Country: USA
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 235
This book marks the end of my ambivalent feelings about Chuck Klosterman. It's the most self-involved narrative written by a self-involved rock critic, but it's done the right way. Killing Yourself To Live: 85% Of A True Story is a road trip of Kerouac-ian proportions, a self-examination and a meditation of loneliness, love and music. And of course, the death of many rock n' roll icons, which was the whole point of hitting the road in the first place. The initial goal, set by Klosterman and his editor Sia Michel was to understand the relationship in between a premature death and eternal musical credibility. Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain, the Allman brothers, Layne Staley and Lynyrd Skynyrd were just the icing on the cake. The American landscape is filled with the tombstones of rock stars and Klosterman hopped in his Ford Taurus (which he amicably renamed Tauntaun) with for only company six hundred records and his tortured mind.
The greatest thing about Killing Yourself To Live is that it's not about death. I mean, that's what Klosterman does, investigating music business deaths, but throughout the pages of his book, he's struggling with a whole other issue. He's in the process of breaking up with his not-so-girlfriend Diane, who he loves in a one-way affair. On the first day, he drops her at a hippy camping in Ithaca, New York, before really starting his trip who will put him on the trail of two ex-girlfriends, Lenore and Quincy, with whom he feels he has unfinished business. Klosterman travels through the rough landscapes of the south and puts his whole life in perspective in the solitude of his car. He meets other interesting and painfully lonely people who try to reach out to him. The most touching example being a Cracker Barrel waitress with a taste for literature and a desperate need for intellectual conversation. Being born in a rugged mining town, where work (physical labor) is God and the Death Star all at once, that waitress struck a nerve with me. Klosterman paints her beautifully, with no judgement or irony whatsoever.
But like I said, most of Killing Yourself To Live is about the Klosterman himself. Isolation, music and death drag him into this morose state of mind, where he feels the weight of what he sacrificed for his professional success and ponders on the validity of his choices. He was never the most flexible person and it caused him to leave people who cared about him behind, but who asked for some compromises from him (Lenore). Or he had to move to pursue his career and leave others in the dust (like Quincy). But he was never sure both of them loved him anyway. Killing Yourself To Live is a great example of the weakness and incertitude of the human condition. The realm of one's knowledge and influence (in Klosterman's case, music and pop culture) can onlyl lead you so far, before you find yourself alienated and surrounded with people who don't consider you to be a God within your field of expertise. Empirical knowledge and the human experience are two things that don't fit together. Somehow, Klosterman balances both with gracefulness (at least inside his book).
Wow, this review is really going in all directions. It's a book that reads like a heavily narrated diary, with beautiful, surreal scenes of self-exploration. For example, during a long haul on the highway, Klosterman has a rhetorical discussion with the ghosts of his three ex's like an Ebeneezer Scrooge who has sinned a different type of greed. The rock n' roll deaths are instruments to his coming to terms with his career decisions. It's illustrating the feeble nature of success and the desperate (and most of the time unconscious) quest to transcend mortal nature. In true Klosterman, you end up learning a lot, even about the smallest things. The most striking pieces of trivia (to me anyway), were about the value to media gave to Jeff Buckley's work before he died (how dying almost bought him sainthood) and about the meaning of Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, especially the suicide scene and the importance of choosing a proper Beatles song to cut your veins to. It's sometimes a diary, sometimes a meditation on mortality, sometimes a handbook of rock n' roll deaths, but it's sincere and earnest in a way only Chuck Klosterman can be.
