Currently Reading: Severance

Severance
by Robert Olen Butler
Chronicle Books 2006

I always believed that getting my head chopped off would inspire me to say “FUCK!” or “HOLY JESUS ON THE CROSS MY BLOOD IS SHOOTING OUT LIKE FIREWORKS,” but apparently there’s more to it.

Severance combines two medical facts (1. you stay conscious for a minute and a half after you’re decapitated; and 2. your brain puts together about 160 words a minute) to create a small book of 240-word stories, written in the voices of people who are recently beheaded. Robert Olen Butler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a college professor, but this book—in case you haven’t already caught on—is really freaking cool.

Each of these stories plays out as a headlong (ha!) rush of unpunctuated words, but the surprising thing is they don’t always deal with the decapitation itself. A lot of people, in Butler's opinion, spend their last minutes of consciousness remembering the most evocative parts of their life—often a love affair. The sudden thud of their skulls hitting the floor seems to be far from their minds. Butler’s protagonists are concerned with sex, secrets, glory, sex, graphic violence, missed opportunities, and sex. One guy actually uses his last minute and a half to ponder the metaphorical relationship between a guillotine and vaginal penetration. These are brief, punchy stories that remind us to have incredible sex while we’re alive, because it will be the last thing we remember when our necks are bursting open in a wanton explosion of blood. I told you this book was cool.

Severance is strongly biased toward Western culture: beheadings set in Rome, France, and England are the most frequent. But on the whole, the book raises a lot of interesting points without even trying. It reminds us that Western civilization took a turn for the worse after the Roman Empire, and we didn’t recover until…well, there’s still hope. It also shows a remarkable lack of accidental beheadings throughout the middle period of history: after a saber-tooth tiger rips a man’s head off in the first story, all of the killings are perpetrated by other people…until we arrive at the modern era, with its car crashes, train wrecks, and elevator accidents. There’s also a lot of attention paid to current events at the end, with terrorists and their bloodthirsty ilk making a strong appearance.

But after you read a few dozen beheadings in a row, you start to notice the other things, like our tendency to cherish love and regret above all other memories. What I take away from this book is a close network of emotional connections among all kinds of human beings, in all eras of history, who have arbitrarily found themselves robbed of a head. Butler does a great job of letting the gruesome aspects speak for themselves, while drawing our attention back to the beautiful moments that cap off our lives.

As a final note, Chronicle Books did a bang-up job on the design. Chronicle is known for its glossy and artistic books, so I’m pleased to see them bring that same talent to a collection of stories. Each story is held on a single sheet of white paper, and separated from its neighbors by a full spread of completely black pages, so that flipping through the book is like repeatedly opening and shutting your eyes. It’s a great way to visually distinguish between the interconnected stories. I could say more, but basically Chronicle rocked this one, and it would be a shame if other, more established fiction publishers didn’t notice and follow along.