10/09/2017
In this insightful collection of personal essays, Lopez proves a poetic, thoughtful, and at times surprisingly funny narrator in his quest for the most meaningful way to remember the dead. In “Monument Valley,” about the valley on the Arizona-Utah border that came to represent the whole of the American West in film director John Ford’s work, Lopez poignantly asks, “What is the right memory in the face of all we’ll forget?” Lopez covers a range of subjects, including the science behind both astronomical and dermal sunspots (the latter in connection with the susceptibility toward skin cancer he inherited from his father), the largest U.S. time capsule in Kentucky, and a Tucson, Ariz., cryogenics center. He is at his best when finding emotional resonance in the intricacies of a scientific theory. In “Parallax,” he describes the source of sun spots on skin (“harmless if cared for,” mere signs “that the body they rest upon moves in time and space”), but also explains, in accessible prose, Galileo’s use of parallax to determine the displacement of celestial bodies. Despite the breadth of subject matter, at some point every essay returns back to the loss that looms over Lopez’s life: his father’s death from a brain tumor. Lopez’s contemplation of mortality and memory makes for a collection of quietly profound essays. Agent: Matt McGowan, Frances Goldin Literary. (Nov.)
Praise for The Book of Resting Places
"The Book of Resting Places is Mira y Lopez’s account of his travels, from a cemetery to a crematorium to a cryonics company . . . He’s looking for the good death, somewhere, anywhere." —The New Yorker
"In this insightful collection of personal essays, Lopez proves a poetic, thoughtful, and at times surprisingly funny narrator in his quest for the most meaningful way to remember the dead . . . Lopez’s contemplation of mortality and memory makes for a collection of quietly profound essays." —Publishers Weekly
"At one point in this debut, a researcher compares excavation to arranging a tapestry—an apt analogy for Mira y Lopez’s essay collection itself . . . Each chapter alternates—or weaves—between his personal experience and history, myth, and societal practice." —Booklist
"Mira y Lopez’s first book is a thoughtful, intriguing collection of 10 personal essays dealing with the dead and where they end up . . . These are wide–ranging and often tender meditations on death." —Kirkus Reviews
"The Book of Resting Places is admirable for the restlessness and fierceness of its need to work through both its own elegy and the nature of elegies in general. From defunct cemeteries to Canaletto’s genius for turning presence to absence to those museums of the self assembled by collectors or hoarders to the nature of parallax to cryonics, it’s wryly deft in its associative deployment of useful metaphors in its attempt to come to terms with loss, and shame: what is the safest way to preserve the dead, and to acknowledge the love we sometimes failed to reciprocate?" —Jim Shepard, author of The World to Come and The Book of Aron
"Each place in The Book of Resting Places is haunted. But the deeper we go into Thomas Mira y Lopez's MC Escher painting of a collection, the more we realize that perhaps it is us, not the dead, who haunt the past. An excellent meditation on his father's death and his mother's preparations for her own, this book's loneliness is more than matched by its curiosity and its beauty.” —Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point
"Mira y Lopez is a stunning writer and his debut book, a tender and adventurous exploration of the intimate distances we share with the dead, deserves to be widely read. Artful sentences mirror, page after page, his artful mind. With formal intelligence and quiet wit, he has found death to be a spur to reflection and wholehearted embrace of life. This is a book to savor." —Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit
2017-08-29
A series of essays functions as a memento mori.Mira y Lopez's first book is a thoughtful, intriguing collection of 10 personal essays dealing with the dead and where they end up. Many have been previously published in a variety of publications, including the Georgia Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review. Throughout the book, the author delicately interweaves remembrances of his mother and dead father. "Overburden" is about Tucson's National Cemetery, created in the late 1800s and now defunct. "A city buries its dead just so it can keep on living," writes Mira y Lopez. "Whether exhumed or not, a grave doesn't maintain what's been lost so much as it concedes the ghost is never really coming back." Then it's off to the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome. A bacteria discovered in the catacombs in 2008 was eating away the walls, creating a dilemma: "What is to be done when the only thing left alive in a place also destroys it?" The author's sharp, illuminating essay on the 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto, employing a slightly modernist structure, doesn't deal with death at all except, briefly, the painter's. The artist who had produced nearly 600 paintings left behind some old clothes, household items, a smattering of paintings, and an incredible documentary record of a city both real and imagined. The longest and best piece, "The Eternal Comeback," is about the author's tour of the cryonics lab of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Begun in 1972, the company houses nearly 150 bodies, and brains, all preserved at minus 196 degrees Celsius in liquid nitrogen. While outside Hutchinson, Kansas, 650 feet underground, in the "most secure underground vault in the world," rest memory boxes put together by their clients for when they return, "At least, if all goes according to plan." Some pieces register better than others, but these are wide-ranging and often tender meditations on death.
