Being Dead

by Jim Crace

Nostalgia has sent Celice and Joseph back to their singing stretch of coast, but in the seeming calm of the afternoon they meet a brutal and unexpected fate - one which will still their bodies but not their love, and certainly not their story.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery, Death, Book Club

209 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

James "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.

Reviews

[Vicki Herbert - Vacation until Jan 2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life is. It Goes.
It Does Not Count...

BEING DEAD
by Jim Crace

5 stars. For old times' sake, Joseph and his wife Celice drove out to the salt dunes at Baritone Bay for a final visit...

They never returned...

Thirty years ago, they'd met and made love in those very dunes. They'd meant to relive those moments...

Until they were murdered with a large rock...

Both were well-educated zoologists and teachers at the university. None of their colleagues had ever seen them together...

No one ever saw them touch each other, so it seemed odd that they would be found naked and dead together...

Victims of murder in the open air while in the act of sex...

In times past, their bodies would've been carried home, laid out in their finest on their beds, and given a quivering until daybreak...

However...

The couple wasn't found immediately, so they enjoyed six days of grace above ground. Just the them two of them at their ugliest...

Celice died first, almost instantly. She did not have the leisure or the knowledge to be afraid...

Less than a minute it took...

Joseph, with his thick skull, was harder to kill. Still breathing, he was left to feel the pain and experience dying half an hour longer than Celice.

Six days of grace...

There's nothing more sincere than death. The dead mean what they say...

Life is. It goes. It does not count...

Almost immediately, bugs, gulls, rats, crabs, and a host of other vermin began breaking down their bodies...

After that, the couple were irretrievable. Their eyeballs were liquifying. Their faces enlarged. Skin blistered, innards bloated with gas, orifices frothy...

After their six days of grace on the beach, their only child, an adult daughter, finally noticed they were missing...

Fear of death is fear of life. Change is the only constant. Nothing in the universe is stable or inert. Decay and growth are synonyms...

This is my second time reading this novel of literary fiction graphically and poetically recounting the life and death of this married couple and how randomly death suddenly overtook them.

There's a lot to unpack in these pages. Many nuggets of truth and contemplation to be had. While I didn't necessarily agree with some of the author's observations, many were thought-provoking, and all were beautifully written.

[Guille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empiezo con lo único importante de todo lo que aquí diré: Jim Crace es un autor sobresaliente y es del todo inexplicable el poco caso que las grandes editoriales, y por ende los lectores, le han hecho por aquí a pesar de los muchos e importantes premios que ha recibido a lo largo de toda su trayectoria literaria.

En “Y amanece la muerte” el autor expone nuestra mayor tragedia: la fugacidad de la vida y lo irremediable y definitivo de la muerte.

“Vivimos, morimos, no es necesario entender nada. No hay fantasmas que enterrar, sólo cenizas y recuerdos.”

Para ello, y de una forma soberbia y perturbadora, nos relatará el proceso de descomposición de dos cuerpos asesinados y abandonados entre las dunas de una playa (no teman el spoiler, así se inicia la novela y el asesinato es otro de los momentos estelares) en paralelo a la narración del momento en el que Joseph y Celice se conocieron 30 años antes en esas mismas dunas y el discurrir de su último día de vida. Dos personajes que, como la mayoría de nosotros, han tenido existencias anodinas, con problemas y alegrías triviales, y que, lamentablemente, son más atractivos muertos que vivos.

“La tierra es experta en dar sepultura. Reúne, abraza y acoge a los muertos. Pasado el tiempo, Joseph y Celice se habrían transformado en paisaje. Sus cadáveres habrían sido un objeto muerto más en un paisaje tallado en la muerte. No se transformarían en nada especial. Las gaviotas mueren. También las moscas y los cangrejos. Igual que las focas. Incluso las estrellas deben descomponerse, deteriorarse y abrasarse en el cielo. Todo ha nacido para irse. El universo ha aprendido a sobrellevar la muerte.”

No nos resignamos a desaparecer sin más, nuestra vanidad como especie nos aleja del destino que asignamos sin más a cualquier otro ser viviente, nos asusta y nos repugna el vacío, la intrascendencia, el fin. No somos capaces de concebir una naturaleza, un universo, insensible a unos sentimientos, a unos deseos, a unos miedos y a unos anhelos. No concebimos que la muerte desenmascare nuestra completa y patética insignificancia. Lo terrible es que no hay una estrategia universal satisfactoria contra ese futuro cierto, aunque entre todas ellas quizás no sea la peor olvidarnos en todo lo posible del tema y simplemente vivir… el problema es que no elegimos la estrategia, son ellas la que nos eligen a nosotros.

“Su hija era la siguiente en la línea sucesoria. No podía escabullirse de la cola. De modo que no debería malgastar el tiempo en aquel oscuro universo… los que vivían pendientes de las estrellas eran estúpidos al sacrificar el breve fulgor de la vida en aras de las esperanzas en un cielo o los temores de un infierno. Nadie trasciende. No hay futuro ni pasado. No hay otro remedio para la muerte –ni el nacimiento– que aferrarse al espacio comprendido entre ambos momentos. Vive a lo ancho, a lo alto, con estruendo.”

Mientras tanto, sea cual sea la estrategia que nos caiga en suerte, nos queda, entre otras muchas cosas no menos placenteras, la lectura de obras tan notables como esta de Jim Crace.

“Sólo los que vislumbran el terrible e interminable corredor de la muerte, algo demasiado tremendo para contemplarlo, necesitan perderse en el amor al arte.”

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”They’d only meant to take a short nostalgic walk along the coast where they had met as students almost thirty years before. They had made love for the first time in these same dunes. And they might have made love there again if, as the newspapers were to say. ‘Death, armed with a piece of granite, had not stumbled on their kisses.’”

