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Six
Raunchy, revelatory and beautifully refined, 'Six' charts the sexual history of a loving, baffled man, the sexual emancipation of a city, and the sexual ambiguities of humankind.
282 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
4 people are currently reading
203 people want to read
About the author
Jim Crace
22 books419 followersJames "Jim" Crace is an award-winning English writer. His novel Quarantine, won the Whitbread Novel award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Harvest won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Crace grew up in Forty Hill, an area at the far northern point of Greater London, close to Enfield where Crace attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London. After securing a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1968, he travelled overseas with the UK organization Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), working in Sudan. Two years later he returned to the UK, and worked with the BBC, writing educational programmes. From 1976 to 1987 he worked as a freelance journalist for The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers.
In 1986 Crace published Continent. Continent won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. This work was followed by The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine, Being Dead and Six. His most recent novel, The Pesthouse, was published in the UK in March 2007.
Despite living in Britain, Crace is more successful in the United States, as evidenced by the award of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999.
Crace grew up in Forty Hill, an area at the far northern point of Greater London, close to Enfield where Crace attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London. After securing a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1968, he travelled overseas with the UK organization Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), working in Sudan. Two years later he returned to the UK, and worked with the BBC, writing educational programmes. From 1976 to 1987 he worked as a freelance journalist for The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers.
In 1986 Crace published Continent. Continent won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. This work was followed by The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine, Being Dead and Six. His most recent novel, The Pesthouse, was published in the UK in March 2007.
Despite living in Britain, Crace is more successful in the United States, as evidenced by the award of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
September 2, 2024
Ew. Worst book I've ever read. At one point he equated his load to the United States of America. 0/5
September 25, 2025
Another exceptional novel by this author. I have known a Lix. Not an actor, but in most other ways a doppelgänger. It was uncanny to read. And the extreme fertility of Lix, considered a gimmick by many readers, does exist in the world.
I happened to read this just after Youth Without God. They complemented each other perfectly. Politics and sexuality, courage and cowardice, in times of authoritarian rule, which in both books was especially difficult to read right now.
One odd thing: while there are many aspects of this book that are signature Crace, the tone and points of view continually made me think I was reading Ian McEwan. Perhaps it was only because one of his is coming up in my queue.
I happened to read this just after Youth Without God. They complemented each other perfectly. Politics and sexuality, courage and cowardice, in times of authoritarian rule, which in both books was especially difficult to read right now.
One odd thing: while there are many aspects of this book that are signature Crace, the tone and points of view continually made me think I was reading Ian McEwan. Perhaps it was only because one of his is coming up in my queue.
September 3, 2024
Súper fine!
March 3, 2010
And after all the quashing there remains a tale
GENESIS may not live up to Jim Crace's monumental peak of writing he reached with BEING DEAD, but I think it deserves much more examination than those who dismiss it as a work of Ego onanism. The very nature of the story of an Actor who struts the stage and movie screen but is shackled in his personal life by his inability to connect to the women with whom he finds himself is perhaps too obvious a metaphor for men today, but it is a well developed metaphorical journey none the less. The majority of the action takes place in a 'magical realism' atmosphere - The City of Kisses - which is besieged by bizarre police activities, odd floods, and bohemian eateries and bars that bounce us back and forth in time as well as place. Our Actor (Lix, to give him his name) is cursed with being hyperfertile, so much so that every women with whom he copulates becomes pregnant immediately. How Lix manages these various (six in number) affairs and marriages and the offspring that result from his curse is the line of story we follow - or try to. Were it not for the glorious word working such as 'Love is enacted by small things. Love is what you do with what you've got.' and 'No one's to blame, but passion is not intended to endure. The overture is short or else it's not the overture. Nor is marriage meant to be perfect. It has to toughen on its blemishes. It has to morph and change its shape and turn its insides out and move beyond the passion that is the architect. Falling in love is not being in love. Waiting for the perfect partner is self-sabotage.' then perhaps this book would not deserve our close attention. And I think it does.
When passages such as these are used for a moment of meditation, then GENESIS has a lot to say about how we are functioning in this discombobulated world.. And if Jim Crace does only that - makes us stop for a moment and observe the Human Comedy - then reading this book has its rewards. Let's see where he goes next.
Grady Harp
GENESIS may not live up to Jim Crace's monumental peak of writing he reached with BEING DEAD, but I think it deserves much more examination than those who dismiss it as a work of Ego onanism. The very nature of the story of an Actor who struts the stage and movie screen but is shackled in his personal life by his inability to connect to the women with whom he finds himself is perhaps too obvious a metaphor for men today, but it is a well developed metaphorical journey none the less. The majority of the action takes place in a 'magical realism' atmosphere - The City of Kisses - which is besieged by bizarre police activities, odd floods, and bohemian eateries and bars that bounce us back and forth in time as well as place. Our Actor (Lix, to give him his name) is cursed with being hyperfertile, so much so that every women with whom he copulates becomes pregnant immediately. How Lix manages these various (six in number) affairs and marriages and the offspring that result from his curse is the line of story we follow - or try to. Were it not for the glorious word working such as 'Love is enacted by small things. Love is what you do with what you've got.' and 'No one's to blame, but passion is not intended to endure. The overture is short or else it's not the overture. Nor is marriage meant to be perfect. It has to toughen on its blemishes. It has to morph and change its shape and turn its insides out and move beyond the passion that is the architect. Falling in love is not being in love. Waiting for the perfect partner is self-sabotage.' then perhaps this book would not deserve our close attention. And I think it does.
