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Summary: powerful insight to decay
Review: This is a story of a middleaged couple who decide to return to the beach of where they first made love. Unfortunately for them, it is also the day a desperate man is among the dunes, needing cash and other valuables.The couples are left undiscovered by humans for almost a week, not so by the animal and insect world. While they are decomposing amongst the dunes we learn of what their lives were like, earlier that day and earlier in their life when they just met. I found this book to be totally engrossing and touching in many ways. However, I didn't find that I 'bonded' with any character to really draw me into the book. An earlier reviewer stated that you should read this alone, and I add that you shouldn't read it over lunch either, if you are squeamish.
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Summary: JIM CRACE'S TAKE ON "BEING DEAD"
Review: At first glance, one would think this book is a mystery. Two bodies found dead in the dunes of Baritone Bay. That assumption could not be further from the truth. While there is a murder and there is a murderer, the killer will not be mentioned again once he has committed his crime. Because this book is not about their death and who did it -- it is more about death itself and all the diminutive details of the actual physical death of these two people and the ultimate decay of their bodies. Sound gruesome?? Crace makes it anything but. The subject matter -- death in its crudest form or most beautiful form (however you choose to look at it) may not be for everyone but it is a book that has provoked me to think more on this topic than I would have before. The story follows the death and life (in that order) of two married zoologists who are found partially clothed and beaten in the dunes of Baritone Bay. They are middle aged and the thing that Crace notes here, and is bothered by, is that they were robbed of a "good death". A death where you age together, get sick and die a so-called "normal" death. By being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were victims of a random act of violence. Because their death is out in the open and their bodies are not found for six days, the reader becomes privy to the eventual decomposition complete with all those insects and birds and sealife that aid in the process of returning these once lively forms to the origin of whence they came. It is not pretty but, in a sense, Crace somehow makes this beautiful. There is so much more to this story as the author jumps back and forth between their life and their death. He explains how they met, introduces us to their grown daughter Syl and tells the events that led them to the dunes that day -- the scene where they first made love many, many years ago. It is more than ironic, in light of their profession as zoologists, that they would end up in a situation where each of them would have delighted in exploring the aftereffects of their own demise. There is an incredible amount of food for thought in this book. The author explains that "at least their deaths coincided -- there can be nothing lonelier than to outlive someone you are used to loving." By returning to the dunes in an effort to recapture some of their youth, Joseph and Celice paid a heavy price for their nostalgia.
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Summary: he Unbearable Lightness of Being Dead
Review: Many other reviews have equivocated on the quality of this book or backed away from what is unique about it by warning readers of the detailed journey into the processes of death and decomposition they must face if they read it. I, too, found the principle characters unappealing, but they are sufficiently specific-yet-universal to give us a reasonably good idea of what is ending when they die. But it is beginning that interests Jim Crace. What makes this book worth reading is precisely its exploration of that distasteful journey into and beyond death. The lack of a particular statement about the characters as characters may be part of Crace's statement. He stays with them as long as he can, up to the point of death, and then remains faithfully at their sides as they decompose. Thomas Huxley declined to speculate on whether the poor stuff of which he was made would remain forever separate from the great All whence it came. Grace also declines to speculate. He stays with the bodies and what happens to them, because those at least do not remain forever separate. They part company with the person and embark on their own afterlife. Grace gives us a good enough idea of who it is that is decomposing. But he does not delve further into their characters because it is the dissolution of their individuality he showing us. "Being Dead" is not a composition, but a decomposition, in which we are invited to gaze upon their remains and see not the end of two people but the beginning of something else--something that has its own aesthetic, its own directions, its own entropy, and its own mystery. It is this meditation on that liminal moment of undoing/becoming, written by Jim Crace with exquisite and tranquil grace, that makes this a very special book. His voice is not cold and clinical; on the contrary, in his highly specific descriptions you can hear the music of the spheres. "Being Dead" is one answer to that great line of Dracula's: "To die, to be truly dead-- That would be glorious."