Jim Crace begins the book with the big reveal...the death of his two main characters. The demise of Joseph and Celice is a brutal and nonsensical one. An encounter, unplanned, random among the dunes, between two teachers and a maniac. He finds a chunk of granite; rocks and tree limbs are the oldest weapons, and like a scene out of the Stone Age, he bludgeons them to death. They are vulnerable. Joseph is completely nude, and Celice is naked from the waist down. They were lost in the nostalgia of the past intersecting in the present and trying to grasp the last few remaining sparks of their youth.

They die, not really knowing they are dying.

Then begins six days of grace.

This is the time they remain undiscovered. During this time, Jim Crace reveals the details of their lives from their first meeting until death in the dunes occurs. He also gives us details of what exactly is happening to their bodies during this time. ”A dazzling filigree of pine-brown surface veins, which gave an arborescent pattern to the skin. The blossoming of blisters, their flaring red corollas and yellow ovaries like rock roses. And in the warmer, gaping caverns--sub-rib, sub-flesh, sub-skull--the garish blues and reds and greens of their disrupted, bloated frames. They were too rotten now and far too rank to hold much allure for gulls or crabs. They’d been passed down through classes, orders, species, to the last in line, the lumpen multitude, the grubs, the loopers and the millipedes. The button lice, the tubal worms and flets, the bon viveur or nectar bugs, which had either too many legs or none.”

Being scientists, think how intriguing it would be for Joseph and Celice to observe the process of their own decay.

I know this is going to sound abhorrent to many of you, but Crace writes beautifully about the decomposition of their bodies. I’ve been struggling for years on the proper way to perform my last task...the disposal of my body after I’ve finished with it. I certainly do not want to be pumped full of poisons and thrown into a hermetically sealed coffin to slowly rot, nor do I like the idea of riding a conveyor belt into a roaring flame. Frankly, I don’t like the idea of people handling my body at all after I pass. I’ve thought about a Viking funeral, burning boat sans virgin sacrifices, but I’m really not all that thrilled about deep water. I’ve thought about being buried in a pod where my decomposing body could feed and grow a tree, but after reading this book, I really like the idea of being exposed to the elements and letting the seagulls, vultures, crabs, wolves, hyenas, on down to the swarming insects reduce my body to a skeleton. Of course, living in a first world country, the authorities tend to frown on bodies being left about and would insist on throwing me in some hole where I’d have to hope at least the worms would find me. Still, wouldn’t it be nice to be food rather than just rot?

Joseph and Celice have a daughter named Syl, and we get to meet her as she realizes that, despite her best efforts to reject everything about her parents, she still has a final responsibility to them. First, she has to find them. ”What was she doing with her life? (Not wasting it on books. Not rusting in a lifeless town.)” Well, needless to say, that Syl is not my type of gal. Her definitions of not wasting her life is to drink too much, take too many drugs, shave her head bald, have sex with random strangers, and serve people food. She isn’t even a very good waitress, with a surly attitude, quick to take offense, and a bristling, menacing demeanor. She seems to me to be searching for the perfect blissful mix of being pissed off and having fun.

Joseph and Celice, I’m sure, were as baffled at their daughter’s scathing anger and scoffing rejection of their chosen lives as most parents are. The question is, are Syl’s decisions about her life really her own or are they merely designed to irritate and disappoint her parents?

It’s been a long time since I’ve read Jim Crace, but I will be selecting his books more often in the future. His novels brim with intelligence and insight. He elevates a reader's perceptions and is a perfect example of where fiction becomes more true than nonfiction.

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[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life Cycle

This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read, vying with D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel for poetic originality, though quite different in manner. And one of the most extraordinary things about it is that it makes no claim to concern itself with world events at all, but something utterly ordinary: the death of a middle-aged couple near a small seaside town. Which brings me to the first of the four points I offer as demonstration.…

1. The Story. Joseph and Celice are zoologists in their later fifties. As the novel opens, they die together shortly after making love in a hollow in the dunes of Baritone Beach, the setting of their very first tryst three decades before. The book is well titled: their death is simply a fact. There is a crime, but no mystery; nobody has much hope of solving it. Instead, what Crace concentrates on is simply death itself, and what happens to the bodies in the six days between being killed and carried away. He does this in clinical detail which at first seems disgusting, but soon develops its own kind of poetry; this is death as it might be described by a scientist such as Joseph and Celice are themselves. But death is not Crace's only subject.…

2. The Handling of Time. The novel juggles three time-frames simultaneously. One, hour by hour, day by day, is the post-mortem narrative that I mentioned above. Against this, Crace sets a second sequence, describing how the couple arrived at the beach, and moving backwards an hour at a time to Joseph waking Celice at daybreak to tell her that the day promises to be too good to waste indoors. For this is also a portrait of a marriage, a marriage held together by love and parenthood, though no longer by passion. A third timeline goes back thirty years to their first meeting, as graduate students on field study, and the unpredictable twists that led them into each other's arms. There are surprises in this story which will affect their later lives, including their last excursion. All in all, this is as much a book about love and companionship as about death. You could even argue that Crace's objective description of dying is the mechanism that allows him to paint an entirely clear-eyed portrait of marriage, totally free from sentiment, and to have it emerge as something both ordinary and beautiful.

3. The Setting. Crace is a superb writer, and brilliantly evokes the duneland setting of Baritone Bay (so called for the occasional phenomenon of its singing sands) and its flora and fauna. But it has the quality of somewhere you almost know but can't quite place. I wondered about East Anglia, since Crace is English, but that doesn't quite fit. I thought the American Northeast, but no fit there either. I am not the first to note this; I came upon at least one blog entry raising the same questions. This story about biologists, for instance, is filled with plants of all kinds, from the manac shells that surface the paths to the lissom grass on which the couple bed down; look them up, though, and you will find they don't exist. The people in the town, too, seem part of the familiar Anglo world, but the drinks they consume, the drugs they take, the customs of their lives, all are slightly unfamiliar: cousinly, not fraternal. It is a superb balancing act, doubly so in that you are hardly aware of it at all. I suppose it is a kind of science fiction: the everyday world re-imagined through the mind of a scientist.

