Customer Reviews

Being Dead: A Novel

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

"Being Dead" somehow illuminates Being Alive. Jim Crace has given us a thoroughly engrossing, touching, spirit-expanding eulogy on the presence of death as a part of life. Early in this extraordinary little book he states "It's only those who glimpse the awful, endless corridor of death, too gross to contemplate, that need to lose themselves in love or art." He then proceeds to light that corridor for our examination, cell by decomposing cell, of the thing we try the hardest to avoid: death. This is not a macabre book, a sensationalist view of things morbid: with great grace and love the author invites us to explore the transcience of our corporal time on earth and in doing so he encourages the celebration of all things that life could be. If his characters appear as ordinary beings (if ordinary means two people who have explored the highs and lows of love, of procreation, of guilt, of grief, of dissappointment, of intimacy with the earth as only a zoologist can understand), then he has managed to touch us all, allowing us to identify with the inevitable confrontation with dying. This is a brilliantly conceived and written book- one of the most uniquely satisfying I have read. This is a map of our lives, our mortality, our spiritual quest untended/aborted. Food for thought and for sharing and for treasuring.

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.

"Being Dead" is a remarkable novel by a remarkable author. Jim Crace turned pulp-fictionism upside down and proved that it is possible to be disillusioned about humanity and the wonders of the human mind without becoming a mere cynic. When Bret Easton Ellis wrote "American Psycho" he created a genre, but he also indicated the direction into which this genre would commercially drift away and lose its strength. Concentrating on Patrick Bateman - the cold, cynic killer - he made the genre attractive for voyeurists. Jim Crace does something different. He tells the story of Joseph and Celine, a couple of middle-aged zoologists, who are cruelly killed on a sunny afternoon at Baritone Bay. The killer, however, disappears from the stage as soon as he has fulfilled his basic and rudimentary task of slaughtering the couple. From then on Craze remains with the dead and their daughter. His writing is the work of an analyst: carrying out a post-mortem. He finds lots of things that are ridiculous about humans, and the "wonder of life" leaves hardly any space for deifying humanity. But dignity remains. And it posts a powerful stop to the final attempt at simply equating wounds and death and the frailty of life with vulnerability.

I just finished this book this afternoon, and I have to say that it truly astonished me. It is a testament to Mr. Crace's abilities as a writer that in crystalline prose with a flawlessly controlled, impassive tone he can generate such an intense and involving humanity in the two central characters. Many novels have four times as many words, yet they cannot succeed in making a reader care one eighth as much. That he avoids even a trace of sentimentality further elevates the novel and saves it from being in any way maudlin.

Through the use of three carefully constructed and effective narratives, Mr. Crace deals with the physical reality of death, the way that death exists in a continuum with life lived, and the impact on those left behind. In the end, the reader has a stunningly complete and rich picture of the main characters and how their doubts, loves, griefs, successes, losses, and uncertainties have shaped their lives and, in combination with something as simple as a beautiful day, led them to be where they are at the novel's beginning.

Overall, a stunning piece of work, one of the most moving and thought provoking that I have read in quite some time. It offers proof of Kierkegaard's notion that life, while it must be lived forward, can only be understood in reverse.

This is the first novel by Jim Crace that I read, and I mustadmit that I was gladly surprised by it. It's not only the limpidprose and subtle humor (I was often reminded of the Milan Kundera of 'The unbearable lightness of being' and 'Immortality') that Crace uses; it's, also, the magnificent structure of the novel, which goes hand in hand with the premises established in the first few chapters and the subject matter. I have seldom enjoyed a novel as much as I enjoyed 'Being dead', and now I just hope that Crace's other novels, particularly the celebrated 'Quarantine', are just as good.

To be sure, 'Being dead' defies definition. It is, as the author says in the beginning, a 'quivering' to capture the meaning of the life of a senselessly murdered couple, both zoology professors, on a beach in a place called Baritone Bay. Thus, the novel is really a search for meanings at several levels to the many unanswerable questions of life. Death is the excuse to explain life, not the other way around.

I could not help thinking about the important role contingency, sensu Stephen J. Gould, has in the novel. Things could certainly have been different, from the time the couple is murdered to the time they met. Crace expertly goes back in his narrative, showing us that if some things--some little, some big--had not happened, the couple could still be alive in many different ways. It's as if Crace was telling us that there is only one death, but many different ways to get there. Hence, the uniqueness of everybody's life.

I thoroughly recommend this short, but great, novel. Perhaps those who haven't read Crace yet, as I haven't, would feel invited to explore the world of this gifted writer.

I have been tauting this book to my friends and family. It is not the easiest read, but if you know Crace's work, you already know this. It is literary genius, and a ronde of chapters that explores death in a way that I've never seen before- he takes a scientist's probe and contrasts it against a backdrop of the quiet, disturbing nature of mankind and a beach and its creatures, as well as simultaneously exploring the subtle nuance of relationships, both familial, marital, and

societal. It is circuitous in chapters back and forth from death to life, from wide telescope to microscope. It's utterly poetically chilling in its distance from passion and thus so totally embracing the passion of living life itself. I felt transformed by this book, never able to "view" death with the same sentimental eye again. For those seeking mystery, plot and excitement, this is not your novel. This is for lovers of language and idea, of literature and internal landscaping. It is stunning work.

