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A review by floodfish
Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery
3.0
Sigh ... what a squandered opportunity. Well-researched, dully conceived, poorly written.
I learned a lot about Edward Gorey (for which I am quite grateful) and I experienced a lot of how limited and tiresome Mark Dery is (for which I am quite annoyed).
An abridged version of this book (just the history and contemporaneous criticism, please!) would be a joy. Instead it’s a slog, mired in Dery’s overbearing neediness to act as the readers’ guide, interpreter, and self-conciously witty friend. On top of that, Dery is driven to categorize, define, look for hidden meaning, connect dots, Freudian-analyze, speak authoratively about specialized topics he doesn’t really understand, etc. (and show off his legwork for all of the above). If only he’d just get out of the way of the story—it’s a consistantly interesting one.
I like that images are distributed where they ought to occur in the text (rather than clumped in glossy inserts) but there should be many, many more. Time and again, Dery will spend a paragraph describing an illustration or object in superficial detail when we would be much better off just seeing the thing. (I’m sure the rights are expensive, but so is gumming up the book with all these extra words; maybe just tell us where to find the pictures in other books.) That said, I did appreciate the descriptions of things we can’t see as easily, such as theatrical works.
For all the minutiae in some areas, I miss it in others. Who paid for his theater company? How did he travel between NYC and Cape Cod? Why did Gorey think Philadelphia was closer to Pittsburgh than to NYC? Who took care of his cats in New York when he went to Cape Cod? Where did his cats come from? What were their names? Did he take them to the vet? (We do get a tiny bit of info about his cats, mostly those who survived him, but info on them seems like the most obvious hole in the book; they seem to have been much more important to Gorey than they are to Dery.)
Some of the endnotes are good and important (on such topics as David Bowie, the whiteness of Gorey’s world and art, the origin of the Black Doll), so take some time to scan for the long ones.
I recommend Joan Acocella’s review in The New Yorker and Robert Gottlieb’s review in the New York Times Book Review, both of which I read in the middle of slogging through this book. They are both enjoyable reads featuring valuable infomation and insight about both Gorey’s greatness and this book’s shortcomings.
I learned a lot about Edward Gorey (for which I am quite grateful) and I experienced a lot of how limited and tiresome Mark Dery is (for which I am quite annoyed).
An abridged version of this book (just the history and contemporaneous criticism, please!) would be a joy. Instead it’s a slog, mired in Dery’s overbearing neediness to act as the readers’ guide, interpreter, and self-conciously witty friend. On top of that, Dery is driven to categorize, define, look for hidden meaning, connect dots, Freudian-analyze, speak authoratively about specialized topics he doesn’t really understand, etc. (and show off his legwork for all of the above). If only he’d just get out of the way of the story—it’s a consistantly interesting one.
I like that images are distributed where they ought to occur in the text (rather than clumped in glossy inserts) but there should be many, many more. Time and again, Dery will spend a paragraph describing an illustration or object in superficial detail when we would be much better off just seeing the thing. (I’m sure the rights are expensive, but so is gumming up the book with all these extra words; maybe just tell us where to find the pictures in other books.) That said, I did appreciate the descriptions of things we can’t see as easily, such as theatrical works.
For all the minutiae in some areas, I miss it in others. Who paid for his theater company? How did he travel between NYC and Cape Cod? Why did Gorey think Philadelphia was closer to Pittsburgh than to NYC? Who took care of his cats in New York when he went to Cape Cod? Where did his cats come from? What were their names? Did he take them to the vet? (We do get a tiny bit of info about his cats, mostly those who survived him, but info on them seems like the most obvious hole in the book; they seem to have been much more important to Gorey than they are to Dery.)
Some of the endnotes are good and important (on such topics as David Bowie, the whiteness of Gorey’s world and art, the origin of the Black Doll), so take some time to scan for the long ones.
I recommend Joan Acocella’s review in The New Yorker and Robert Gottlieb’s review in the New York Times Book Review, both of which I read in the middle of slogging through this book. They are both enjoyable reads featuring valuable infomation and insight about both Gorey’s greatness and this book’s shortcomings.