4. The Language. Crace invents a linguistic world in order to be master of it, to hold it to the light, turn it on its head, hold it up to the scrutiny of eternity. That reversal of time, for instance. At the start of the book, he describes an old custom (I think invented) of "quivering," a kind of wake whose purpose is to shake the body and turn time backward:

Their memories, exposed to the backward-running time of quiverings in which regrets became prospects, resentments became love, experience became hope, would up-end the hourglass of Celice and Joseph's life together and let their sands reverse.

I am reminded of Martin Amis turning time backwards in Time's Arrow, although Crace has far greater subtlety. His object is not illuminate some particular event but to make a statement about life in the universe—an atheist's philosophy perhaps, but as consoling as anything offered by religion. So let me end with the passage when Joseph and Celice's bodies are finally separated:

Joseph's body rolled towards the west. His wife went east. They came off the grass and on to cotton, then into wood-effect, then on to the flat bed of the sand jeep, along the beach and through the suburbs to the icy, sliding drawers of the city morgue, the coroner's far room, amongst the suicides. Their bodies had been swept away, at last, by wind, by time, by chance. The continents could start to drift again and there was space in heaven for the shooting stars.

[Berengaria · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little over 4 stars

short review for busy readers:
A unique story of the murder of a zoologist couple and their "six days of grace" before they are found. Backstory provides details of their life and the significance of the beach where they are found. An arresting, beautifully told tale, but slowish (not full slow!) and on the literary side.

Trigger warning: several chapters about the natural decomposition of bodies, police forensics and morgues, but nothing too gross.


in detail:
I have never read a novel like this.

It's quite literary, focusing very tightly on its theme ("death and life are synonyms") as we circle back in time to where and how the zoologists met, how they died, how they lived, how they were found, the state of their marriage, how the police dealt with the bodies, their relationship with their daughter, and ultimately, the fate of the beach where so many pivotal events in their lives occurred.

And the beach setting is just as much of a character as the couple are.

There are long descriptions of the fictional English Baritone Bay: the beach, the winds, the flora and fauna. But unlike many other novels which take a romantic or 'post card' tone, this one takes a scientific one, detailing the landscape with scientific facts and knowledge.

In fact, that's the magic of the story: the science.

Our murdered couple are zoologists. Science is how they see and understand things. But that doesn't mean they don't have feelings about the facts of the natural world. And if they were alive, they'd certainly be fascinated by what happens to their bodies over the six days before they're found, just as they are fascinated by the insects and flora of the beach.

But they aren't alive, so we are treated to the POVs of several people as they deal with different aspects of the couples' death. We have the university secretary who doesn't know what to do when they don't show up for meetings or answer their phones, the morgue attendant who hates dead people, their self-absorbed daughter, and the murderer himself.

The only reason this short novel (about 200 pages) doesn't get 5 stars is the somewhat slowish pace and how the camera eye is, at times, moved away from some interesting things and onto the normalcy of everyday married life. Other than that, splendid!

Highly recommended for fans of nature novels, science esp of coasts, well-crafted literary works and unique fiction.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This opens with a grisly murder in a beautiful spot and such counterpoints are the nature of the story and its telling. One thread of chapters starts near the “end” of the story and goes back (initially, but then forwards too), while the other thread starts many years earlier and only goes forward, building the expectation of the two threads meeting at the end of the book. It describes death and decay in detached detail in a way that is simultaneously disgusting and beautiful; passages are searingly poetic. It needs the beauty, because in may ways it is a painfully empty story, full of loss, misunderstanding, distance, waste and pointlessness. But it’s actually rather a good book.

[Tyler · Rating 1 out of 5]

Craft and good writing make this book a hit with many readers. Innovative form and thinking prose set the right words in the right places. The story brings readers an introspective reflection upon death, seen through the lens of a married couple whom it overtakes.

The form of the story weaves along three tracks: One moves the couple back in time from the occasion of their deaths; the next parallels that with a forward-moving tale of their early lives; and the final track contrasts with the first two the physical disposition of their bodies, and with other impersonal events unfolding in the days after their deaths, juxtaposing untended corpses with their living antecedents. So far so good. But as the actual story unfolded, I started having problems.

Now the theme of doomed flesh has been a recent innovation, but only in visual media. I first noticed it in nature programs that show what happens after the kill. In one, about the Amazon, my eyes popped as I saw piranhas strip some hapless mammal to its bones in forty seconds flat. In another, about Africa, my jaw dropped as the camera lingered upon insects I have never even heard of, showing them devouring a dying giraffe in a similar instant, almost before the animal’s head hit the ground.

Demise of the flesh is also the subject of the recent documentary about that body farm in Tennessee where the decomposition of human cadavers is studied – you know, the one broadcasting last year on an almost endless loop so you couldn’t avoid it no matter what. American crime serials like CSI now stress close-ups of drying or decaying body parts, meaty human bone fragments, blood spatter and what have you.

Film gave us Eyes Wide Shut, in which Tom Cruise leans in as if to kiss the dead streetwalker in the morgue. I used to imagine what would happen at that garish moment if Tom had slid out his warm, wet tongue to glide it along her chilled, bluish-green skin. Needless to say, the theaters would have been packed to the girders. As it stands, the movie was a total cop-out, not just for that but for the pathetically botched orgy scene as well.

