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thebobsphere's review against another edition
4.0
One major theme which is present in Jim Crace’s novels is the power nature has over society. No matter what the situation is, the natural world will win. Being Dead is no exception.
Zoologists Joseph and Celice return to a sandy beach after a long absence, the reason is twofold. This is the place where the couple first had sex when they were students and secondly Celice has some demons which she has to confront. Unfortunately when they are in the act, a thief bashes their heads with a piece of granite.
The book then is about how events lead to Joseph and Celice’s coupling, their bodies decomposing after the murder and the aftermath. None of it is told in chronological order.
As the title states this is a book about death. There are passages about how the body rots, the different types of death and that sex leads to death. As an aside the sex = death mantra occurs twice in the book. Once is obvious as it is part of the book’s plot but the other one leaves Celice scarred.
Yet this is a book full of life. The book is about how nature takes over once death happens, thus there are sections about insects burrowing in the body and how the grass being affected by the corpses. Although the couple are found, it is stressed that the sand and water would have enveloped the bodies and made them part of the land. Ultimately life conquers death in it’s unique way.
The people vs nature theme crops up in other sections. Joseph is studying an insect which has disappeared from the beach due to overbuilding. There are glimpses of how we are destroying nature. Considering the book was written in the late 90’s it’s prescient.
Jim Crace is one of those authors who can do no wrong and he does have a lot of classics Quarantine, Harvest, Arcadia and definitely Being Dead is up there as well.
Zoologists Joseph and Celice return to a sandy beach after a long absence, the reason is twofold. This is the place where the couple first had sex when they were students and secondly Celice has some demons which she has to confront. Unfortunately when they are in the act, a thief bashes their heads with a piece of granite.
The book then is about how events lead to Joseph and Celice’s coupling, their bodies decomposing after the murder and the aftermath. None of it is told in chronological order.
As the title states this is a book about death. There are passages about how the body rots, the different types of death and that sex leads to death. As an aside the sex = death mantra occurs twice in the book. Once is obvious as it is part of the book’s plot but the other one leaves Celice scarred.
Yet this is a book full of life. The book is about how nature takes over once death happens, thus there are sections about insects burrowing in the body and how the grass being affected by the corpses. Although the couple are found, it is stressed that the sand and water would have enveloped the bodies and made them part of the land. Ultimately life conquers death in it’s unique way.
The people vs nature theme crops up in other sections. Joseph is studying an insect which has disappeared from the beach due to overbuilding. There are glimpses of how we are destroying nature. Considering the book was written in the late 90’s it’s prescient.
Jim Crace is one of those authors who can do no wrong and he does have a lot of classics Quarantine, Harvest, Arcadia and definitely Being Dead is up there as well.
juliechristinejohnson's review against another edition
3.0
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.
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.
craigwallwork's review against another edition
5.0
Jim Crace is the author of novels such as: Being Dead, Arcadia, Six and Quarantine to name a few. I’ve not read all his work, but the one’s I have blown me away. In Being Dead, the story is set around two decomposing bodies on a beach. Told in flashbacks, the narrative unfurls into the macabre, and although nothing much happens regards to plot twists, Crace’s attention to detail and wonderfully woven syntax negates any real need for shock value. In truth, Being Dead reads like poetry, written by a person who truly understands his characters and environment.
wilte's review against another edition
2.0
Different life episodes out of the lives of a couple of elderly scientists are described. Some scenes with description of decay are sickening, so well written. But their younger years, the names of flora and fauna in the dunes and the relationship Celice and Joseph was not very captivating. I did like the entry of their daugther midway through the book, but that was not enough to save the book. Okay-ish, but I won't recommend this novel.
alexclare's review against another edition
3.0
An interesting book, which confounds the usual presentation. A lot of description and concepts which can't really be said to slow down the plot because really, there isn't one but the idea holds up through the work.
xterminal's review against another edition
3.0
Jim Crace, Being Dead (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999)
Jim Crace's novel Being Dead is, for lack of a better term, an anti-murder mystery. Specifically, it is the antithesis of Heinrich Boll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Instead of getting a book where the murderer is known from the first sentence and working out the "why"s of the murder, we get a book where the murder is nothing more than a mechanism to reflect both on the past lives of the murdered couple and the mechanisms of death by the seaside.
I said about halfway through reading this novel that I didn't know whether finding out who the killer is would make me like the novel more or dislike it; having finished the book days ago, I'm still not sure. The book ended up feeling as if there were a number of loose ends (many of which had to do with the dead couple's daughter), but this could be put down to the author mistakenly giving a little too much screen time at the end to what should have been minor details.
In any case, quite a fine little read, quick and easy. *** ½
Jim Crace's novel Being Dead is, for lack of a better term, an anti-murder mystery. Specifically, it is the antithesis of Heinrich Boll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Instead of getting a book where the murderer is known from the first sentence and working out the "why"s of the murder, we get a book where the murder is nothing more than a mechanism to reflect both on the past lives of the murdered couple and the mechanisms of death by the seaside.
I said about halfway through reading this novel that I didn't know whether finding out who the killer is would make me like the novel more or dislike it; having finished the book days ago, I'm still not sure. The book ended up feeling as if there were a number of loose ends (many of which had to do with the dead couple's daughter), but this could be put down to the author mistakenly giving a little too much screen time at the end to what should have been minor details.
In any case, quite a fine little read, quick and easy. *** ½
innatejames's review against another edition
4.0
well crafted story where the reader meets the two main characters instantly after they've been murdered and the backstory unfolds backwards from there. The tone was very Six Feet Under, so you know I liked it. And I also recommended it to my sistah in Six Foot Under fandom - you know who you are.
arirang's review against another edition
4.0
Very original take on death and nature. Crace's books (at least those that I've read) are always different, thought provoking, and, a feature I particularly love, offer a wonderful anecdote to the over-researched Wikipedia-regurgitation that bedevils many novels. Crace's epigraph to the novel is a poem from Sherwen Steven, and within a few pages he has introduced us to the mourning practice of "quivering", to Mondazy's Fish, a traditional analogy for death, and to the sprayhopper, a distant beach-dwelling marine relative of the cricket, all key to the story. All very plausible - and all completely invented by Crace (even the poet), which is as it should be in fiction.