Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger

I've never read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, but was intrigued by her follow-up novel Her Fearful Symmetry.  Why?  Aesthetics and morbidity.  The library's hardback cover is shiny blue-green with tree-branch lettering and the primary setting for the story is London's Highgate Cemetery.  I'm a sucker for attractive book covers and I love cemeteries, history, and ghosts.

I was unfamiliar with Highgate Cemetery prior to reading this book, but I must say, it's the most interesting part.  The cemetery opened in 1839 on the outskirts of London as the city's population, and subsequently its mortality rate, were exceeding available burial acreage.  It seems burial here was somewhat of a posthumous one-upmanship of fancy funerals and swanky memorials, excluding London's poor, of course.  With a decline in new residents, negligible funding, and virtually no landscaping or grave maintenance, the cemetery nearly fell into disrepair; however, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery have been working to restore and preserve the cemetery since 1975.  Hats off to them!  I'm not familiar with many of the "famous internments," except Karl Marx (I read The Communist Manifesto in high school...fun) and Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

But back to the novel, I greatly disliked most of the characters, which presented a roadblock in my reading enjoyment.  Niffenegger's depiction of identical twins made me profoundly grateful for my singularity and protective of my individuality.  I feel like I should chat up some twins to confirm that they're not all absurdly dysfunctional.  The story requires some suspension of disbelief, to which I excel, but it doesn't make the characters' behavior more bearable.  I'm just gonna say it: everyone in this book is a selfish whore (except maybe Martin, Marikje, Jessica, and James, the last three of which are fairly peripheral)!  I finished it feeling annoyed.  Mind you, it's well-written with well-developed characters and plot, just not particularly pleasurable.