Enough. What these visual treatments suggest is a market, so it was only a matter of time before writers tried to convert images to words. Crace attempts a seamless stitching, yet the postmortem descriptions stand stubbornly apart from the narration of the first two temporal strands. It's like reading two books. Compounding the problem is the third-person voice. Though understandable, it discourages sympathetic identification. The reader becomes an observer, not a participant.

Pushing away the reader as well is the couple, two British doctors of zoology. Here’s another idea with merit: zoology = nature = materialism. This couple expresses perfectly the impersonal quality the author seeks. But their status as British academics puts them in a league most readers cannot hope to love. Nothing I read of their lifestyle elicited my sympathy. Their clothing, housing, breakfast choices, entertainment and all-around attitude were as alien to me as if they had dropped from the sky. A colder and more cheerless pair I have never come across. Their icy standoffishness depicts a slice of humanity so removed from most that it cadges the imagination.

This book is about death, we are told, about how life is really an aberration, death our real destiny. Even a baby is born dying, we read. Life is fragile, fleeting, impotent – scarcely worth the effort except by pitiable self-delusion. The point is stated page after page, and even during the same paragraph, wherein three or four sentences express it in different words. Take away the creative writing that covers the repetition and say hello to a 200-page exaltation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Dwelling on ruined flesh has no more appeal for me in books than it does in the visual media, and I found the story hard to engage beyond a creeping feeling of mild disgust. Being Dead has won a major book award. Its writing really is superior; the contrast of life and death is its key literary innovation. This may be exactly what many readers are looking for, and for them the rest will be secondary. Then there are peculiar and narrowly focused minds that can fully appreciate the precise contents that flesh out the story. So with those two exceptions, I do not recommend this book.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capsule review -- Nostalgia: deadly.

Crace writes my kind of sentences. This book--its focus, its themes, its stubborn determination to cover matters that shouldn't be fictively compelling, the kind of stuff that most writers elide or skip altogether--should collapse at regular intervals, and yet doesn't, because the author somehow makes it work. Part of the thrill of Being Dead is that: wondering how on earth he's going to keep it all going. It's about estrangement and how we're animals subject to proclivities and tendencies about which we can do very little, and finally, nothing at all. It's unquestionably--often provocatively--very grim. But it's also about life, and how it should be lived (and loved) all the harder for being so fleeting. A genuinely unique marvel.

[Daisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Years ago I recall a friend discussing his father’s decision to put his grandma into sheltered accommodation on account of her finding the stairs too difficult to manage and it becoming dangerous. At the time she was a fairly spritely woman nearing 80 who used to cook double amounts of supper and take the excess to, “the poor dear down the road”, who was probably not far off a decade younger than her. She still painted her watercolours and visited any new cafes or attractions in her area. My friend’s view was that it was no bad thing if she did go falling down the stairs, in her own home while her life was still full and active rather than slowly rotting away in a impersonal flat. He has a point as while the move did extend her life to her early 80’s her quality of life reduced. Her new home was far from friends and not easily accessible, the people around her had little conversation and with nothing else to stimulate her than tv she slowly lost her mind and with that family visits dwindled as it was increasingly hard to see her deterioration.

This is one of the themes/questions of this book. Should we be hopeful that we have a sudden death while still in possession of our faculties, that essentially our decay take place post mortem not slowly in the final couple of decades before death? This is not a book for the faint hearted nor the romantic types as it has a very graphic description of the final minutes of life (particularly brutal in this case as the main characters, Joseph and Celice, are bludgeoned by a piece of granite wielded by a stranger intent on robbing them). This is followed up by detailed description of the physical decay, animal and insect predation and what happens to the blood spilled over the 6 days they lie dead in the dunes before their corpses are discovered.

It's an apt ending place for the couple, they are both academics in marine life – seaweed and sandhoppers not the more glamorous dolphins and coral – and they die together in the place they first made love. In fact Joseph is found naked and Celice naked from the waist down as they were finished off as they were finishing off, as it were, reliving their first time. Crace fills in the back story of the couple, it is no great love story, a mismatched couple coming together through lack of other options and being fused together by a tragedy in the first days of their budding romance. They are dull, no-one really knows them, they are estranged from their only child and in a tragic twist (which reminded me of Silas Marner ) tragedy befalls them the one time they act out of character – Joseph phoning in sick to make the most of the good weather and take a nostalgic trip back to their meeting place. These are unexceptional people living unexceptional lives and yet Crace gives them and their death and decomposition a nobility and gravitas that is tender and beautiful. He even gives the jaded but enduring love between them,

"Yet there was still love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots. Old, lasting love."

a passion worthy of the most romantic of romantics, as they die with Joseph’s hand clasping his wife’s leg, joined in death and remaining that way until the undertaker separates them. It’s a book that questions what is the best time and way to die, it reminds us that we are all just fodder in the end and yet I found this unique book strangely uplifting.

[Maciek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to reading Being Dead - I read a review mentioning it somewhere, and was intrigued ever since. I have read several novels by Jim Crace by now, and found him to be a good stylist versatile author, with each subsequent book being a very different experience from the one before. That being said, I sadly found Being Dead to be a great disappointment.

Being Dead is concerned with Joseph and Celice, a pair of middle-aged zoologists who return to visit the coast where they met as students more than 30 years ago, with hopes for a romantic evening. Instead they are disturbed in an act of intimacy by a stranger who kills them both and plunders their possessions, leaving their naked bodies left to rot.

What follows if a non-linear accounts of Joseph's and Celice's life - their careers, marriage and relationship with estranged daughter - and post-mortem: the slow decay of their dead bodies, and how they react to elements, insects and animals now feasting on them. This is an interesting juxtaposition, but the book never evolves much beyond it - there is little to make us care for Joseph and Celice, both in life and death, and the whole book ends up being more of an experiment than a novel. Why should we care for these people? Did we learn anything at all from their story? These questions can be answered only if a book meets the prerequisite of having both real people and real story, but Being Dead sadly ends up having neither.

