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Being Dead: A Novelby Jim Crace
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Book DescriptionPicador, 2001-03-21. Paperback. Very Good/No Jacket. Trade paperback, very light wear to cover else very good with no rips, tears or marks of any kind. Email for photo. Book summaryIn Crace's typically strange and lyrical novel, the lives of a middle-aged married couple, murdered while making love al fresco, are examined in a narrative that moves backward in time, while simultaneously the reaction of their only daughter is explored. A New York Times "Editors' Choice" for one of the best books of 2000.Media Reviews"The naked daring of Crace's subject matter seems to have produced prose more majestic and assured than in any of his previous novels....This story's terse, drumming, iambic utterances often come close to verse, and its wit matches the best work of any of Crace's contemporaries....These lives at first appear too unremarkable to claim our attention, and the physical facts of their end too repulsive to allow us to care, yet we are intensely involved in the drama. We understand this precisely because our rising interest in Joseph and Celice's lives keeps pace with the increasingly ghastly details of bodily death. Our caring, as Crace makes clear, is a tribute to life itself." -- Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "Restrain a natural impulse to dismiss this [novel] as mystic pantheistics addled with goriness. Though not widely known in the United States, Mr. Crace is one of Britain's most remarkable writers, and has been for the past couple of decades. He is unique, as well. Two suspectly inflated adjectives, but what they denote in tandem is that Mr. Crace is a novelist able to precipitate large and cloudy themes into slashes of a particular, revivifying rain....[Crace] is an insidious storyteller....If the characters in Crace novels are ostensibly on high-flown literary missions..., their flights swoop so near ground level, in fact, that they whip up gravel, grass, gestures of startlement, and the smoke of human cooking fires." -- Richard Eder, New York Times "It's not clear to me why Jim Crace isn't world famous. Few novels are as unsparing as this one in presenting the ephemerality of love given the implacability of death, and few are as moving in depicting the undiminished achievement love nevertheless represents." -- Jim Shepard, New York Times Book Review "Jim Crace is a brilliantly inventive storyteller who writes curiously rhythmic, almost poetic prose. In BEING DEAD, he creates with perfect control an interlocking two-way narrative: the last day on earth of a middle-aged couple, from their brutal murder back to the dreams they were dreaming that morning, and their difficult daughter's grief and liberation. It sounds grim, and it is, but it's also exhilarating and very moving." -- Kitty Burns Florey, Hartford Courant First LineFor old times' sake, the doctors of zoology had driven out of town that Tuesday afternoon to make a final visit to the singing salt dunes at Baritone Bay. And to lay a ghost. They never made it back alive. They almost never made it back at all. Publisher NotesOn Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon, Joseph and Celice, married for almost thirty years, lie murdered in the dunes. The shocking particulars of their passing make up the arc of this courageous and haunting novel. The story of life, mortality and love, Being Dead confirms Jim Crace's place as one of our most talented, compassionate and intellectually provocative writers. Other Recommended Books
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