Noémi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto, Hide and Seek, 2012
(November 25) I forget how I heard about this book, but the topic is of course interesting.The book begins with Elizabeth Greenwood talking to a lot of people who investigate death fraud and it was mildly interesting to learn all the telltale signs of not being dead and how people can track you down thereby… and about how the age of the internet works against you because of digital footprints but also can work for you if you know how to fake up a lot of websites and false digital trails.
But Greenwood starts off her non-fiction book with the premise that her research journey was all intensely personal -- she had $60,000 in student debt and wanted to be free of it, so that’s why she looked into faking one’s death. Also, she likes the romance of death-faking.
This would have been OK as a starter and with one or two additional mentions throughout the book… it’s standard practice in books of this kind… the having of a personal reason for launching an investigation of a topic.
But this girl never lets it go! And it becomes tedious af, especially when shored up with little anecdotes about other aspects of her life, particularly “humorous” stories about how clumsy she is or what a loser she is.
Argh, it feels like so much padding…. A feeling that gets starker when you consider the length of the book (244 pages) and the size of the pages (very small).
Why do people do that, or why do people’s editors allow them to do that? The topic is super interesting on its own and she has so many good interviews with would-be death fakers that you think she surely could have expanded those stories and done without the “I-too-want-to-escape-my-(small)-debt” posture.
And then you realize her editors probably encouraged the personal business….. WHY?????
That put me off quite a bit.
But then Greenwood went for a little while into the death-hoax conspiracy believers, the groups that think Elvis, Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Princess Di, and many others (all beloved celebrities) faked their deaths and are either coming back soon or are currently being portrayed by a look-alike. This blew me away.
So: kind of an interesting little book, significantly spoiled by an identity crisis, when it decided it wanted to be a humorous memoir as much as an investigative research piece.
