The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

Rating:
Summary: A toilet-humor parody of Joyce is thoughtfully included
Review: You know how people wanna be 'the only one'? In regard to romantic love. Nobody wants to be displaced by a romantic rival. Even if the rival is a mere memory in the mind of someone. That's the subject-matter of a story called THE DEAD, by James Joyce. Well, leave it to a Heaven-sent sicko like Thomas Lynch to take a perfectly good heart-wrenching thing like THE DEAD and to wizz all over it.

From THE DEAD by James Joyce: 'His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

From CRAPPER by Thomas Lynch: 'Still, there are nights now in West Clare and nights in Michigan when I eschew the porcelain and plumbing in favor of the dark comforts of the yard, the whitethorn or lilac or the mock-orange, the stars in their heaven, the liberty of it; and the drift my thoughts invariably take toward the dead and the living and the ones I love whenever I am at the duties of my toilet.'

But wait. There's more. Congratulations to Tom for kicking down the door of The Final Taboo and openly discussing the grim reality of corpse-flatulence.

From CRAPPER: 'In the room where Mrs. Regan's body was, despite the candles and the flowers and the February chill---a good thing in townlands where no embalming is done---there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs. Regan's belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Between decades of the rosary, neighbor women shot anxious glances among one another. Later I heard, in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs. Regan, a light-hearted woman unopposed to parties, had made her dinner the day before on boiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half-pints of lager at Hickie's in Kilkee. And these forgivable excesses, while they may not have caused her death, were directly responsible for the heavy air inside the room she was waked in and the 'bad form' Nora called it when the requiems had to be moved up a day and a perfectly enjoyable wake foreshortened by the misbehavior of Mrs. Regan's body.'