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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Jodi Picoult
Genre : Fiction
This is a finely-written book about death, dying, crossroads, and choices (with some foul language). It is stories within stories past and present, along with numerous references to Egyptology and the fascination the ancient people of Egypt had with the preparation for death and the way after.
Dawn Edelstein, a death doula in her life back in Boston, is on a plane when the flight attendant tells passengers to prepare for a crash landing. She learns that the pilots are not able to clear the fuel filter and they have to do a land evacuation. She learns later that she is one of thirty-six people who walked away from the crash. The lucky ones have been told they can have a plane ticket anywhere they need to go. The woman at the desk asked, “Where do you need to go?” There is something in the way she phrases the question: need, instead of want, and another destination rises like steam in her mind.
The question at the center of the story: “Did you ever wonder who you would have been, if you hadn’t become who you are?”
“I am stunned at how quickly the Arabic comes to my lips. There must be a space in the brain that stores the information you assumed you’d never need again. When Merit was little, she used to say latter-day, which might mean five inures ago or five years ago—and that’s where I am right now. Like I sipped back into the moment that was left behind when I abandoned this country. Like it has been waiting all this time for me to return.”
“Whenever I’ve thought about my life, it has been before and after, scored on different fault lines: Egypt. My mother’s death. Meret. It’s like there is one Dawn who inhabited the space on one side of the divines, and a different Dawn who inhabits the space on the other, and it’s had for me to see how one evolved from the other. I wonder if this is a new fault line. I wonder if you can erase an old one, by going back to the spot where everything changed.”
“Fifteen years ago I’d been writing my thesis on how th coffin was a microcosm of both the tomb and the universe itself. At a basic level, each funerary text contained information the deceased would need in the afterlife. But zoom out a bit and the coffin itself became a miniature of the cosmos, from the sky painted on the lid to the map of the Book of Two Ways on the floor, to the mummy that filled the space in between. Zoom out again, and the tomb itself—with its superstructure of a pubic chapel space and underground burial chamber and the coffin contained within—was another symbolic representation of the layers of the universe.”
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