When passages such as these are used for a moment of meditation, then GENESIS has a lot to say about how we are functioning in this discombobulated world.. And if Jim Crace does only that - makes us stop for a moment and observe the Human Comedy - then reading this book has its rewards. Let's see where he goes next.
Grady Harp
March 17, 2018
Well, Genesis is not a novel on a par with Jim Crace's tour de force, Being Dead. It's generally well-written, sometimes funny and insightful, but here's the thing: Lix Dern, our protagonist, isn't very good with women, so the way to make his travails into a semi-continuous story, Crace offers a gimmick he only half, if that, exploits.
Lix always impregnates the women he has sex with. That's the gimmick. Usually they take the lead in getting into bed with him because he's not a much of a Lothario--although he's a well-known actor and singer--and usually they drift away from him, or dump him, but when they go, they've always got his seed worked into one of their eggs.
Well, okay, but it raises the question, What about the ensuing kids? And that's a question Crace doesn't answer, or exploit. They are named, they are referred to, but like the women, they are not major features of Lix's life. Their significance doesn't really bloom until the closing pages of Genesis, and even then, what we get is a smooth chunk of Crace's prose, not three dimensional characters.
Lix is not portrayed with unflagging sympathy, so this isn't a novel about how difficult women can be for men. It's more a novel about a firecracker (or firecrackers) that didn't go off. I'm going to read another of Crace's novels fairly soon. I didn't hate this book. I just found it more forced than fanciful and completely out of keeping with the demonic man Crace's publishers chose to place on the dust jacket.
Lix always impregnates the women he has sex with. That's the gimmick. Usually they take the lead in getting into bed with him because he's not a much of a Lothario--although he's a well-known actor and singer--and usually they drift away from him, or dump him, but when they go, they've always got his seed worked into one of their eggs.
Well, okay, but it raises the question, What about the ensuing kids? And that's a question Crace doesn't answer, or exploit. They are named, they are referred to, but like the women, they are not major features of Lix's life. Their significance doesn't really bloom until the closing pages of Genesis, and even then, what we get is a smooth chunk of Crace's prose, not three dimensional characters.
Lix is not portrayed with unflagging sympathy, so this isn't a novel about how difficult women can be for men. It's more a novel about a firecracker (or firecrackers) that didn't go off. I'm going to read another of Crace's novels fairly soon. I didn't hate this book. I just found it more forced than fanciful and completely out of keeping with the demonic man Crace's publishers chose to place on the dust jacket.
January 21, 2025
As a novel by Crace I think fans have no reason to be disappointed. It is set in the parallel world of the tarbony trees, both like and unlike our own, this time in an "Eastern European" country with its student protests, its intimidating militia and its unpredictable periods of cultural thaw. It is the story of birth-marked, cowardly, ultimately lionised actor "Lix" (Felix Dern) and his odd blessing/curse that he gets every woman he sleeps with pregnant. But the children are largely cyphers, the pregnancies seem to have surprisingly little effect on the arc of his life (his first wife leaves him anyway although her lover then leaves her) and one can't help wondering how the plot device is actually supposed to work: One pregnancy per woman or one pregnancy for each sex act when not already pregnant? The upshot, as it were, is that he has surprisingly little sex for a famous actor with long periods of celibacy. Don't get me wrong. The book has things to say about sex, family and relationships (and about another facet of the atmospheric Craceland) but I can't swear that the love life of the protagonist could only have turned out this way because of his quirky fertility. Could one call it a plot device that doesn't quite deliver?
Read
October 1, 2019I have read this before but cannot remember it. Indeed, I find it quite difficult tog et into. It does improve as it goes along but is really short on story line and long on literary styling. Lots of sex and babies but nor real substance
February 24, 2019
Just too cringey to continue reading past (my 'give it a chance') page 50.
No doubt not a fault with the book - just really not my thing.
No doubt not a fault with the book - just really not my thing.
March 11, 2019
The writing was insightful and poetic. The story was rather dull.
January 20, 2024
I don’t quite know what to make of this book, but I LOVED the writing so it’s four stars from me. I shall be reading more Jim Crace!
July 23, 2024
By the author of "Being Dead", an actor has impregnated every woman he's slept with. The story of the details of his life. He's a good writer.