[Άννα Morta ⛧⛧⛧ · Rating 5 out of 5]

'There was no beauty for them in the dunes, no painterly tranquillity in death framed by the sky, the ocean and the sand, that pious trinity, in which their two bodies, supine, prone, were posed as lifeless waxworks of themselves, sweetly unperturbed and ruffled only by the wind.'

Being Dead depicts the lives of Celice and Joseph and their random, opportunistic murder in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay. We accompany two corpses on a beach, re-experience and contemplate through recollections and resuscitate their existence through the eyes of the dead, a reminder of our own mortality and the vulnerability of life.

The dual temporal structure represents the low and high water of the beginning and ending of things - human existence vs. mortality. The book delves deep into natural decomposition, the state or process of decay, the stages of death in a tragic play, the cyclical nature of life, a metamorphosis where endings also represent new beginnings. The writing is sublime, simultaneously spine-chilling and magnificently beautiful, described in a very sensitive, poetic way, with an affinity, love and craving toward nature, an intuitive and natural drive. For me, the slow pace of the book offered time for reflection, observation and exploration of deeper questions within the narrative.

Highly recommended!

[Mon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about ordinary people.



This is painting by Van Gogh in 1888 titled Shoes The objects painted are the artist's own processions - they are well used, experienced and passive. Now, instead of a full analysis of Van Gogh's artistic merit (which can be found in any high school art essay), try to picture his thought when he was painting this pair of shoes. Were they chosen with particular intention? Not really, since he did another painting with a black pair of boots in the same manner. Why did he pick shoes of all possible objects? Sunflowers, you can argue, are well, aesthetic naturally. More importantly, these are his own shoes. Remember, Van Gogh was nobody at the time, this would have been even more insignificant then his portraits. The shoes were not accidentally put into the picture, they were its sole occupants. They had to be important. Ok, so maybe Van Gogh really loved his shoes, but why did he paint them so scrubby and worn? Notice how they are positioned slightly off the center and placed on domestic floorboard? This is a composition you would use if you want to degrade a subject and emphasise its feebleness.

In a way Being Dead is similar to Shoes. The novel starts with two zoologists robbed and left dead on a beach. It is not about the violence of the act or the consequences of it. It is completely random and unremarkable, just like the rest of the cast. So why couldn't I put the book down? Van Gogh was one of the first to be so daring - he painted the emotional weight of the object rather than the actual quality of it. He managed to elevate a pair of shoes to a subject worthy of time and effort. Similarly, Crace achieves the same result. The characters and plot themselves are mundane, yet the way he illustrates the process of the cadavers' decay and the little details of their brief existence contribute to the charm of the story. Highly recommended.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Our births are just a gateway to our deaths. That's why a baby screams when it is born."

A fascinating and morbid retrospective of a meeting, a marriage, and a discovery... Being Dead is about a couple attempting to rekindle the romance in a decades-long marriage with a visit to the shore where they first met, and where their lives inevitably end.

Joseph and Celice met as doctoral biology students at Baritone Bay, studying the zoology of the dunes, he the insect life, she the tide pools. Thirty-some years later, they revisit the dunes with an amorous picnic lunch, and are followed by a thief who also murders the couple, leaving them for days undiscovered. The crime itself is not the focus of the book, and we never learn "whodunit", but as the book is written, that is not the point.

In being dead, Joseph and Celice continue the life cycle of their favored dunes. Crace describes over the hours the decomposition and the decay of their remains, being reclaimed by the creatures and environment that the couple spent their own lives studying.

Syl, the couple's daughter enters the story half-way through, as their disappearance is noted. Her own disbelief, grief, and bereavement are studied in alternating chapters.

Yes, morbid and often accompanied with a grisly set of descriptions, yet Crace's telling is poetic, full of marvel, at times funny, and graceful. The writing struck me over and over, and I am ready to experience more by Crace.

"You're dying now. Get used to it!"
[Celice in lecture to her undergraduate biology students]

5/5 * One of my faves of the 2024

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*
This book was exceptional in parts. It may come across as too detailed to some concerning the subject matter but i thought it was done really well.

I would not suggest reading the info regarding the book here on goodreads as it gives too much away.spoils it. Give it a miss. I had the book and it only had a little info on the back which was just enough.

This story follows two people and the tragedy that happens to them one day. It goes back and forward from past to present and at the end it pulls the story together. The subject matter is in depth. It tells of their murder and the decomposition of their bodys. You will realise why if you read it. This is not for everyone it all depends on what type of things you would read. The overall meaning is so true to life/death.
I came away feeling that life is an amazing thing. We get on and do what we think we should. Till our time is our time. Nature has its own amazing cycle.
This was written in a way that worked well. Regarding whats mentioned throughout this could have came across differently and ruined the whole read.

I will read more from this author.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this very affecting indeed. Life, love and death seen through the death (not a spolier - this is announced from the very beginning) of a middle-aged couple on a beach.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amoebolites and monophyles enjoy eternity. We do not. We die. We will live longer than dusk bugs - for every bug must have its day - but not nearly as long as land tortoises. We're less than turtles. We have to die before they do. We must. It's programmed that we will. Our births are just the gateway to our deaths. That's why a baby screams when it is born. Don't write that in your notes. They who begin to live begin to die. It's downhill from the womb, from when the sperm locates the egg and latches on.

And that's not the morbid part.

No, Celice and Joseph, an older couple, and both zoologists head out to the dunes. They attempt sex, and come real close. Then they are killed. Then nature - the sun, the rain, the beetles and the crabs - has at their bodies.

That would be the morbid part.

We die, Jim Crace says. Get over it, he seems also to be saying.

Other than that, their daughter - who never really cared for them - tries to find them when they turn up missing. The police find them first, what's left. But as she wonders if she's happy actually, or appropriately grieving, she finds a Mason jar in her parents' home. Nineteen little nubs. Each of her child's teeth (not counting the one she was forced to leave at school). So, you know, it had its moments.

I wasn't shocked. I wasn't grossed out. But I kept hearing that Dylan song, It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), as I was reading this; and in particular the line: That he not busy being born is busy dying.

[Valerie Book Valkyrie-on Holiday Semi-Hiatus · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 LitFic Stars
Are you a fancier of Literary Fiction? Then don't be bamboozled by the brevity of it; this is an Epic tale in a nutshell of a novel, truly a 5-star read!

About thirty pages in I had had-it with the (mistaken) purple prose, the (deceptive) droning tone, and the (seemingly viscid) reminiscing to the point of dnf'ing with a 1-star rating and a contemptible commentary of a review.

Inextricably goaded by a driving desire, an undulating urge, a niggling need to see, even a pittance, of that which LitFic lovers suggest to easily savor in the stories of (what has been) my nemesis of a genre, this hardcore SciFi fanatic forged ahead.

“Literary Fiction: the final frontier. This is the voyage of Valerie Book Valkarie. Her one-book mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new meaning and new realization, to boldly go where no book-valkyrie has gone before." adapted from Star Trek, the opening title narration.

Beam me down, Scotty, I'm going in with tricorder intact and phaser set to stun. (I don't possess the education, training, qualificatons, or even vocabulary to make a cogent assessment of any literary work.)
As luck would have it I do keep a small stash of synthetic dilithium crystals by whose glow the following has been illuminated:
1. The deft use of foil in the character development of Celice and Joseph.
2. The agile juxtaposition of prose resulting in a narrative that is poetic, almost lyrical, in nature.
3. The avid application of alliteration promoting the poetic quality of the prose.
4. Outstanding use of both organic and kinesthetic imagery (for which I had to slow my reading way down in order to fully immerse myself in the verse).
5. Paramount personification that sows the tone : “The sun's forehead is peaking at the day, its face still indigo from sleep, its cloudy head uncombed and tumbling its vapor curls onto the skyline of the sea. []The town's first trams are nudging through the streets in search of love. [] A crabbing boat is laboring aling the coast, to meet the light half-way, or chase it back whence it came.”

Flipping the story over and exposing its soft underbelly, you may be taken aback, but not put off by, a glimmer of soft porn, a gloaming of splatterpunk and, alas, a glabrous mundanity.

As my exploration ferried me deeper into this novel I developed a great appreciation for the author's insight into the human condition and his remarkable, and eerie, ability to set that insight to verse; yet derived little enjoyment or much satisfaction from the verse being read. I'm all too aware of my own shortcoming: “In literature, as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others.” André Maurois

Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here 💛🧚‍♀️🙋🏼!
(though there is undulating on pg 164 😉)

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the curiosities of contemporary Western literature is why Jim Crace isn't more well known on this side of the Pond. On the other hand, during the two years I spent underneath the Equator in Aotearoa I was introduced to a great catalogue of writers who have made no more than a faint "ping" on the U.S. cultural radar. Even with the supposed borderless Nation of Internet, we Stateside-bound lot live in our own world. A big huge one, granted, so we can't catch everything. But we miss a lot. Don't get me started on the authors who create in languages other than English who will never be published or spoken of in the U.S. Mostly because I don't know who the vast majority of them are. Because I live here.

Anyway. Being Dead is my introduction to Crace, and this after first hearing of him just two weeks ago. Yet this novel has heaps of awards (National Book Award, New York Times Book of the Year, Whitbread (now Costa) Book Awards short-list, American National Book Critics' Circle- see, America did take note!). Had I been paying attention in 2000 when it was making the rounds of "Best" lists, I surely would have sought out Crace and his brief, elegiac novel.

I find the whole thing a bit confounding. Being Dead is highly stylized and so meta. It's full of symbolism and writerly tricks, like made up species and poets and legends and cultural practices (Hint: don't waste any time looking up anything unfamiliar on Wikipedia. You'll get a great big Crace "Gotcha!" Just read the damn book). Gobs of gorgeously pretentious writing - you get seduced by and swallowed up in its richness, like duck confit or Sauternes. It contrasts the minutiae of decay with abstract atheism. It's like watching a Terence Malick film and pretending that you know what you're supposed to be getting out of the deep themes and esoteric observances, but really, you just like the pretty pictures.

I'm sounding cynical. It's not that I don't think this is an astonishingly composed novel. It is. Parts of it are breathtaking. But this reader enjoyed the central characters far more when they were dead than when they drew breath. Part and parcel of this conundrum is that I enjoy Crace's writing when he is alone with his dead characters than when he is their puppet-master as they interact in the world.

Dead, our murdered protagonists Joseph and Celice are beautiful, humane, tender, multi-layered, Technicolor beings. Alive they are crashingly dull. As are their lives and their histories. Dead they are mysterious, life-giving, splanchnic and viscous. Alive they are vapid.

I wouldn't venture to recommend this to anyone, because I don't want to be responsible for keeping someone up at night as they listen to their bodies die. Or because I don't want the sound of someone throwing this book across the room to wake me up. I'm very glad to have read it. I will seek out other novels by Jim Crace. But I won't pretend to like them.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another five-star read for 2018. Three time-lines wrap around the deaths of Celice and Joseph on a remote beach: their decomposing bodies, how they came to be there, and their daughter's search for them. None of the characters are particularly likeable, but all of them are so real. Brilliantly written.

[Fazilet Özdiker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joseph ile Celice orta yaşlarda zooloji doktoru olan bir çifttir. Çift, aradan geçen otuz yılın ardından kendileri için önemli olan Bariton Körfezi'ne eskiyi yâd etmek için geri döner. Geçmişi anmak ve yeniden yaşamak isterken bu plaj onların sonu olur ve işlenen cinayetle birlikte kitap geçmişe doğru çifti ve anılarını anlatarak ilerler. Buraya kadar okuduklarınız kitabın arka kapağında da olan açıklamalar. Şimdi gelelim olmayanlara.

Kitapta asıl önemli olan şey ölümün sonrası. Ölümü bir son olarak düşünen insanlığın bilmediği ya da unuttuğu şey, ölümden sonra gelen çürüme ve toprağa karışma. Ölüm ile doğanın ayrılmaz bütün olduğunu her sayfada hissettiriyor Crace. Ve insan hayatının kaçınılmaz sonu olan ölüm varsa, her ne olursa olsun ne yaşanırsa yaşansın geriye kalan tek şeyin doğa olduğunu okutuyor bize. Kötünün tüm izinin doğadan silindiğini, canlıların her birinin doğanın dengesinin bir parçası olduğunu kanıtlıyor yazdıkları ile.

Trajik bir cinayetten yola çıkarak, herkes açısından ele alıyor ölümü. Joseph ve Celice ile başlayan günün gerisine giderek bir döngü kuruyor yazar ve bu döngüde böceklerden rüzgara, çimenlerden kumlara kadar her detayın insan bedenindeki yerini sanki dillendiriyor. Ölümden beslenen canlıları, ekolojinin ölüme katkısını hiçbir yerde okumadığım kadar iyi açıklıyor. Çürüme ve dirilmenin anlamdaşlığını, sadece ruhun ölüp bedenin yeni bir biçim kazandığını idrak ettiriyor okura. "Being Dead" anlamını tamamen veriyor metinde Crace. Farklı ve ilgi çekici bir kitap arayanlara tavsiye ediyorum.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because there was an escalating and persuasive case for running to him through the surf like some starlet from the fifties. She was bewitched. She could imagine being old with him. His was her pillow face.

[☕Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm trying out something new since I haven't been very good about writing full reviews in a while.

Ratings (1 to 5)
Writing: 4.5
Plot: 4
Characters: 3
Emotional impact: 4
Overall rating: 4

Notes
Favorite character(s):
Favorite quotes:
Other notes: I found the technique of telling the sequence of events leading up to and including the murders in reverse order very interesting.

[Sandra Deaconu · Rating 1 out of 5]

Celice și Joseph sunt uciși cu bestialitate, încă de la începutul poveștii. Pe restul paginilor autorul ne povestește cât de nefericiți și anoști erau în timpul vieții. Asta cam în jumătate de carte. Aflăm chiar și că nu dormeau în același pat, deși se iubeau, pentru că erau timizi și nici nu voiau să își modifice rutina. Clar genul de oameni despre care vrei să citești mai multe... În cealaltă jumătate, autorul se gândește să ne arunce la polul opus al scriiturii și să ne descrie cu multe detalii ce se întâmplă cu trupurile lor. Cum li se scurge creierul, cum le plesnește carnea, cum îi mănâncă animalele etc. Așadar asta e o carte m-a plictisit și dezgustat în același timp. Inedit, ce să zic! Am prins eu pe acolo o idee profundă, dar trecerile rapide dintre starea de somnolență și cea de greață nu m-au lăsat să o înțeleg.

,,Se pare că auzul e ultimul simț care ne părăsește, că trupurile rămase în urmă aud foșnetul cearșafurilor trase peste capetele lor, primele bocete și trântitul ferestrei, pașii coborând scările de lemn, plecarea grăbită, penița scârțâitoare a doctorului."

,,Nu aveau puterea de-a nu muri. Erau, ca noi toți, carne crudă, și ca noi toți au ajuns în cele din urmă hrană."

,,Cei care încep să trăiască încep și să moară."

,,Ziua de luni destramă familiile. Îi trimite pe toți ai casei la lucru. Îi urcă în autobuz, în tren, în avion."

,,Totul s-a născut ca să moară."

[Meg Ingram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely LOVED this book. It was recommended to me by my good friend, Sarah, who warned me that it was a bit morbid. It is, but in a scientific and factual way. It's about what happens after you die...literally. As a society, we are so intent on covering death up, hiding from it, avoiding it, and ultimately ignoring the fact that it is inevitable. Granted, none of us want to meet our end in the manner that the couple in this book did (attacked, robbed, and left for dead during a romantic picnic on the beach). But the way Jim Grace describes the process of thier death and the effect it has on their estranged daughter is actually remarkably graceful, peaceful, even beautiful. A very interesting read...like nothing I've ever read before.

[JimZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I liked it. In the book as ephemera I have two reviews. One by John Banville and he had a 2 page review in the NYRB (April13, 2002) and his first sentence of the last paragraph was a less-than-ringing endorsement of you ask me: “These are not so much criticisms of a brave and in many respects highly successful attempt to divert and broaden a tradition, as indications of the pitfalls that await the novelist who dares to experiment.” Like yeesh, thank you very much for reviewing my book, not!

But Jim Shepherd liked it a lot (New York Times).

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a pleasant novel, unless you love decay, but a courageous success.

[Irina Constantin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Am descoperit o carte potrivită pentru stările mele actuale...

În mine se vorbește de moarte cu frenezie...zilnic.

E început de Septembrie bacovian, dar parcul e viu încă și se agită după greva unei veri fierbinți...

Am regăsit rugina din mine depusă pe paginile acestei cărți, prea subțire totuși.

Cartea are multe să îmi povestească, e o stafie venită într-o vizită fugara, nu o alung...

M-aș putea sechestra pe mine însămi într-un salon al celor bolnavi de melancolie, să stau mai multe zile, să privesc geamurile dinspre asfințit cum evocă lumina portocalie doar câteva minute înaintea marelui apus, apoi totul se va stinge ca un bec spart, va pocni liniștea sedata forțat de niște nebuni în uniforme de doctori.

Nimic nu o sa ma vindece, toamna e anotimpul nemilos care descompune natura într-un mod vulgar. Totul e în putrefacție și uneori nopțile reci mai păstrează cartilajele intacte.
Dar soarele lăptos injectează spuma gălbuie în pielea lăsată a morților până îi umflă apărând ca niște baloane de carne în mijlocul arid al amezii.

E prea multă căldură pentru un început de Septembrie....
Abandonată la sol, culcata în iarba vesteda arsă de vară și menită să putrezească peste toamnă, mă zgârie firele netrecute ale melancoliei.

Ea a devenit o boală, s-a transformat din acută în cronică ca atunci când medicul de familie îți schimbă fișa medicală convins de gravitatea bolii neluate în serios până acum.

Cărăbuși și gândaci împart porțiunea de sol cu mine, se mișcă pe lângă corpul meu semi-adormit. Eu, spre deosebire de Joseph și Cecile, nu sunt moartă încă, dar insectele tot au venit la ultimul curs universitar ținut de Joseph la zoologie.

De data asta nu li se vai mai pune absență studenților neinteresați, pentru că lipsesc însuși profesorii...

Cartea lui Jim Crace este de un romantism straniu, păgân, brutal prin descrierea amănunțită a cadavrelor celor doi, soț și soție.

Am simțit cum se umflă noaptea în mine și dă pe dinafară, mi-am amintit de motanul portocaliu mort și umflat găsit la mine în grădină acum câteva săptămâni...

Era doar cu o zi înainte de a mă lua ambulanța.
În noaptea când am ieșit din casă spre ușile ei, mirosul parfumat de cadavru încă plutea prin razele anemice ale lunii cețoase, chiar dacă îngropasem motanul singur, nu știam al cui e, mă gândeam cât de umflat o fi acum în groapa micuța și dacă l-am acoperit bine...
În timp ce asistenta îmi spune că nu o să mai am amețeli după a treia injecție, o să îmi țin echilibrul.
M-am întors acasă singur, dimineața, mirosul parfumat dispăruse definitiv din aer.


Am citit o carte despre mine.

"În clipa morții" este și o traducere superbă de Radu Paraschivescu

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting -a simple murder story that turned into a study on what happens to the human body after death - I wish I knew exactly how scientifically/medically accurate is all this, what I looked into does check out so points to that, especially as there is something poetic in the writing mix, I liked it.

It's way too long though - and the woman Celice was absolutely unbearable and this has nothing to do with her age or cultural background; she was a self-absorbed promiscuous narcissist as a young woman and I cannot be impressed by the fact that she stopped being promiscuous when she got old, had she dropped the egocentrism perhaps then I would be touched by her character development. As it stands, I feel sorry for her husband.

"The blow across her face and throat cut off the blood supply, and though her brain did what it could to make amends, to compensate for the sudden loss of oxygen and glucose, its corridors of life were pinched and crushed. The signals of distress it went were stars. The myths were true; thanks to the ruptured chemistry of her cortex, she hurtled to the stars."

[Kirstie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to say this novel is morbid but that's not entirely true. Instead, peculiar would be a more fitting word. First, it contains the longest description of decomposing bodies and the organisms that profit from it that I've ever read. It recalled the detailed and forever memorable rotting of Miss Havisham's neglected wedding feast only, you know, with human corpses.


Second, we start out with this married couple in midlife being dead and go backwards. We learn enough about these two zoologists-what they were like when they were young, how they met and became closer and everything inbetween. By the end of the book, we know infinitely more than we'd ever thought to want to know about the two that were killed off beginning on page 1. And yet, these are the main protagonists of the book and the more that you read, the more that you wish you could escape the inevitable fact that these two are not going to have any moments together anymore. It's as if being dead redeems them as characters because you grow attached and you even love them a little. All the while, the tragedy is accentuated. And in these 200 pages that escape, you find yourself slowly realizing ad you grow to love them that it might, in fact, be because they are no more. If they were alive, surely they would not be as interesting or as (ironically) vivid as they are now. They are preserved in a sense of tragedy that makes them intriguing.


Third, it's much less predictable than most fiction on this topic. Our two protagonists are dead from the start because of a rather brutal murder but instead of focusing on who did it and why, Crace instead tells us their story. In a way, that makes them less like victims and more like modern British tragic heroes. It's also what makes the story more interesting than a whodunnit or a why did it happen sort of novel. There's enough already written like that and not as many with this sort of angle.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gleamingly honest and original vantage of life and death

"Being Dead" somehow illuminates Being Alive. Jim Crace has given us a thoroughly engrossing, touching, spirit-expanding eulogy on the presence of death as a part of life. Early in this extraordinary little book he states "It's only those who glimpse the awful, endless corridor of death, too gross to contemplate, that need to lose themselves in love or art." He then proceeds to light that corridor for our examination, cell by decomposing cell, of the thing we try the hardest to avoid: death. This is not a macabre book, a sensationalist view of things morbid: with great grace and love the author invites us to explore the transcience of our corporal time on earth and in doing so he encourages the celebration of all things that life could be. If his characters appear as ordinary beings (if ordinary means two people who have explored the highs and lows of love, of procreation, of guilt, of grief, of dissappointment, of intimacy with the earth as only a zoologist can understand), then he has managed to touch us all, allowing us to identify with the inevitable confrontation with dying. This is a brilliantly conceived and written book- one of the most uniquely satisfying I have read. This is a map of our lives, our mortality, our spiritual quest untended/aborted. Food for thought and for sharing and for treasuring.

Grady Harp