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Being Dead

by Jim Crace

ISBN: 0312275420
ISBN-13: 9780312275426
Format: Paperback

Summary

In 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.

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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

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Picador USA
Published date: 2001
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 5.25 x 8 inches
Weight: 0.45 pounds
Pages: 195

Publisher's Notes

On 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 Editions

Hardcover - Farrar Straus & Giroux (2000) - from $1.00
Paperback - St Martins Pr (2001) - from $1.90

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Being Dead: A Novel

Jim Crace

Picador. Used - Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! (more information)

Offered by Better World Books (United States)

Price: $1.00