Rating: 
Summary: COULDN'T STAND IT.
Review: UGH. I didn't think I would ever say this, but before 1/3 of
the book was done I longed for something with more refined
sensibilities. By the time 2/3 of the book was done, so was I.
It is obvious that Crace is a good writer. Unfortunately, his
topic stinks - as it were.
Rating: 
Summary: Descriptive and empathetic life and death journey..
Review: Joseph and Celice spend their last moments of life together on a remote beach, the emotions of their thirty year marriage all there with them. Some anger, some regret, some frustration, and love. Just after they make love like teenagers in the sand, they are brutally murdered, and as their bodies decompose together in death, their lives are reflected upon in this wonderful tale of an ordinary couple and their ordinary love for each other.
Mr. Crace's description of Joseph and Celice's decomposition is realistic and wonderfully disgusting in its detail, yet he brings this same absorbing prose into his descriptions of their lives together, their individual feelings, the passing of time during their marriage, and the passing of time in reflection after their death. Great book!
Rating: 
Summary: a must read for mortals
Review: Jim Crace is one of the five greatest living writers.
Rating:
Summary: I thought I wouldn't like this, BUT
Review: I did like it. Somehow the story didn't appeal to me at all, people dead on a beach, decomposing, and the plot didn't look like it could possibly move forward. So why did I pick it up ... because I have great respect for Jim Crace.The protagonists die right at the beginning of the novel (I'm not telling you anything that's not on the back of the book here), and the story moves backward in time, so you find out about them, like them, knowing what happens to them. In a way, it reminded me of the movie Memento, which has a similar plot device. Crace, however, uses it in quite a different way: he is not building suspense, rather he is developing the characters, letting us get to know them and think about their fate and the twists that preceded it. If you've never read a Jim Crace book, this might be the best to start with, but I'd also recommend The Gift of Stones as a starting point. Crace's books are very different from one another, so each one remains a unique experience. Even if you don't think this one will appeal to you, you might be as surprised as I was how long Being Dead will stay with you and keep you thinking about it.
Rating: 
Summary: When death is more interesting than life
Review: Pity the poor couple in BEING DEAD; they are far more interesting in death than they are in life. The flashbacks to their lives and that of their rebellious daughter gave me no sense of connection to the characters. They were a particularly dull couple, two academics, who met during a research project, fell in something that approximated love, and stayed together. While the husband tries to rekindle some youthful passion and the wife tries to deal with her own demons related to a horrific fire at this site, they are murdered by a passing drifter. The eventual return of their bodies to nature after life seeps out of them becomes the core of this book. Nature at its most raw and unfeeling is unleashed, yet Crace makes it seem comforting after the senseless destruction that ended the lives of his characters. Flashbacks and the daughter's eventual return to search for her parents seem unnecessary and interrupt the flow of the book, to the point where they seem to be filler, needed to turn an excellent short story into a novel.
Rating:
Summary: Intense and Intriguing
Review: This book starts with a murder, but never becomes a murder mystery. A middle-aged couple is murdered and left on an isolated beach. Mr. Crace's writing occasionally approaches blue prose, occasionally poetry. But it has an intensity all its own. A reader will never forget the haunting description of the murdered bodies' decomposition. Nor will the reader forget the individual's personalities - the little they are revealed. One can just imagine the man's excitement the morning of his death as he planned and orchestrated a romantic day with his long-time and uninterested wife. This book is unlike any other I have read as it starts with the murder then jumps between subsequent events (such as decomposition on an empty beach and then daughter's learning of the death, etc.) in chronological order and then back to what happened to the couple the day of the murder in reverse chronology. It all really comes together when the couples' estranged daughter enters the mix. I recommend this book; but do not expect light beach reading. It has an intensity that kept me rapt.
Rating:
Summary: Trite, Tedious, Trivial
Review: In Jim Crace's "Being Dead", an old man and woman are killed, naked on a beach, and the book explores their lives. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? A little dangerous, a bit experimental? More interestingly, the old couple actually did not have lives to speak of. They were boring people, so average it hurts. A defender of this book will argue it shows two average people with average lives, and meditates on the meaning of life through average eyes, reflecting on their lives with delicacy, philosophically demonstrating that even the most boring-seeming lives have meaning. Sounds deep, doesn't it? The problem is that any given two months in any Amazon.com reader's life will be more interesting than the entire lives of these two people, combined. The book goes out of its way to make these two people so plain. No one in the real world is this boring. It might sound philosophically interesting to ruminate on the life of an earthworm shriveling on the pavement under the hot sun too, but it doesn't warrant writing a 200-page book on the subject, much less making the book readable whatsoever. The idea for this book was exceptional, and truly quite wonderful. The plot summary is fantastic, and the idea seems a great springboard for a highly experimental and philosophical novel. The theme is as deep and meaningful as any ever conceived, but the book fails on its promise, by executing itself very poorly. It's one of the longest 200-page novels this reviewer has read. Worse, the writing smells amateurish. Twelve novels under his belt, and Mr Crace still writes like a college freshman, at least to this reviewer's eyes. The writing was tedious to me, the subjects trivial, the philosophical exposition trite, and the author conceited enough to think he has exposed us to grave and mysterious matters of univeral import. I wish I had a better book to recommend instead, and I'm sorry I haven't been more helpful describing this one, but the book left me with nothing to show for the experience of having read it.
Rating:
Summary: Joseph and Celice sitting in a dune K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Review: This story is about the death of Joseph and Celice, a couple in their 50s, in a sand dune at Baritone Bay. It talks about a lot of topics that all relate to the death of this couple. The author talks about the decomposition of the bodies, how coworkers react, how their daughter responds, how they are found, why they went to the place where they were killed and discusses the complex relationship the husband and wife had with each other. Crace is great. I have never read anything else by him, but would definitely read another novel he wrote. He seemed to have a lot of knowledge about several areas I didn't know much about (how bodies decompose, and perhaps he even goes in too much detail about that, as well as some knowledge about the coasts and doons). He does use some English words like centre or colour which are not bothersome, just something I noticed. There is not a whole lot of dialogue in the book, mostly description: of thoughts, of actions, of locations. By the end of the book one almost feels like if they passed the Baritone Bay location in the book they would recognize it. The rooms in the house where Joseph and Celice lived are described. Their daughter's attempt to find them is really realistic. Nothing seems extremely out of the ordinary even when you take in the whole subject of the book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: I could not get into the plot (was there one?) Too strange for me.
Rating:
Summary: Great setting, great premise, plot a bit muddled
Review: This book is billed as an interesting yarn about two corpses. It begins when a middle-aged academic couple is pointlessly murdered in a remote spot on the British coast. When I picked this up, I thought it would have a lot of scientific material about what happens to corpses; sort of a forensic fairy tale. There's quite a bit of that here, but not quite as much as I was expecting. The book rather quickly abandons its hook and investigates the lives of the couple through flashback. This takes it in a different direction than I was expecting, and robs a bit of the novelty from the book. The flashbacks tell the story of a boomer couple over a few decades. It's one of those "whatever happened to our dreams" stories that gets a bit stultifying in the middle, but is partially redeemed by the scientific bent of the couple and by the gradual revelation of the murder spot's significance in their lives. A subplot involving the couple's self-centered daughter and her GenX angst is unsatisfying. I kept wondering how the cops would go about their forensic work once the bodies were found, but not enough time is spent on that. Still, this book IS different, and I enjoyed most of it. It just showed me a few too many scenes I didn't care for, and didn't show me some of the ones I wanted to see.
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