Corner of the Dead, 2008
Summary of Corner of the Dead
Corner of the Dead depicts the violence perpetuated by the Shinning Path Guerrillas, a Maoist based organization, the subsequent authoritarian counterattack by the Peruvian government, and the humanitarian groups that tried to help. The narrator is destabilized by the love she abandoned along with the fight while trying to find meaning beyond that of just surviving.
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Reviews
"Corner of the Dead is keen and passionate -- a sexually alive elegy. Lurie's hypnotic language is as subversive as Seuss in its indictment of racism, bullies, and demagogs. A stunning debut."
"Lynn Lurie's report about political aberration and organized cruelty is an eloquent appeal for compassion and solidarity with their victims."
"In this haunting, powerful novel, Lynn Lurie explores not only 'the Corner of the Dead' but that entire shadowy no-man's-land where the dead and those who remember them—or more accurately, those who cared enough to try to save them—play out the elemental trauma of their shared experience. Lurie's strong, spare prose will stay with you long after the reading; the truths she tells of life and death in one of the hardest places on earth will stay with you even longer."
"Corner of the Dead has the indelible feeling of a dream you can't shake, a terror made beautiful. it moves by sensation, association, with great fluidity and urgency."
"An extraordinary account of one woman's journey into hell and how she brought it back with her. Written in Lynn Lurie's wonderful, exact prose, this book small in size is enormous in content, a dizzying look at appalling horrors, a terrifying depiction of what human beings are capable of doing to each other, an investigation into the worth of a human life. Corner of the Dead is a very moving, gutsy, urgent book."