What do you think?
Rate this book
Burial
Fiction. Set in the mind of a narrator who is grieving the loss of her father, who conflates her hotel room with the morgue, and who encounters characters that may not exist, BURIAL is a little novel about an immeasurable black hole. Like a 21st century Lispector, Donato grapples with ontology and trades plot for ambience; the result is an elegy in prose at once lyrical and intelligent, with no small amount of rot and vomit and ghosts.
"Claire Donato's patient, immersive meditation on death and mourning designed in precise urn-like prose, BURIAL, fledges itself with the poise of Woolf or Loy or Carson; a kind of humming, marbled elegy for the as-yet-extant-alive, and like finding a real river in a dictionary."--Blake Butler
"In her captivating book, Donato follows grief logic into a space of defamiliarization, speaking of death, television, rooms, love, nouns and voices as if confronting them for the first time. The language loops, stepping back to move forward, always circling a mind aware of its movements. It's a gorgeous fugue, an unforgettable progression, a telling I cannot shake."--Heather Christle"
BURIAL is a full and vibrant illustration of the restless turns of a mind undergoing trauma. Language here serves both as escape and as a threat, at once suspect and yet the only consolation. In BURIAL, Donato makes and unmakes the world with words, and what is left shimmers with pain and delight."--Brian Evenson
"BURIAL's narrator dislocates familiar language in order to present a view of the self from outside the self. Claire Donato's assured and poetic debut augurs a promising career."--Benjamin Moser
"Claire Donato's patient, immersive meditation on death and mourning designed in precise urn-like prose, BURIAL, fledges itself with the poise of Woolf or Loy or Carson; a kind of humming, marbled elegy for the as-yet-extant-alive, and like finding a real river in a dictionary."--Blake Butler
"In her captivating book, Donato follows grief logic into a space of defamiliarization, speaking of death, television, rooms, love, nouns and voices as if confronting them for the first time. The language loops, stepping back to move forward, always circling a mind aware of its movements. It's a gorgeous fugue, an unforgettable progression, a telling I cannot shake."--Heather Christle"
BURIAL is a full and vibrant illustration of the restless turns of a mind undergoing trauma. Language here serves both as escape and as a threat, at once suspect and yet the only consolation. In BURIAL, Donato makes and unmakes the world with words, and what is left shimmers with pain and delight."--Brian Evenson
"BURIAL's narrator dislocates familiar language in order to present a view of the self from outside the self. Claire Donato's assured and poetic debut augurs a promising career."--Benjamin Moser
- GenresFiction
93 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2013
About the author
Claire Donato
6 books54 followersClaire Donato is most recently the author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (2023), a collection of short fictions. Her previous titles include Burial (2013), a fiction novella, and The Second Body (2016), a full-length collection of poems. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, and recent writing has appeared in Parapraxis, Forever, The End, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Chicago Review, BOMB, Blue Arrangements, and GoldFlakePaint. She also contributed an introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer. In addition to writing books, Claire makes music, illustrates, and has a 35mm photography practice. Currently, she works as Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020-2021 Distinguished Teacher Award, and is a candidate at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat Woebegone.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 14, 2018
Every word and interlinked sentence of this [prose poetry? essay? internal narrative?] shimmers with intensity and originality. Donato's voice and thought constructions drift and shift so fluidly that you may expect this to fall apart or lose meaning at any moment, but the highwire act succeeds beautifully and with never a misstep. Grief and loss and a deathly limbo-state stillness, captured in exquisite motion by an active mind.
June 12, 2023
Someone once described Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a spiral and it changed the way I categorize narratives. This book is a slim but incredibly potent spiral on grief, really good stuff. In the last ten years people have started to overuse comparisons to Lispector in promotional copy, but this one rang true.
March 14, 2019
The question is: how does the heart make its own grave?
January 14, 2026
“Sadness leaves the body dumb.”
March 31, 2016
Claire Donato manipulates language and logic in a poetic representation of the mind in grief.