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Summary: The Neverending Days of Being Dead
Review: Jim Crace is an extravagantly gifted writer and Being Dead is a rare interweaving of writerly panache and common human emotion; an extravagantly beautiful book about a subject that some find horrifying. As the novel opens, two middle-aged zoologists, Jospeh and Celice, in a nostalgic mood, return to the very strip of beach where they first made love more than thirty years before. Nostalgia, though, at least in Being Dead, comes with a very high price. It gives nothing of the plot away to say that this couple are brutally and senselessly murdered on this strip of beach by a psychopathic thief. Their deaths come at the beginning of the book and are the very incident upon which all others turn. As Jospeh's and Celice's half-naked bodies lie undiscovered in the dunes for days, Crace describes the process of their corruption and dissolution and, in alternating chapters, the story of how they met, fell in love and first made love on that morning now so long ago. Later chapters introduce one further character: the couple's daughter, Syl, a lost child in more ways than one. The death of Joseph and Celice, in some ways, marks the beginning of Syl's life. The book seems to be reviving the age-old practice of "quivering" the dead in which guests stand around the dead one's home and bed, making strange noises and shaking "quiver sticks" until the entire house rattles "as if a thousand crows were pecking at the roof." As they "quivered," the guests would reminisce about the dead until, "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 hour-glass of Celice and Jospeh's life together and let the sands reverse." Quivering is supposed to release any evil spirits that may be inhabiting the body and help to speed the soul on its journey toward heaven. "Quivering," however believable it seems to be, and it does seem to be believable, is Crace's invention. Yet we believe in it, just as we believe in the characters of Joseph and Celice. Crace's prose is that good; he is a master at hypnotic word-spinning. In writing about death, Crace has managed to write a book about life and about the celebration of life as well as about chance and loss and struggle and hope and love. Jospeh and Celice were people who knew the details of the physical aspects of death and who now must suffer them in the most intimate manner possible. There is more in this book than death though, and the careful reader will not miss it. Just before dying, Joseph manages to reach out and grasp his wife's leg. This final gesture of love outlives them both, surviving rain, insects, and seagulls, and is destroyed only when the police intervene. This intervention is one of the saddest incidents in the book. Some readers will learn more than they ever wanted to about the biological ravages of being beaten to death. But even the highly detailed descriptions of the couple's decomposition take on a poetic and moving quality: "The bodies were discovered straight away. A beetle first. Claudatus maximi. A male. Then the raiding parties arrived, drawn by the summons of fresh wounds and the smell of urine: swag flies and crabs, which normally would have to make do with rat dung and the carcasses of fish for their carrion. Then a gull. No one, except the newspapers, could say that 'There was only Death amongst the dunes, that summer's afternoon.'" The problem for some readers will be that the above flora and fauna simply do not exist...outside of Crace's imagination. But it is this very selective inventiveness, these minute surprises, that weave a gossamer web of black comedy around the decay and loss of death. Much of Crace's lyrical prose is lyrical simply because it is written in iambics. After her parents are buried, Syl, sitting on the steps of the church and listening to the hymns thinks of them as being "as thin as water, and as nourishing." Crace, himself, describes the hymns in hymn meter, of course. "Love songs transcend, transport, because there's such a thing as love. But hymns and prayers have feeble tunes because there are no gods." Crace is obviously an artist; a writer's writer of the highest order. Being Dead is a novel of surrealistic beauty and that is what redeems it and sets it apart from other books that touch on similar subjects. Crace has managed to turn even the state of death into a meditation on the various cycles of life. He seems to lament the discovery of the bodies and the arrival of those who would "rescue" the mortal remains of Jospeh and Celice. "The dunes could have disposed of Joseph and Celice themselves. They didn't need help. The earth is practiced in the craft of burial. It embraces and adopts the dead. Joseph and Celice would have turned to landscape, given time. They would become nothing special. Gulls die. And so do flies and crabs. So do the seals. Even stars must decompose, disrupt and blister on the sky. Everything was born to go. The universe has learned to cope with death." One of the strongest statements Crace makes about death comes near the end of the book, nine days after the death of Joseph and Celine, when even the very grass they had been lying in has recovered and not a trace of the couple remains. In Being Dead, Crace copes with dying in a very ordinary manner that manages to become most extraordinary, and, in so doing, he shows us the beauty inherent in something as natural and commonplace as the death of the physical body...a death not one of us will manage to escape. Death may be seen by some as an ending, but in Being Dead it is the most efficient and most exquisite continuation of life imaginable.
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Summary: OK.. just
Review: I found this book to be a difficult read. It is well-written but the message is rather bleak. OK, here are some people whose bodies are decaying and becoming a part of the earth. But, every character in the book - without exception - is very selfish, judgemental. Their lives are unfulfilled and wanting. The message seems to be that life is horrible and then you die, and your body decays. Even death itself, as described by Crace, appears to have no mystical aspect, it's like: "now i'm alive... now i'm not". Don't read it if you're looking for something uplifting.
