Amazon.co.uk Review

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Zoologists Joseph and Celice returned to the site of their first lovemaking to rekindle the flame thirty years into their marriage, only to be battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their bodies lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand-crabs, flies and gulls, and yet there is something touching about this scene--it's in the way that Joseph's hand curves lightly around Celice's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead but not departed yet."

Being Dead is more about the leavings of death than it is about the state of death itself. Running crazy fate lines between the past and present of Joseph and Celice, Crace returns again and again to those mutilated bodies in the dunes with updates on the colour of their decaying skin, the seeping fluids and the creatures feeding off them. This is not a murder book-- the killer is perhaps the least important character. But Crace gives some wonderful glances at death- professionals, in particular a drugged-up lascivious mortuary clerk; "He'd find his own name on the list one day...Enfin, a name to make his heart stand still. Sincere at last."

Jim Crace is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress and Quarantine, which won the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize and IMPAC Literary Prize. Crace has won numerous other awards, including the EM Forster Award and the Guardian Fiction Award. -- Anna Davis --

Synopsis
The author ponders the redemptive power of secular love in this novel. Their bodies had expired, but anyone looking at them could see that Joseph and Celice were still devoted, the couple seemed to have achieved a peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. They were still man and wife, quietly resting, dead but not yet departed

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Picked up for my mother. I will leave it on her bed. You may get lucky and she may even journal it!

RELEASE NOTES:

At the Mini BC meeting In Darwin Can't Wait to meet Y'all

picked up with all the vampire books at the meet-up. it was great to meet you both.

I couldn't get into this. Didn't finish it.

Hopefully the next reader will be more appreciative.

Off to the winner of the Hapy Smile Day RABCK.

Received as a result of the Happy Smile Day RABCK Sweepstake - aren't I the lucky one then! :D And . . . it arrived with a companion, so I'm doubly blessed.
Thanks for your generosity amberC.

Still TBR, but now reserved for VeganMedusa as a wishlist tag.

Sure took me a while to get to this one, but finally made it. Love the wishlist tags for getting me to raid the lower stacks!

"Being Dead" is certainly a very different sort of book. Well written, original, and has a haunting quality to it, especially towards the end. Can't say I enjoyed it as such, but definitely appreciated it.

Now off on a trip to New Zealand.

Posted off to VeganMedusa as a wishlist tag. Happy reading!

Thanks, crimson-tide. Very appropriate to receive this book just as I was flopped like a fish out of water, trying to survive our hottest December day in over 50 years. My husband handed me the parcel, and I saw Being Dead, and thought, "Well, yes I nearly am!"

Quite an odd book, but compelling. Now on its way, finally, to catsalive.

Thanks for this & "My Sister...", Vegan Medusa.

A strange & beautiful discussion of corporeal decomposition as a murdered couple lie undiscovered on a beach for six days, quite an awe-inspiring devolution, if not an entirely comfortable experience. Perhaps Celice & Joseph, zoologists both, would, indeed, be fascinated by the processes of returning a human to its component parts, but maybe not their own components. As we are born we begin to die - it is a true if unpleasant fact. The language made it quite easy to read, but I wasn't so interested in the rest of the story - and where is the murderer?

Travelling companion to another book.