Rating: 
Summary: Scientifically morbid, fascinating
Review: This is a daring book. As a writer myself, I admire what the author is doing - in terms of time, style, and content. Some of his statements of his characters forced me to stop and think about how one's death is, at one and the same time, the definer of one's life and yet reduces us back into the grasses. He doesn't really intend for you to like, dislike, or empathize with the characters but rather with the moment of passing tenderness, the romantic impulse, because without death, his female protagonist proclaims, there would be no love, no art.
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Summary: You can never go home again
Review: I guess it was Thomas Wolfe who said you can never go home again. But that was what Joseph was trying to do when he took Celice to the beach that faithful day. He was trying to recreate a time and a moment that had passed and they both paid the ultimate price. And perhaps that is the message of the book. The world around them continued, with the flies and the gulls and the insects, continued, it did not stop, even their daughter did not stop - maybe just slowed down for a brief moment. In our memories we want to freeze a moment in time and have the ability to return to it. But that moment is gone and can never be exist again. The past lives in our hearts and we can share that with someone in a way but it can never happen again. BEING DEAD is a short novel that can be read in a couple of evening. It has a message and is well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Ashes to Ashes
Review: Death is not proud for Joseph and Celice, a middle aged couple off for an afternoon passion and remembrance in the sand dunes of their youth. For them, death is a slimy process, a story unto itself, narrated in brutally clinical detail by Jim Crace in his startling exploration of man's relationship with fate and nature. Relaxing in undignified nakedness, Joseph and Celice are set upon by a stranger with a brick, their heads squashed into pulp, their limbs intertwined in a final demonstration of devotion. The novel circles around this central event, always returning to the repulsive but thoroughly involving process of human decay. We learn that Joseph and Celice are zoologists, an unattractive, harmless, innocuous couple who have ridden through life with few expectations and a strong sense of industry. If they have a passion, it is for their shared interest in the workings of nature. Joseph and Celice have some colleagues, few friends, and a daughter dealing with the bitter fruit of a disappointed youth. For her unhappiness, she blames her parents. But for the random and violent nature of their deaths, Joseph and Celice would have passed through time into obsolescence and natural mortality with barely a whimper. But death is their story. Through it, they demonstrate real truths about the human condition, its relationship with nature and its cycles, and how endings inspire beginnings. In its way, the book reassures us of the beauty of process, and how each stage and level of life feeds into the others. In a way Jim and Celice's ending makes perfect sense for them. In death they become a metphor for all the possibilities and tragedies of life. One warning: this book is filled with descriptions of bodily rot, decay and consumption. Oddly, though, this provides a vehicle for Crace's abundant talent for creating magic through words. The author renders disgusting things beautiful, describing death as have the smell of "burnt marmalade," speaking of how "thanks to the ruptured chemistry of her cortex, (Celice) hurtled to the stars". In his rendering of the entire experience, Crace creates chinks in the armor of the human dread of death, providing enlightenment and reassurance in one brief and intense book.
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I started BEING DEAD with great excitement and admiration, and read along full of interest--because of the characters, who were, at first, so fully and deeply drawn. The bugs and beetles were neither upsetting nor very interesting--is everyone really surprised and troubled to hear that beetles eat dead bodies? What did upset me was the tiresome lack of depth of the main characters after the first half of the book. The author seemed to have lost contact with them after the wonderful scenes of the first day and night in the study house, so that the fire and its ramifications seemed generic and shallow. Crace began deep in Joseph and Celice's minds and hearts, but he seemed to know them less well with every passing chapter, until he switched to the dim perspective of their daughter and left the reader completely at a loss. Meanwhile the writing became more and more sentimental and weighted with lofty sounding but empty phrases. The idea of a "quivering" that people say the structure is based on, is put forth by Crace as a reconstruction of the lives of the dead, going back in time toward their births--but he does not do that here--the beautiful, spare ideas and complex characters he begins with, are abandoned rather than developed. The terribly poignant moment when Syl finds her baby teeth saved in a jar was all the sadder because the author seems to have shared Syl's lack of understanding of her parents--his characters. I felt sorrier for them on that count than for their being eaten by beetles.
Rating:
Summary: Nabs your attention
Review: Irregardless of whether you agree with Jim Crace's view on the afterlife, you will be hooked by his writing style. True, the book is unique in that Crace gets horrifically graphic about the two decomposing bodies lying there amongst the grass. But what keeps you engrossed is not merely morbid fascination. It is the way in which he writes about this middle-aged "unattractive" couple, this man and this woman that are neither denizens of the beautiful class, nor the dregs of the earth. It is amazing that he makes you care so deeply about the death of two seeingly unremarkable, almost unlikeable people...definitely makes me want to check out his other books.
