Vessel
The Shape of Absent Bodies
Dani Netherclift’s sublime memoir commemorates her father’s and brother’s accidental deaths and ponders corporeality and impermanence.
One scorching afternoon in 1993, Netherclift’s father and brother drowned while swimming in an irrigation channel near their Australia home. Her father’s body was recovered that night, her brother’s not for several days. A joint closed-casket funeral took place six days later. Eighteen at the time, Netherclift witnessed her relatives’ disappearances but didn’t see their bodies. She wonders whether one must see a corpse to have closure.
“The presence of absence” is the book’s overarching paradox. There are lacunae everywhere: in Netherclift’s police statement from the fateful day, in her journal and letters from that summer. The holes left in her family necessitate a looping, fragmented progression, and the prose sometimes adopts the stanza form of poetry. Other historical examples of drownings, including Virginia Woolf’s and Jeff Buckley’s, provide perspective.
The contradictions and ironies of the situation defy resolution. Water, both “familiar and unknown,” took on menace that day. Distant cousins drowned in 1908 and in the 1980s—was there a family curse? Incorrect news reports stated Netherclift’s father and brother jumped in to rescue their dog, who survived. Rather, its presence was coincidental.
As a visual representation of all that is missing, there are occasional photographs of century-old envelopes that Netherclift’s great-grandfather sent home during World War I; the letters themselves have been lost. It’s a striking parallel: corpses devoid of spirit and envelopes empty of text, “nothing but space and remembrance.” Sifting through her brother’s belongings, Netherclift finds that artifacts spark “reverence for close-enough to a body.”
Lyrical and allusive, Vessel is a memoir about a personal tragedy and a moving meditation on what remains of the dead.
Reviewed by
Rebecca Foster
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