Being Dead: A Novel

by Jim Crace

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312275420
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Picador
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Great Job

I was initially a bit miffed with this company because they sent me an order confirmation and then never sent any other emails to confirm issues like shipment, but once I got into contact with them they were very polite and gracious. I have to say though, their initial email didn't provide their contact email address and I had to look it up separately by going to their website. Turns out they sent the book out via regular mail to keep the shipping price down, with the drawback that they couldn't provide any tracking information. The book did arrive within the estimated time period though, and it was in pristine condition. Initially a bit frustrating, but I'll be generous and say it wasn't really their fault.

Being Dead

This novel is really excellent . . . even though it has a rather morbid title, it is very beautifully written and a really interesting story. I actually read this book a few years ago and just recently I was able to convince my husband that he would like the book and really needed to consider reading this book; so I ordered it through "used books" on amamzon and it was great - very reasonable and fast shipping, too. And to make things even better, my husband really DID like the book ! ! ! !

A gleamingly honest and original vantage of life and death

"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.

Life through death

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.

English Anti-Psycho

"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.