…[He] takes a trip to heaven and talks with all sorts of dead people. It's like some kind of travel book. In Busy Dying, a character's offhand comment on the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg's Spiritual Diary may as well describe Obenzinger's fictional memoir itself: only in an apocalyptic 1968 could heaven and hell converge. Life is rhythmically punctuated by death, just as memory is punctuated by moments of revelation, in which the characters are transformed by sudden glimpses of the world beyond knowledge or language. A young handyman believes he sees the finger of God; a girl confined to bed by a nervous disorder feels blessed by the splendid visible and invisible worlds; a college student dives out of his ninth-floor window to, after a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez “catch the stars more quickly.”
Obenzinger, like Conrad and Woolf, is attracted to the dark, unknown realm of which our daily life is only a mirror image. The Columbia strike in 1968, the centerpiece of the memoir, represents such an effort to reach the beyond. The students fail to write poems during their occupation of the president's office, realizing that the breach of social semantics needs "a language no one had yet invented." For Obenzinger, in particular, the search for a new language has tangible implications. The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, he has lost Polish, his mother tongue, and Yiddish, his father's language. Haunted by his brother's untimely death as well as all the deaths before and after, Obenzinger inherited his father's "survivor's guilt" reminiscent of Lord Jim. With the Dada practice of inflicting the Biblical ten plagues on Columbia campus, he was reenacting the history of his lost ancestors.
The travel to the other world ultimately confirms life. The memoir starts with the death of Obenzinger's mother, which, to the author's amazement, transforms her back to a pretty young girl at peace. It ends with the discovery of his father's youthful poems, where, alone in the strange New World, the father recognizes himself in his son.
–Lu Chen, Brooklyn Rail, April 2008
Busy Dying is so true and funny and unexpected and sweet and profound and very deeply moving. As the cliche goes: I laughed and I cried--for real!
- Luc Sante
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