"To wave goodbye, one moves one's hand to and fro, signaling polite wishes at the end of a conversation. An exchange of spoken ideas is only on instance of communication; one may signal good wishes to bodies both dead and alive." (42)
It's nearly impossible to verbalize grief. The staggering shifts in association in Donato's book starts to close the gap. The book lives in the compressed space of words and memory where one cannot breathe -- minty freshness does not cover the sorrow.
"To wave goodbye, one moves one's hand to and fro, signaling polite wishes at the end of a conversation. An exchange of spoken ideas is only on instance of communication; one may signal good wishes to bodies both dead and alive." (42)
It's nearly impossible to verbalize grief. The staggering shifts in association in Donato's book starts to close the gap. The book lives in the compressed space of words and memory where one cannot breathe -- minty freshness does not cover the sorrow.
February 23, 2021
A perspective on death that deserves a second read by all who have traversed it's pages once. For my first time, the main character of this story isn't a person, but rather a moment, and Donato did a marvelous job in giving the moment (and connected moments) life and face and voice and space.
A small book in size but thick with imagery and has left this reader to ponder death, life, and the moments that may lie in between.
A small book in size but thick with imagery and has left this reader to ponder death, life, and the moments that may lie in between.
Read
October 15, 2014A complex, essay-like fiction on a traumatic death, on the interiors of morgues and the timbre of corpses and lakes and voices. Rewarding reading, but make a space around yourself for this to devote full attention to the winding, reverberating prose.
February 14, 2024
An experimental, poetic, stream-of-consciousness about death and grief and ghosts. The “storyline” about the narrator thinking through her father’s death, and death in general, conflating her hotel room with a morgue created an otherworldly atmosphere. I loved the natural imagery throughout this work—trees, flowers, rot, soil. Donato’s looping language creates a type of fugue (compositionally and psychiatrically); she repeats, and makes the reader repeat many phrases throughout this little book:
“Life is the body of death”
“What does it mean to be dead?”
“Do you smoke?”
My favorite lines from “Burial”
“And sadness always sticks. Or if sadness softens, another sadness hardens in the throat’s wooded forest. Indeed the throat is a forest: a lush, wooded environment covered in brush, small trees, and shrubs that bloom white leaves.” (4)
“Sadness leaves the body dumb.” (28)
“Grief floats to the tips of one’s fingers—a kinetic place of rest, a lovely place to die.” (29)
“Water lilies hang majestically from half-dead canvases, weep themselves a succession of notes: small, handwritten reminders that grief will pass like a ghost, and life will continue despite the body’s termination.” (65)
“Life is the body of death”
“What does it mean to be dead?”
“Do you smoke?”
My favorite lines from “Burial”
“And sadness always sticks. Or if sadness softens, another sadness hardens in the throat’s wooded forest. Indeed the throat is a forest: a lush, wooded environment covered in brush, small trees, and shrubs that bloom white leaves.” (4)
“Sadness leaves the body dumb.” (28)
“Grief floats to the tips of one’s fingers—a kinetic place of rest, a lovely place to die.” (29)
“Water lilies hang majestically from half-dead canvases, weep themselves a succession of notes: small, handwritten reminders that grief will pass like a ghost, and life will continue despite the body’s termination.” (65)
August 7, 2022
The GOAT
May 26, 2023
Right book wrong time?
August 7, 2013
"Sadness leaves the body dumb. Again, the mind turns toward itself: one lukewarm rupture of protuberance devolves the back of the head, and the brain expands, implodes, and then refills with helium, which turns memory grey, grey as the overcast sky or a handful of ash, and the hand--the disembodied hand--is severed at its wrist."
April 10, 2013
creative engagement with Burial: http://www.5cense.com/13/river_corpse...
Want to Read
September 25, 2015I haven't read this yet but I totally will because Claire is the daughter of my french professor at Clarion University!! I'm surprised I actually found her book!
June 26, 2016
Beautiful and profound. Donato handles grief in a way that is familiar, but makes you wish it wasn't so familiar.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews