Volume 20, Number 16 · October 18, 1973
Expensive Eternity
By V.S. Pritchett
Père-Lachaise: Elysium as Real Estate
text and photographs by Frederick Brown
Viking, 109 pp., $8.95
The cemetery of Père-Lachaise in Paris was the first garden cemetery of Europe, the first attempt to rid the bursting aisles and vaults of churches and the common burial pits of cities of their hoarded putrescence. But for Mr. Frederick Brown, in this brilliant mortuary sermon that runs only to fifty-seven pages, the place is the Versailles of the bourgeois. The book contains a large number of photographs, both handsome and bizarre. Brown opens with a text from Proust: 'Here was still another consequence of the mind's inability, when it ponders death, to picture something other than life.' To which he adds the gloss, 'The city of the dead bespeaks the city of the living more eloquently than any of its other monuments, like an unconscious in which its profoundest self-image, its dreams and gods, or nightmares and want of gods, lie fossilized.'
Review, 1308 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |