Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Argentinian horror novelist Enriquez (Our Share of Night) makes her nonfiction debut with this evocative travelogue-cum-memoir chronicling the two decades she's spent visiting cemeteries. Enriquez--whose obsession was sparked after visiting Italy's "staggering" Staglieno cemetery in her 20s--crosses continents in her search for burial grounds both famous and lesser-known. Among those spotlighted are London's Highgate Cemetery, the site of Karl Marx's surprisingly "imposing" grave; Savannah, Ga.'s famously beautiful Bonaventure Cemetery, which she likens to "an ancient but not abandoned temple"; and Australia's Rottnest Island, which houses an Aborigine burial ground that was used as a campground until the 1990s and is currently marked by "minimal signage, as if they wanted to avoid ruining someone's vacation." Enriquez's reports are peppered with fascinating trivia about each place: the character of nearby cities and towns, histories of architecture and politics, along with weirder anecdotes about corpse relocations and apparitions. Physical descriptions of each space--whether carefully curated or dilapidated, built for the rich or for the indigent--are likewise full of texture and wonder, prompting graceful ruminations on the fluidity of time and memory (Enriquez admits to a "nostalgia for everything, especially for what I've never experienced"). The result is an eccentric and enlightening peek into how memorialization happens across the world. Photos. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Argentinian horror writer Enriquez (A Sunny Place for Shady People) takes readers on a journey through 21 cemeteries around the world, in cities including Barcelona, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Havana, Lima, London, New Orleans, Paris, and Savannah, plus several places in Argentina. Each chapter offers information about a particular cemetery, its history, and sometimes, background on the people buried there, such as AC/DC lead singer Bon Scott, interred in Australia, and Rabbi Judah Loew (the Golem's creator), buried in Prague. The book includes Enriquez's own photographs of graves and other landmarks, taken during her visits to the cemeteries. Writing in a candid, sometimes blunt style, she successfully captures the essence of the cemeteries she explores and the people she meets on her travels. Her chapter on Mexico's Day of the Dead celebrations accurately depicts the joyous nature of this event in which the deceased are celebrated and honored. Readers will also learn about inhabitants of Patagonia descended from Welsh immigrants, the pyramid-shaped tomb in New Orleans that Nicholas Cage commissioned in anticipation of his demise, and much more. VERDICT This engrossing book, Enriquez's first work of nonfiction, will serve as an excellent world-travel guide for anyone interested in cemeteries and local history.--Erica Swenson Danowitz
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Travel tales and mini histories collected in cemeteries across the Americas and Europe. Given the gothic flavor that infuses Enriquez's fiction, it is perhaps no surprise that the author is a "cemetery connoisseur." In this essay collection, she pulls notes from visits to iconic graveyards across Europe, the United States, and South America, lightly lacing them with personal memoir and niche cultural interests (like the Welsh punk rock band Manic Street Preachers). This is not a simplistic account of morbid tourism. Instead, Enriquez constructs mental maps of notable interments, dedicated children's zones, and funerary statuary with vivid scenic details that illustrate how surrounding landscapes affect the delicate beauty of gravestones and monuments. She staves off the creep of the macabre with entertaining sketches of the quirkily superstitious and grave robbers, partiers, and defacers and with little-known tidbits of idiosyncratic cemetery norms. (Who knew that most cemeteries of a certain size contain a person buried standing up?) While Enriquez visits each cemetery for the appeal of the site itself, each also has its own strange history, famous inhabitants, and unlikely ghost stories. And, it turns out, cemeteries, their origin stories of creation, exhumation, and relocation, the care of them, and the mysteries that shroud them, lend themselves to discussions of geopolitical history, religious inclinations, social delineations, and how we think about both the dead and death more generally. The author's visits to cemeteries in Patagonia and on a remote island off the coast of Perth, Australia, create a spectral background for Indigenous-colonizer relationships and serendipitous nation-state boundaries; New Orleans's famed mausoleums provide an entrée for explaining voodoo and noting class divides. Despite hints of deeper darkness, Enriquez's almost protective devotion to the subject of her eerie obsession supplants juicy personal details and the rendering of moral judgments to shape an ode to material remembrance that is unusual, sometimes comical, and ultimately oddly comforting. Quietly, hypnotically amusing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
