Word: mercuryã
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Dates: during 2002-2002
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...example, Creasie, the servant in the Urquhart home, lends her voice to tales of voodoo in the swampy former plantation where Mercury??s African-American population is concentrated. A wooden dummy comes to life for her in the body of her lover, Frank, who disappears as soon as the dummy is removed from a storage shed. The elements of the fantastic that pop up in these parts of the story are not even magically real, just plain ridiculous. They seem severed from the main stream of history flowing through the novel...
Subplots involving Parnell Grimes, the director of Mercury??s funeral home, also compromise the harmony of the tale. The necrophiliac undertaker and his wife, who dies a little death for him at orgasm, may serve as a counterpoint to Finus and Birdie’s unfulfilled sexualities—even the dead can copulate, but they can’t. Still, the new characters feel sensationally extraneous...
While they’re not having sex, the dead play an important role in the novel. Watson says, “the ‘Heaven of Mercury?? [is] everywhere. In the characters’ minds, and their memories, in the presence of the dead in their waking and dreaming lives, and in their communion with spirits, real or imagined.” Finus writes obituaries about his friends and acquaintances for the Mercury newspaper, which he edits and owns. The dead are constantly being summed up into bulleted recollections and pithy paragraphs. Ghostly spirits appear...