Autobiography of the [Undead] is an autobiographical mosaic, a memoir reconstructed from a mirrored myriad of textual fragments from other books, movies, songs, articles, web pages, inner thoughts, personal conversations/correspondence, etc. all parsed and deconstructed, then reformulated and collaged in a new light. For has not every sentence already been said? How vital is context and subtext, the framed phrasing coming before and after? Does Marguerite Duras own the four words "I want to write"? Can no one else besides Ocean Vuong write, "I want to make my words deliberate"? Anyone can play three chords or a sequence of tones, but what about the rhythm, tempo, key, timbre, dynamics, harmonics or accent? Or the instrument the notes are played on, the natural-born tone of voice?
With thoughtful reverence, Emilio Carrero appropriates and reshapes these fragments of sea glass and twists and spins them into a collaged kaleidoscope unique to his own "sad, brown Puerto Rican life." Does he not have the right to sing along with Gillian Welch when she croons, "I want to do right, but not right now"? In Before Midnight, when Ethan Hawke says, "that is a good line, I want to use that in a book someday," are the screenwriters the only ones that can take such lines and reuse them in books? Is not every book an ever-morphing Ship of Theseus, riding on the shoulders of those that came before us?
With the dexterity of a surgeon stitching together a new Frankenstein from hundreds (704, in fact) of others, dead and undead (for, as Carrero writes (quoting Marquis Bey), "once the work is out of their hands, the author dies a little death"), the author compiles this cacophony of sound bytes into a holographic chorus of voices, a quantum superposition of tethered threads woven into a textured tapestry that blurs the boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, appropriation, authorship and literary license, reviving the words into a new life form all it's own.
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«This is an autobiography from/in/as [the graveyard], and it will unsettle you. As we all need to be, for such an unsettling brings us to each other; it brings us to the graveyard—who knew it was so, so full of (our) love, of our yearnings. We can live there, in the graveyard, in a non-possessive undead coalition. Emilio Carrero gives us an exquisite meditation on gritty love, honest togetherness, and a forceful consideration of what it means to live with, for, and as the [un]dead.»—Marquis Bey
«Maybe the only part of a life that can be written honestly is the crisis. Fearlessly grounded in the aspirations and cringe of a single life, Autobiography of the [Undead] nevertheless burns through the narrative and ontological expectations of both living and writing. Carrero lights a citational fever through a vast archive of texts, voices, and moments, and, like Clarice Lispector, creates a fleeting flame that lets us see an eternal presence. As long as we live, the crisis is us.»—Farid Matuk
«Emilio Carrero’s Autobiography of the [Undead] is a book of the body and mind. A book of wants. A philosophically dense mix of poetic personal excavation and howling from the void. Carrero’s voices contemplate our malaise, the contemporary problem of personal narrative with original and disturbing ferocity: “As if desire could be sealed and contained, as if my grave inscriptions could resound as music, as if this lone/ly voice—a sad, brown Puerto Rican life ©1992 pitched in authorship and ambition—could drown out the [undead’s] bracketed noise.” Whereas the aesthetically playful writing is singularly Carrero, the experimental constructions of text work as fractured mirrors—part Carrero conjoined with slivers of the reader—to reveal secrets, the dead and the living. Later, the speaker muses “[t]here’s something [impossibly] enchanting [and undead,] about the many voices and lives that fill the[se] pages.” Bodies and voices are ripped, sewn back together, Carrero stitched on the skin. Salvation and begging and jouissance. Erasure, blackout, statement and cancelation, cenotaph and phantom obelisk. In the contemporary landscape of literature and so-called personal writing, I have read nothing like Carrero’s Autobiography of the [Undead].» —Charles Kell
«If a book is usually about an encounter between a writer and reader, Emilio Carrero’s Autobiography of the [Undead] troubles both of these positions. “Never have I thought I’ve escaped ‘you’ and ‘I’ in this graveyard. I have only tried, as best as I could, to dwell in the spaces between us,” Carrero writes. Reading this book, shuffling between text and notes, at times I felt like a detective, at times like I was being haunted. In assembling—in writing—a book whose nearly every sentence is a citation, including citing itself and citing “conversations with myself,” Carrero has coupled the sheer pleasure of choose-your-own-adventure with a dazzling, rigorous erudition. In encountering this extraordinary act of assemblage, redaction, and elision, I felt the book itself fall away to reveal the writer on the other side, grasping after connection with you, with me, and in doing so, articulating a notion of the self that can, perhaps, wriggle towards something like free.»—Stephanie Cawley
«If Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse came with an Exhibit A appendix, if Justin Torres’s Blackouts were even more heartsick and even more dialogic and more haunted, if you ran a concordance for the word “want” through the archives that both of those books open, you might have something like Emilio Carrero’s Autobiography of the [Undead]. I can’t remember a more centrifugal reading experience: I was sent from the book the whole time I was absorbed by it. When I was finished, one of my still open search tabs returned “No results for ‘citational protocols of selfhood,’” which made me laugh and had me feeling even more possessed by the book’s designs.»—Brian Blanchfield
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Excerpts/reviews:
—Leavings issue 4
—Sleepingfish XX
—The Ocean State Review Vol. 13/No. 1
—Black Warrior Review
