“Just listened to the COMPLETE audiobook. Finally, finally it exists.
I also happened on a very strange and heartbreaking story about this book. The story came from an interview with Chuck Palahniuk who spent some time with Max Brooks. The story goes like this:
Max Brooks, as most people know, is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. What most people don’t know is that around the time Max Brooks was writing, his mother was dying. Uterine cancer.
Just like most fiction, the books Max wrote weren’t about the things they were about. Not really.
He remembered seeing specialist after specialist who said,
“Don’t worry.”
“We’ll take care of your mother.”
“Everything is going to be fine.”
And all these people, all these experts kept fucking up. Fucking up or saying they could fix something they couldn’t. All these men of science who knew so much and were so confident, none of them could help.
Brooks remembers his mom differently than most. He remembers her as a Jewish peasant. He remembers her looking at their dog one day and saying that if they lost everything, they could probably live off of the dog’s meat for 6 days. She said that if they lost everything, they could eat the fish from the reflecting pond in front of the house. She was always a gardener.
Brooks wanted to write a book about his mother. He wanted to write a book that preserved the skills she had, kept her way of thinking and her way of life alive somehow. And he wanted to write about her death, about the frustration and the pain and the terror, about how heopeless it can all be.
He didn’t think that anyone would read a book about the death of his mother, Anne Bancroft. I hate to say it, but in my case, he’s 100% right.
But World War Z. A lot of people will say it’s their favorite book. It was made into a huge Hollywood movie with Brad Pitt. Nobody can accuse it of being a small book, a small portrait. Through fiction, Max Brooks took the story of his mother’s death and made it into something bigger. Not for him, but for the rest of us. He took a personal event and made it something that we can all look to. It’s a book that’s horrific and funny, and in the end it gives a person faith in humanity. That we can not only survive, but that we can help each other, even if our lives can be way too short and end way too messy in the face of something with no remorse.
I’ve wondered for a long time what it was about World War Z that was so successful where so many other zombie books just didn’t work. Why did this one always work for me, and for so many other readers? What is it about this that hasn’t been replicated?
Now, I think, I have an answer.
“