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Summary: Being Alive
Review: Joseph and Celice are dead, as we learn at the start of Jim Crace's eloquent and rousing novel, Being Dead. Ordinarily a book that opens with a pair of corpses would take the form of a whodunit, slowly unraveling the mystery surrounding the deaths (or more likely, murders). Crace, however, is not your ordinary novelist. As he tells in the first couple of chapters, people used to celebrate the lives of the dead rather than mourn their deaths. Loved ones would reconstruct the pasts until it seemed as though the dead had their whole lives ahead of them. Following this method, Crace moves back and forth through time, telling us alternately about Joseph and Celice's early history together as well as of their deaths. The reconstruction of their first encounter and blossoming relationship is heartwarming and hauntingly real, a detached portrait of an imperfect love. The alternate chapters describing the twilight of these two lives is very scientific and at times unsettling. For the most part these chapters move backwards in time, first describing the decaying bodies (in intimate detail) and eventually moving backwards through Joseph and Celice's last day, slowly bringing us into their beds before they awake for the last time. This book is no meandering accident; Crace appears to have a purpose. He is clearly not one to believe in religion or an afterlife, and so presents life as it is: organic, brief, valuable. This may be a difficult pill to swallow for some, but Crace's beautiful language is like a cool drink of water to wash it all down. It is life that counts, he tells us. So do what you can with it: live, love, and definitely read this book.
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Summary: Thanks to a Dear Friend!
Review: My friend Grady was right when he said in his review that this story "Being Dead" somehow illuminates "Being Alive." It's because of his wonderful review & recommendation that I didn't miss this brilliant & well-written book from an author I had not previously known or read. It's the story of Joseph & Celice, two doctors of zoology, who have been murdered while enjoying a beautiful day of remembrance on the dunes at Baritone Bay. This senseless & horrific murder ended a wonderful life for these two partners of almost 30 years. The visual images of their dead and gradual decay & decomposing bodies was very hard for me to take. The author has left no details out and seems to draw these horrible images for us to make his point, and perhaps to make us face our own reality. It's all for a good reason. He wants us to know the body may die but the spirit of love lives on. So be forewarned if you get a little weak at the thought of the details of dead. This is a wonderful story that I will always remember. A book you can't forget. It makes you think about the value of life and what is really important. We are only here for a short period of time, and we should cherish and make the most of it, every day, every moment. Thanks, Grady, for this gift, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves life!!!
Rating:
Summary: Can the Victims Win?
Review: Being Dead takes us through the life and death of two innocent people who were murdered. For those who think death does not conquer us in the end, the book is too morbid. This book is a good attempt at making victims win somehow, and a constant reminder that each one of us must eventually face our time to translate to the other side.
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Summary: Meaning with a little m
Review: Jim Crace's superb novel "Being Dead" is about one the primary intellectual challenges of our time. How does one find meaning in the absence of faith in religion or the supernatural? Almost overbearingly, Crace narrows the field of opportunity. There is no afterlife, no spirit, nothing that lingers more than the few minutes after the death which he clinically documents cell by cell. Almost any hope in legacy is extinguished: bugs and crabs eat the bodies laying near the shore; rain washes away the fluid remnants; police unceremoniously remove the couple from their loving final position and cart them off in non-descript coffins; and wind, waves and foliage smooth over the dunes leaving no trace of their final resting place. Even the shore itself is soon to be replaced with development. The only exception is the brief touching of the couple's daughter when she sees them lying together. Still, meaning remains, albeit a less ambitious kind, brought to life in a quivering, a reminiscing of certain parts of the couples lives. It is as if we need to strip away all the false hopes for meaning before the remaining core can seem significant. There is an odd freedom found by the daughter in finding the worst that can happen, and seeing past it. Something, perhaps far less grandiose, remains.
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Summary: Dead is Dead; Life is what Matters
Review: The plot of this book is no secret, so don't think I'm giving anything away here. Celice and Joseph are married scientists/educators who are murdered on the English oceanside during a romantic interlude at the same place where they had first made love years ago. But don't mistake Being Dead for a murder mystery. Instead, Crace would rather lead us to believe that it's a scientic look at death much like Celice and Joseph would look at death. Lurking deeper in the story though, is a look at life, especially Joseph and Celice's. Masterfully written and told in time-twisting progression, we learn that the saddest thing about Joseph and Celice isn't the finality of their deaths, but rather the lovelessness of their lives together. Without spoiling the story, it needs to be said that this book will challenge the beliefs of many readers and could possibly turn some of the more narrow-minded off. This is unfortunate for those readers not only because the story requires a scientific premise, but because it is so well presented. Queasy readers may also turn away from some more graphic passages. Those cautions revealed, Being Dead is one of the best pieces of literature I have read recently, comparable in style, originality and thoughtfulness with Blindness by Jose Saramago and Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. It hurt me to watch Joseph and Celice's sad lives become exposed, which I think was Crace's intention. I think it also made me think about my own life and the importance of being human and connected with others. Life is precious, and no matter what you might believe about the afterlife, being dead is at the very least the opposite of this life. Live and love are for the living and should be embraced like no other gift we're ever given.
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