Rating: 
Summary: IF I HAD THE CHOICE...
Review: if given the choice between reading this book again or facing a demise similar to the main characters, i would have a difficult decision to make. i felt as if i was on life support as i dragged my flagging interest to the finish line of this story. it wasn't much of a story at that. there was no character development for the first 100 pages and mr. crace seemed to relish his ability to discuss every contusion and gash inflicted upon the victims (if i wanted anatomy i would have ordered a gray's from amazon). i have no doubt that mr. crace can write, it's just that he establishes no balance when attempting to allow the reader to form a bond with his characters. there are too many details about what is not important and not enough information that could deliver a story. save your cash and your time because there are bigger and better opportunities on this site.
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Summary: life ends in death
Review: Every multi-celled creature ends in death. Unless you know someone who has been murdered, and layed undiscovered, and rotting, you don't know what happens after death. If you read this book, you will. You will discover life and death, at its most basic, primitive source. This book crosses the lines of what most of us want to know. The private, intimate world of a couple murdered on the sand dunes, the decomposition of their bodies. The daughter what hates her parents, and comes to love them in death. I am torn between loving and hating this book. If you don't have a strong stomach, or can not dissassociate, don't read it. If you can, it is compelling, and worth the journey.
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Summary: Death on Earth(?)
Review: There's an odd stillness to this book -- the stillness of bodies decaying on beach? It's a fascinating experiment where what happens to the main characters' bodies after death is often more intriguing than what happens to them while alive. Crace is deft at painting the psyches of the long-married couple, but less sure and original when he moves their rebellious daughter to the center of his canvas. Her tale seems rote, tacked on, irritating. John Crowley has pointed out in his NY Times review that many of the curious but convincing historical and zoological details -- for example, the 'quivering' tradition, and the 'sprayhoppers' to whom the husband has devoted his scientific career -- seem to have been made up out of whole cloth by Crace. (Go ahead, try to find 'sprayhoppers' in any online or print resource.) This might have subtly helped add to the rather otherwordly charm of this book.
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Summary: simple lives and deaths, complex feelings
Review: Being Dead is a very unusual novel. On the surface it tells of the senseless death of two academics/scientests (..a married couple), then it proceeds backwards to explain the lives of this couple and their daughter. But there is really nothing exceptional about any them, and so one can easily say Being Dead is a book which describes the deaths of some boring people. Big deal. Ah, but that would be an incorrect assessment. Jim Crace's story of brutal deaths of uneventful lives really brings across the sense of how short life is, and how it can be snuffed out at a moment. It leaves you with a cold sense of loss, the same feeling one experiences with the death of a loved one. Being Dead is a well-written, absorbing novel. Recommended.
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Summary: The price of nostalgia
Review: They pay a heavy price for their nostalgia, Jospeh and Celice who, after 30 years, return to the place where they first made love in order to retain something of the earlier magic at a time where life - i.e. biology - starts to let them down. Even if they wind up dead on the first page they remain the main characters of this impressive novel. What follows is the story of how their earlier decisions in life actually play a pivotal part in their ending up dead on a beach with no one but nature there to bury them. Crace is a master at conveying the human yearning for understanding of the entropy of life. But he is also a vivid painter of life after death. We learn that even the decomposing bodies are part of life, that "being dead" is literally a form of being and that we tend to forget that change is the only constant. But this is not just a philosophically challenging book, it is inventively plotted too. Do read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Strangely Beautiful & Absorbing
Review: This strange and absorbing novel explores death both as an inevitable yet beautiful part of the natural world and as a starting point for visiting the lives that preceded it, in both cases moving forward from death in ways that make the dead seem alive. In the end, it is not the deaths of the main characters which will leave you with a feeling of sadness, but rather it is Crace's portraits of people living sad & selfish lives - acting as if they will live forever - which will weigh heavy on your heart.
Rating: 
Summary: Scientific-poetical, intellectually challenging
Review: The paradox of the title captures well what Crace is courageously and creatively aiming at - a thorough approach at a basic as well as mysterious aspect of everyone's life, death. And he does so from a scientific-poetic viewpoint, focussing on the physical and quite deliberately avoiding the metaphysical. There is no hint of the possibility of an afterlife other than what happens in the physical world and in the memory of other people. Yet there is an additional dimension brought in by the element of love, and Crace's work is a 21st century commentary on the age old topic of eros and thanatos. I did not find this book as gripping as "Quarantine" though. To me the minute description of the decaying bodies was a bit too much at times, and I had the feeling that all characters - especially Celice and Joseph - were viewed as scientifically as insects under a microscope, putting too much distance between reader and "story" which made the book an intellectual challenge but not a joy to read.
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Summary: Sweet, sweet death
Review: When one thinks of romance, decomposing next to your loved one doesn't usually come to mind. Jim Crace is no usual author, though, and if "Being Dead" is any indication, to him a loving decomposition is worth more than all the candlelight dinners money can buy. This book proves that point, at least to those who can get through its squeamish details of imploding faces, disappearing flesh and flies and maggots hovering in bloody crevices. Crace makes these details much, much sweeter than anyone could possibly imagine, and yet every last detail screams of the devotion of these two zoologists being returned to the earth they studied . A crackling reverse time-line propels the story, and if it wasn't for the hasty inclusion of the decomposing couple's daughter, "Being Dead" would have deserved five stars.
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Summary: Thanatopsis
Review: A haunting, lyrical work about the murder of a perfectly ordinary couple killed on the beach as they attempt to make love to commemorate the 30th anniversary of their first coupling. It is at once a brutally clincal description of the corruption of unembalmed flesh as well as a celebration of two lives as Crace mimics the old English tradition of "shaking"--literally shaking the bed with the deceased in it through the night to drive out evil spirits even as the life of the person (or, in this case, two people) is told backwards.....from the end to the beginning. It is not a book soon forgotten.
Rating:
Summary: Wonder-full and strangely absorbing
Review: This is an oddly sensual book about death and relationship. Oddly sensual, but sweetly so despite the nature of the deaths. Time is not a factor here, as the Joseph's and Celice's bodies lay in the sand dunes for six days, his dead hand touching her dead ankle, and we are taken back and forth between their lives and their decays. This is a beautiful and thoughtful book. We never meet the murderer, but everywhere is the protagonist--the natural world. "It is of course, a pity that the police dogs ever caught the scent of human carrion and led their poking masters to the dunes to clear away the corpses for 'proper burial', so that the dead could be less splendid in the grave. The dunes could have disposed of Joseph and Celice themselves. They didn't need help. The earth is practised in the craft of burial. It gathers round. It embraces and adopts the dead. Joseph and Celice would have turned to landscape, given time. Their bodies would have been just something extra dead in a landscape already sculpted out of death. 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." This is a wonderful book. I have not read anything like it.
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