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Being Dead: A Novel, by Jim Crace
Fee Download Being Dead: A Novel, by Jim Crace
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Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand crabs, flies, and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."
"Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell―just look at them―that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."
From that moment forward, Being Dead becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death.
- Sales Rank: #554819 in Books
- Published on: 2001-03-21
- Released on: 2001-03-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .48" w x 5.50" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Amazon.com Review
Penzler Pick, June 2000: It begins with a murder. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. They are reliving their first amorous encounter in the sand dunes when they are set upon by the murderer who beats them to death with a rock and steals their watches, their jewelry, and even their meager lunch. From that moment forward, this remarkably written book by Jim Crace becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. Eventually we learn about their first meeting, and that this is not the first time tragedy has struck them in this idyllic setting.
In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death. Celice and Joseph would have been delighted with the description: she was a zoologist and he was an oceanographer, and they spent their lives with their eyes to the microscope, observing the phenomena of life and death. Some readers might find this gruesome, but the facts of death are told in such glorious prose that these descriptions in no way detract from the enjoyment of the book.
After her parents do not return home, their daughter, Syl, must search the morgues and follow up John and Jane Doe reports until she is finally asked to make an identification of the remains in the dunes. We then discover that the reader has had a more intimate relationship with them in death than Syl ever had with them in life. This small gem of a book, not really a mystery in the usual sense, will stay with you long after you finish. --Otto Penzler
From Publishers Weekly
Crace is a brilliant British writer whose novels are always varied in historical setting, voice, theme and writing style, and are surprising in content. Those very factors may have contributed to his failure to establish a literary identity and to attain his deserved audience here. This latest, sixth effort (after Quarantine), a stunning look at two people at the moment of their deaths, is the riskiest of his works, the most mesmerizing and the most deeply felt. Joseph and Celice, middle-aged doctors of zoology married to each other for almost 30 years, revisit the seaside where they first met and made love "in the singing salt dunes of Baritone Bay." They are surprised on the dunes, murdered and robbed, and their bodies lie undiscovered for days. In alternating chapters of chronological counterpoint, Crace traces their last day, working backwards from the moment of their murders to their awakening that morning, innocent of what is to come. At the same time, he recreates the day they were introduced, in the 1970s, when they were researching their doctoral dissertations. By the time these chronological vignettes converge, Crace has created two distinctive personalities who sustain a marriage and careers and parent a rebellious, nihilistic daughter, Syl. His finesse in drawing character is matched by the depth of his knowledge and imagination, and the honesty of his bleak vision. Some readers may be horrified by the brutal imagery ("Her scalp hung open like a fish's mouth. The white roots at her crown were stoplight red") or the matter-of-fact details of the body's putrefaction: the first predators "in the wet and ragged centres of their wounds" are a beetle, swag flies, crabs and a gull, and their activities in each corpse are described with detached scientific accuracy. The profession of the deceased, of course, adds irony to the situation. Celice taught that the natural sciences are the study of violence and death, while Joseph maintained that "humankind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology." In juxtaposing the remorselessness of nature against the hopes, desires and conflicted emotions of individuals, Crace gracefully integrates the facts and myths about the end of human life, and its transcendence (in Syl's epiphanic vision), into a narrative of dazzling virtuosity. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
While not well known in this country, Crace (Quarantine) is established in Britain, where this naturalistic meditation on life and death was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Set contemporaneously in an unspecified country, it concerns Joseph and Celice, middle-aged zoologists murdered while on a nostalgic visit to the place they first met. Crace alternates between detailing the brutal circumstances of their deaths and reconstructing the quiet regularity of their everyday lives. He dwells on the process of their physical decomposition among the seaside dunes in a tone that is at once coolly scientific and highly poetic. A side plot concerns the effect the couple's disappearance and death have on Syl, their estranged adult daughter. This is undeniably a tour de force, but Crace's unrelenting emphasis on "rot and putrefaction" (to quote the novel's flip epigraph) may put off some readers. For larger libraries.
---Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A view of death that is natural and realistic
By C. Collins
This is certainly a well written, calm, thoughtful, dispassionate book. I found several aspects of the book thought provoking:
First, Jim Crace spends much more time and effort in this book viewing the interiors of the two female characters, Celice and her daughter Syl. In some ways the mother and daughter were much alike and Crace focuses most of his attention on Celice when she is a young biology graduate student, which is around the age of Syl when her two parents are murdered. He seems fascinated withh the ways women manipulate and seduce men. He also is very conscioius of the way men seduce women, as exemplified by Joseph's use of singing to seduce Celice as well as the mortuary assistant and the taxi drivers attempts to seduce Syl.
Second, Crace does not take us on a wild romp to bring justice to the faceless man that kills Joseph and Celice in the dunes by the bay. He takes a more dispassionate perspective of balance in nature rather than justice in human social networks. The murderer kills them and drives off in their car. We really don't hear from him again. But we do get a full description of the way their bodies decompose and begin the natural process of returning to the earth.
Third, whenever there is sex in the book, there is death. Joseph and Celice first make love while a fellow graduate student burns to death in the ocean cabin. Syl and Geo the taxi driver make love while she awaits news of her parent's dissappearance. Joseph and Celice try to make love in the dunes many years later and meet the murderer. Where there is death, there is new life is the mirror image of where there is new life, there begins death. In many ways this could be said to be one of the main themes of novel.
Fourth, the writing style is masterful with events from past and present very carfully woven together until they converge.
The book is short and can easily be finished in a couple of nights of reading before bed. Even though the subject is death, you will not have disturbed slumber, I promise you.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Profound and touching
By M. J. Smith
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.
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
A gleamingly honest and original vantage of life and death
By Grady Harp
"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.
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