Half Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older tells the story of a man struggling between the worlds of death and life, all at the same time. Carlos Delacruz is an agent of New York’s Council of the Dead, and lives a life of not really living, all without knowing how he got this halfway life, or even why. Older’s novel is different from anything I’ve ever read in the fantasy genre, mainly due to the themes he implements in his story. The theme of being “halfway” really struck a chord with me, mainly due to the sense of loneliness and uselessness Carlos feels throughout the beginning of the novel. He has a name that isn’t really his and a mission in life that is but a gift that keeps him going, giving him purpose in a life he deems doesn’t have
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The main character, Carlos, has a complicated backstory and his character development mainly revolves around his realization of who he truly is while also accepting that he never will really understand why. Not only is he an in-betweener in the sense of him straddling both life and death, but his inner voice and personality reflect this middle ground too. Carlos is a fan of poetry and often says things dripping with prose, things cringingly cheesy, such as “I want to take that face in my hands and put my own face against it and let our connecting faces be the fulcrum that swings our two bodies together and…our combined life forces into an intimate tangle that obliterates all our fears and regrets…” (106). But at the same time, his thoughts are flooded with vulgar language and swearing and down-to-earth realer than ever narratives that are refreshingly easy to relate to. While reading an Oscar Wilde novel, one can be moved, but one cannot so easily relate to the narrative Wilde sews into his work. Carlos thinks the way a real human would think. Because of this, he creates this heavy amalgamation with his patterns of speech that are also very much in-between: riddled with both contemporary real human thoughts and something deeper and outdated that often teases us with clues of his past life. All in all, Carlos is a very multifaceted character that we can all find very easy to relate to and
The main character, Carlos, has a complicated backstory and his character development mainly revolves around his realization of who he truly is while also accepting that he never will really understand why. Not only is he an in-betweener in the sense of him straddling both life and death, but his inner voice and personality reflect this middle ground too. Carlos is a fan of poetry and often says things dripping with prose, things cringingly cheesy, such as “I want to take that face in my hands and put my own face against it and let our connecting faces be the fulcrum that swings our two bodies together and…our combined life forces into an intimate tangle that obliterates all our fears and regrets…” (106). But at the same time, his thoughts are flooded with vulgar language and swearing and down-to-earth realer than ever narratives that are refreshingly easy to relate to. While reading an Oscar Wilde novel, one can be moved, but one cannot so easily relate to the narrative Wilde sews into his work. Carlos thinks the way a real human would think. Because of this, he creates this heavy amalgamation with his patterns of speech that are also very much in-between: riddled with both contemporary real human thoughts and something deeper and outdated that often teases us with clues of his past life. All in all, Carlos is a very multifaceted character that we can all find very easy to relate to and