Jim Crace in Being Dead again succeeds in writing a compeling, philosophical novel. He does so in an amazing manner - creating a folk-custom of quivering, an all night vigil of mourning and remembrance, which is juxtaposed against a ultra-scientific world view. Similarly human emotion is juxtaposed against natural inevitibility.

Chapters alternate between the dead of the title - a couple, both middle-aged zoologists - and the "quivering" - recounting their life together from their original meeting until their death. The chapters of "being dead" are detailed, scientific descriptions of the process of flesh decaying. Yet despite the objectivity, through use of landscape and language, Crace succeeds in making the story move foreward in these chapters.

The "quivering" chapters provide the biography of the couple, primarily through the wife's experience. The sense of what draws the couple together and what drives them apart is equisite - a realistic view of a long marriage.

As the couple's disappearance is noted and their estranged daughter Syl accepts their death, the reader is lead to see in her distinct resemblances to her mother. This leaves the reader, at the end, with a sense of the circularity of nature.

Sprinkled through the book are paragraphs of a philosophical nature. I personally disagree with the proffered views but find them absolutely right for the characters to which they are attached (even when the character is the narrator). As such, I see this as an ideal book for a "book club" discussion, although I can scarcely envision a book club which consider reading such a difficult topic.

The title alone intrigued me. The first page hooked me. Crace has a unique writing style that is both clinical and eloquent. If you have a morbid sense of humor (like me), then you will enjoy the chapter where Syl (the daughter of Joseph and Celice) goes to the morgue to find her missing parents.
Some of you might be grossed out by the descriptions of the bodies and how they decompose. This is where Crace gets clinical. He describes the decomposition process for what it is--nature.

Fortunately, this isn't what Being Dead is all about. This book, I found, is about the lives of Joseph and Celice before they were killed. They fell in love, got married, had a daughter, and led successful careers. But there was an underlying tension between the couple that I couldn't quite grasp until I was near the end of the story. I won't spoil it for you. Death is entwined in this story, as in every other chapter or so, Crace depicts their bodies lying in the dunes, Joseph's hand touching Celice's leg. That haunted me.
I give this book a high recommendation for its originality and multi-faceted meaning.

From a deceptively simple plot line comes this deep and disturbing work. The story is simple. Two people are murdered and we go back and look at their lives. But the author tells four stories simultaneously, one line being the day the two people die, the three others a couple of days 30 years ago, the next the period between the death and the discovery, and finally the story of Syl, the daughter, during this same period between the death and the discovery.

I agree wholeheartedly with the reviewer who found this last story line discordant . We know little about Syl and nothing about her relationship with her parents other than she felt they disapproved of her. Given what we see her do---especially her callous behavior toward the "driver" she picks up to chauffeur her around as she discovers what has happened to her parents---any rational person might disapprove of her as well. The death of her parents is a rebirth for Syl--but we don't know enough for this to seem really meaningful.

This book is densely and beautifully written. I would love to SEE Baritone Bay after reading of the wind, the grass, the dunes, the sand. And you will never allow yourself to be fooled by what you see at the undertaker after reading this. (A great case for instant cremation!) Not for the fainthearted, but a great book.

I have never read anything like Being Dead: haunting, grotesque, sadly beautiful and unforgettable. The novel is not a murder mystery as it attempts to disguise many readers. It is rather an inventive, daring poetic meditation of a middle-aged couple's re-discovery of love. Nostalgia had ineluctably brought them back to Baritone Bay where they had first plunged into intimacy some thirty years ago. But Joseph and Celice had paid too heavy a price for their nostalgia: their lives.

The beginning is the end in Being Dead. The couple, hand in hand, and whose nakedness had subjected them to indignity, terminated their lives in each other's flesh in a manner marked by a placid love that only time can cultivate. The narration, like the love of Joseph and Celice, is utterly unsentimental and business-like, something that is preserved by habit and memory, not necessarily with flaming passion. The dreamy writing accentuates the serene mood of the novel while it de-emphasizes the dramatic deaths and the reckless physical aftermath. The tranquility of the crime scene, the intrepidness with which the lissom grass perked back up after removal of the corpses, the gradual disappearance of rectangle of time-paled grass, the absorption of blood into the soil and the equanimity of their daughter Syl downplay the horrible death but at the same time usurp the promptings of readers' hearts.

Being Dead transcends other contemporary works on the subject of death with its meditative, poetic monologue that dwells on life, love, and death. It is a literary treatise on an event, and the event is the death of a renowned zoologist and his wife in the midst of sand dunes at a remote beach. Being Dead is a literary event made possible by the author's naked daring.

2004 (26) © MY