July 12, 2013
Crace does not pick easy subjects. Death (Being Dead), Religion (Quarantine) and now sex (Six). To be frank though, this is not a book about sex, it is the life history of Lix who is an extremely fertile person and 'causes' pregnancy every time he has unprotected sex. This forms the vehicle for describing his life as a college student, out of work actor and, eventually, successful actor. All this happens in a make believe (European?) town called the City Of Kisses where rules and regulations have strayed from that which we would expect.
"Avoiding eye-contact, however, and dreaming the impossible, provided no escape. ' My little firebrand needs your help' Freda had already told Movetta during Moliere's and Lix's final act. And Movetta had already agreed to offer the sanctuary of their study couch for a week or so, until it was safe to drive the student out of town, until.....No one knew the sequel to 'until' in these extraordinary times."
As you would expect from Crace, the book is beautifully written and un-put-downable. The rear cover calls this an "Erotic Comedy" which disparages a good, well written, novel.
"Avoiding eye-contact, however, and dreaming the impossible, provided no escape. ' My little firebrand needs your help' Freda had already told Movetta during Moliere's and Lix's final act. And Movetta had already agreed to offer the sanctuary of their study couch for a week or so, until it was safe to drive the student out of town, until.....No one knew the sequel to 'until' in these extraordinary times."
As you would expect from Crace, the book is beautifully written and un-put-downable. The rear cover calls this an "Erotic Comedy" which disparages a good, well written, novel.
August 16, 2007
I admire Jim Crace's boldness and imaginative power. But this work left me absolutely cold. The lead character is a man of inexplicable fame and fecundity in a future repressive society, and the while I think the story was meant to illuminate larger themes of love and sacrifice and relationship, it just seemed to me to go nowhere. It's too bad. There aren't many novelists who can write equally well about the Stone Age, Jesus' 40 days in the desert, and two decomposing bodies, but this novel was a bust.
August 10, 2008
I usually find Jim Crace's writing beautiful and poetic. Not even his writing saved this story for me. This is a story about the conception of one man's children and the emotion, frame of mind (of both the man and the women) and the physical act at the time of conception. There was nothing about this story to like, the story, characters even the depth was missing any quality that would have made this a good read. Maybe the story was just to stripped of the fantasy and perceptions we as humans like to have about how we would like to think children are conceived.
October 31, 2012
I usually like anything Jim Crace writes, but I didn't think much of this one. By halfway through I was bored with it and thinking of giving up. I wish I had. The characters weren't very likeable and I felt no affinity with any of them. The storyline was about how an actor fathered six children (hence the title) by various partners at various times during his life in a city somewhere in Europe. Yes, it was about as interesting as that. If you haven't read Jim Crace before, I would recommend trying one of his other books before this one.
February 25, 2009
Jim Crace seems to have an underground following. He is a highly inventive and theme-challenging author, which is what I really like. He's not an Oprah pick author, and because of that I highly recommend his novels! This one follows a man through six of his sexual relationships. It's better than it sounds. :P
August 6, 2011
A beautifully written book, with elegant prose and an intriguing idea. However, months (years, maybe) after having read it, I have little memories of it save that it was a good read, that it dealt with a man cursed with a extraordinary gift for fecundity and that I remember wondering what Crace wanted to tell with this story.
April 3, 2007
The main character gets every woman he sleeps with pregnant. This is his story of how each of his children came to be.
I enjoy this guy's writing. It's very poetic at times. A "manly" look at things. . . I wonder if it's truthful.
I enjoy this guy's writing. It's very poetic at times. A "manly" look at things. . . I wonder if it's truthful.
May 2, 2007
Chronicling a guy's life which is unique because every woman he has had sex with carries a child. Interesting in that it does not flow linearly but a little schmaltzy at the end. Quarantine was a better book but this one was enjoyable enough.
June 18, 2008
A man impregnates every woman he sleeps with (if he doesn't use protection that is), the premise of the fourth Jim Crace title I've read. The storyline is interesting and kept me reading, but there was the missing element of deeper meanings that Crace did so well and easily in Being Dead.
May 20, 2009
Another of Crace's concisely written books, giving an individual perspective, this time on one man's children over his several relationships - whether they were the product of long-term relationships or a 'coupling.'
Love Crace's work generally - this one didn't let me down at all.
Love Crace's work generally - this one didn't let me down at all.
October 2, 2012
Nope. Straight-up did not care. Maybe an okay book, but it almost completely failed to grip me. Couldn't really figure out how the multiple story lines (guy who's super fertile, speculative post-flood fictional city) fit together . . . nope.
December 7, 2015
A very erotic tale of great fecundity. Jim Crace is a writer who cannot be pigeon holed and is always surprising and inevitably entertaining. If only a few more writers had his imagination and talent.
January 23, 2008
A fascinating study of a fictional actor and the fictional town in which he lives, and the children he sires with every lover.
Want to read
June 22, 20101st edition US, signed & inscribed by author
November 19, 2013
This book's final scene is one that I find indispensable.
January 13, 2017
Interesting
September 22, 2010
Very different to the other two Jim Crace books I have read. Not so keen on this one.
July 30, 2011
I was expecting this novel to be much better than it actually was.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews