Wylene Dunbar

For more information, please visit www.wylenedunbar.com, or
www.writtenvoices.com.