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Summary: Time goes by...
Review: This is my favourite book of the year so far - and maybe for the last five years. Despite some gruesome descriptions of flesh decomposing. This is story of murder where the who-dunnit is not even on the horizon. The story focuses on the people who are 'being' dead and Jim Crace manages to sidestep any metaphysical/religious issues by inhabiting the real world of people 'being alive'. The actions is very slow but the timeline of the story - where the story line 'explodes' backward and forward in time from the start - gives the story a feeling of unfolding - rather in the tradition of murder mysteries. Like other readers, the daughter was a mystery to me - why exactly did she become SO estranged from them? Was the only reason to ensure the bodies could remain undiscovered for so long? Anyway a lyrical, haunting story firmly routed in the 21st century which made me feel much better about death.
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Summary: What's The Point?
Review: The main task of any fiction writer is to say something about the human condition in manner that is new and/or entertaining. If this task isn't accomplished, the reader is left with just words on a page. Unfortunately, that is the case with Being Dead. I struggled in vain to find what the author was attempting to convey. Ulitmately, I found that the few potential themes that existed in the book had been explored more successfully in other works. Was the author trying to say through his graphic depictions of the corpses decomposing that life continues and flourishes even in the presence of death? The Virgin Suicides looks at this idea more effectively than Being Dead. Was Crace trying to explore why mortality rears its head at particular moments in his depiction of the times when death interacted with the lives of the main characters? Thornton Wilder did a better job exploring this theme in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Crace also drops situations and people into the book that are obviously meant to be symbols. The main characters dying on the spot where their love came to life, the fact that both of them are biologists, and their daughter's rejection of their lifestyle are clearly meant to convey some meaning. Yet, they lose their impact when this meaning is never fully developed. As a result, these points simply become literary pretensions. There is one quality that makes Being Dead worth noting. As other reviewers have stated, Crace writes in a lyrical style that can only be described as exquisite. Death has rarely been portrayed in such a vivid, yet delicate way. However, Being Dead is a novel, not a poem. Ultimately, the reader should be able to identify what point the author is trying to make. Outside of the obvious statement that death happens and life continues, it would appear that Being Dead is as pointless as the murder of its protagonists.
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Summary: Different-ish
Review: Clever writing that ultimately left me cold. Subjective reaction: I found the characters more or less equally unlikeable, and by the end wishing the ones still alive as dead as the protaganists. Place in literature: A musing on our time and the universatility of death picking up from where Donne and Hamlet left off. Conclusion: I would recommend this book only to undertakers, necrophyliciacs and others with a reflective bent. Only joking of course.
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Summary: A THIEF IN THE NIGHT - OR IN THE DUNES
Review: A well written and thought provoking novel. The author uses an interesting combination of looking back, 30 years to when the two married victims first met, looking foward from the instant of death until the victims are finally found and taken away and looking back, hourly on the last day of the victims life. The time lines are mixed well and this device really encourages the reader to think of how every day is, or very well could be our last. I found the most interesting and really troubling time line, the last day, hour by hour, from the victims sleeping, to their waking and on as they move on to their eventual death, unknowing, unsuspecting of the violent death awaiting them in the place they first made love, in the dunes. I thought the vivid and scientific detail of the decomposition of the bodies too much and except to really make you understand you are nothing but dust, unnecessary. It was a depressing novel to read [with M]any unanswered questions....
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Summary: The poetry of death
Review: This amazing book is a reading experience that will long stay with you. Although I've been known to put down murder mysteries that are too graphic, the details of the decomposition of these two zoologists (how perfect) didn't bother me because it was written so beautifully; e.g. "But the rain, the wind, the shooting stars, the maggots and the shame had not succeeded yet in blowing them away or bringing to an end their days of grace." (p. 102) If you can accept death as a inevitable and flesh as merely flesh, you don't "need a strong stomach" to read this brilliant book. Mondazy's Fish keeps silvering into our rooms when we least expect it. We the readers become voyeurs as we watch biology combine with zoology and take over the process of dust to dust. "Where there is sex there is death" Crace writes. Death catches most of us with our pants down (as it literally does to Celice and Joseph) because we sequester death away and apart. We cannot hide behind our technology to protect us. Its insignificance in the face of the ultimate realilty is laughable (a single window wiper wiping in the sun). The poetry of this book is so compelling I feel better equipped to face death without making it macabre. I can't believe I just chanced upon this writer and definitely will be reading more of his work.
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