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Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.… (mer)
clfisha: Anyone interested in the creation of Paris Catacombs and in charnel houses/ossuaries in general this is a great non-fiction coffee table book.
Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a well qualified yet naïve young engineer, is sent to oversee the removal of the many thousands of bodies from the cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris, some 4 years before the French Revolution. This is the story of the unsettling year he spent there, dealing firstly with the foul conditions engendered by the over-spilling burial ground, the locals who despite everything, remained attached to the staus quo, the hard-to control and understand Flemish miners hired to do the work of exhuming and moving the cadavers, and the - to Baratte - wholly unfamiliar world of personal relationships particularly with women.
Miller conjures a vivid picture of the daily round in this little part of eighteenth century Paris: the smells, whether of sour breath or rotting vegetables or a dusty church; and of a world about to change, in the destruction of the cemetery and church which has for so long been at the heart of the community Baratte finds himself in. Violence and death are ever present.
Unsettled by the narrative, the reader is left with an impression of a world about to change, a world which is already changing in ways its citizens cannot comprehend. Uncertainty is what draws the reader in. ( )
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young engineer, is tasked with demolishing an old cemetery in Paris, but the whole experience does not turn out the way his rational engineering mind expects. ( )
This was really well written but I just couldn't get into it. I did for a little in the middle but the beginning and end both lost me. Not sure why, exactly. ( )
When I look back not a great deal happened but the superb characterisation was compelling reading and I liked the way the author changed styles after a momentous event had a profound effect on the main character. The historical detail was excellent. ( )
Flowers bloom again in the disinterred cemetery. Sunlight illuminates the darkness through the broken roof of the church. Though progress brings suffering and death, the balance, as Baratte knows, "will still be in your favour". As Miller proves with this dazzling novel, it is not certainty we need but courage, now as much as ever, before we too are reduced to bones.
Purifying centuries of decaying mortality and removing the miasma that permeates the dwellings, skin and even food of the area is neither simple nor necessarily popular. Miller threads into this fabric subtle ideas about modernity, glancing at Voltaire, public health and the seditious graffiti that anticipate the revolutionary fervour of 1789 - just four years away.
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
The time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who have no master but their reason. Marquis de Condorcet
Dedikation
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
In memory of my father, Dr Keith Miller, and of my friends, Patrick Warren and George Lachlan Brown.
Inledande ord
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A young man, young but not very young, sits in an anteroom somewhere, some wing or other, in the Palace of Versailles.
Citat
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He has a notebook with him, a roll of linen tape. When he takes measurements, he asks Jeanne to hold one end of the tape; then, with a steel-tipped pen, a portable inkwell, he writes and sketches in the notebook.... he scratches her replies onto the paper.... She watches how he can make a line thinner or thicker with a little adjustment of the angle of the nib.... He shuts the book, the inkwell, wipes the nib of the pen.
Avslutande ord
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
The he turns away from him, wipes the flies from his face and hurries back to that soft line at the edge of the shed where the light begins.
Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.
Miller conjures a vivid picture of the daily round in this little part of eighteenth century Paris: the smells, whether of sour breath or rotting vegetables or a dusty church; and of a world about to change, in the destruction of the cemetery and church which has for so long been at the heart of the community Baratte finds himself in. Violence and death are ever present.
Unsettled by the narrative, the reader is left with an impression of a world about to change, a world which is already changing in ways its citizens cannot comprehend. Uncertainty is what draws the reader in.
( )