Being Dead - Jim Crace

Being Dead is a bookworms dream. Every bookworm loves to read an emotional and poignant novel. They’re gifted if they manage to find a book full of emotion. Usually this emotion is given to us through the words, or through the plot. Very rarely do both occur in one novel. Well, Jim Crace’s novel Being Dead is an exception because it contains both elements. Crace introduces us to two unknown characters. We know nothing about their beliefs, feelings, or anything. But, by the end of the novel it seems that they’re a lost Aunt and Uncle who we’ve never met but heard so much about. I’ve never read a novel concentrating on two characters so ...  Read the complete review

It is Joseph and Celice who are dead. They are lying on the beach with their heads caved in and they are only partially clad. Joseph is touching Celice, his hand curved around the arch of her shin - does it signify that he tried to help her in the last moments of her life? Is it a testament to his love for her? Or is it just another arbitrary and meaningless juxtaposition of flesh? Being dead involves rotting, it involves decay: and ultimately it involves a vast array of tiny and not-so-tiny animals gorging themselves. Joseph and Celice are hidden amongst the dunes so nine full days and nights elapse before they will be found and in the meantime Mr Crace ...  Read the complete review

I seem destined to read Jim Crace whilst travelling. I read Quarantine on the out and in legs of a car journey, and read Being Dead this past weekend, 28000 feet above the ground, flying to Vienna and back. Of the two, I think Quarantine is the better book (winner of the Whitbread award). Being Dead begins with the brutal murder of its two main characters, mid-fifties husband-and-wife Joseph and Celice, on the beach of Baritone Bay. Both of these dead people were/are zoologists, shoreline zoology being their area of expertise. They had been scouring the shore for sandhoppers, and then headed off into the dunes to make love. Why they were doing these two things, ...  Read the complete review

You certainly won’t forget reading this particular book in a hurry. I do think that I would have been tempted to put this book down due to the graphic details of the decomposition of the two zoologists but the way in which it was written saved me from abandoning it. Death catches most of us when we least expect it down. The poetry of this book is so compelling that you feel better equipped to face death without making it ruin your life thinking about it. ...  Read the complete review

A gruesome, and marvellous discovery. i haven't read 'Quarantine' or Jim Crace's other novels - but i will, and sometime soon. Celice and Joseph, two middle-aged academics, return to the bay where they first met, and where their romance began. We flit from their distant past, that first time on the beach, to the day they return, and on to the following week, as their daughter begins to search for them. As you may infer from the title, this novel is something of a meditation on the processes of life and death, and the point of mourning, where the two coincide. Crace's prose is effortlessly poetic, and the book is filled with ...  Read the complete review