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.
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
