As Kafka once wrote, 'a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.' This book, and this author, are that ax ... Much is laid before us, with great precision: finely tuned metaphors, graceful repetitions. Facts are faced, faults are noted, death and life are seen and held. That is all — and that is truly plenty, this valuable and beautiful account a gift to the reader, grieving or not.
An endearing and achingly real portrait ... Attends to the logistics of end-of-life care while addressing the singularity of human life, community and death ... Deeply tender and generous ... Ms. Perry has extended a companionable hand to the reader, with profound sincerity and grace.
It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special ... Partly, this book works its magic through the adamantine detail and quiet lyricism with which it recounts a particular, unrepeatable life ... Mostly, though, what makes this book gem-like is that it succeeds in conveying the reality of death as this monumental, mythic thing that coexists surreally with the mundane world ... She has written beautifully and compellingly about the life of an unexceptional man, and an experience that is coming to all of us.
Remarkable and affecting ... What grips in these pages, and drives the writing, is Perry’s tremendous sense of rhythm and pace ... We cannot but be somewhat changed by this remarkable book.
An extraordinary book ... She brings to this most over-worked of subjects an attention that is entirely her own and yet generously universal too. Much of that is to do with her extraordinary literary voice, which was forged in her four novels, each tinged with the Biblical cadences of her youth. It is a voice that is rich and wise and able to look squarely at the hard things of life without tipping into cheap sensation. Death of an Ordinary Man is no-one’s idea of an easy read, but it is, entirely and magnificently, a necessary one.
Fresh, gripping and potentially transformative ... Perry’s skilful, profound memoir shows that an unassuming bungalow can be a place of awe and paradox and insight: as good a place as any for contemplating those questions. And by the way, it ends magnificently.
Part loving tribute to her father-in-law, part meditation on the process of dying, this outstanding memoir from Perry (Enlightenment) is marked by a novelist’s economy of language and imagery ... This deceptively simple story conveys deep sentiments—gratitude, sadness, humility, and love—in clear-eyed and unsentimental prose. It’s a marvel.
