A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife

I picked this book up thinking it was a spoof on the Beetlejuice idea. Fortunately it tried to answer all the sill thoughts we have about the Afterlife (will my amputated limb be there?) without addressing Religion, spirituality or a Supreme Being. Essentially, the Afterlife as in Life, is what you make of it.

Did you know that in the afterlife a wind storm can leave your brain in such a shamble that you believe yourself a bicycle? That Borges completes after his death his Biography of the Infinite? That afterlife physicists Rotnac and Rekcur believe the other side is an anti-universe composed in part of charmed anti-quarks? Neither did I, but that's what I learned in this decidedly nutty, bizarre, fantastic, comic fiction. Quinn and Whalen have constructed the craziest, cleverest book I've read since, say, Queneau's Exercises in Style or O'Brien's wacky afterlife novel The Third Policeman. The authors perform their magic with a straight face, but don't be deceived--this is anything but a straight book.

Borges meets Barthelme and on their way encounter the spirits of Nabokov, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and other masters of metafiction. Fans of Daniel Quinn's didactic books with their questionable anthropology will likely not know what has hit them. Fans of Quinn as an iconoclast and of imaginative postmodern fiction at its finest will be delighted.

I am more familiar with the works of Tom Whalen than Daniel Quinn, and I find in this beautifully designed book much evidence that Tom's vision prevailed or at least persisted. Not one to follow a straight line when a crooked one ambles into delightful junctures, Tom explores whimsically our perplexedness in the face and certainty of the beyond. After we shuffle off this mortal coil, what happens to our spirits? And so Quinn and Whalen imagine a book that provides such answers. All in all, it is a brief work, perhaps owing some of its approach to similar guides to one's finances or health. But such guides are never as elegant as the "Little Book," to say the least. Finally, I will observe that this work, while offbeat, somehow manages in its humor to possess an elegiac quality. Thus the reader is not meant to read the book through like a novel, but to leaf through it slowly, pretending along with its authors that these slightly or extremely odd answers make sense. Why not these as much as some others we have already been told? Knowledge as charm or the charm of knowledge. Clutch this little book close. While the meaning of life may be elusive and the meaning of death equally inexact, what to do while "engaged" by it is another matter!

A diabolically wild collaboration between Daniel ( "Ishmael") Quinn and one of my favorite science fiction authors Tom ("Roithamer's Universe") Whalen. I've never ever seen a book like this one. It's a compendium of the Afterlife, but an Afterlife unlike any I have read about before. There are "do's and don't's," concerns concerning Zeno's paradoxes and particle physics, and even summaries of books written in the Afterlife by Asimov, Nabokov, Trakl, Arthur Godfrey, Lucy Terry (the first African- American poet), and Nikola Tesla. Also, check out the great photo-collages by Greg Boyd (of Asylum Press fame). A weird and wondrous book. How in the world did the authors trick Bantam into publishing such a delight!