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Being Dead

3.69 of 5 stars 3.69 · rating details · 2,245 ratings · 300 reviews

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....more

Paperback, 196 pages

Published 1999 by Picador USA

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Thanatopsis: Death, Dying, and Mortality

65th out of 175 books — 73 voters

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58th out of 146 books — 41 voters

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Nov 23, 2009 Tyler rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Fans of Entropy

Recommended to Tyler by: National Book Critics Circle Award

Craft and good writing make this book a hit with many readers. Innovative form and thinking prose set the right words in the right places. The story brings readers an introspective reflection upon death, seen through the lens of a married couple whom it overtakes.

The form of the story weaves along three tracks: One moves the couple back in time from the occasion of their deaths; the next parallels that with a forward-moving tale of their early lives; and the final track contrasts with the first...more Craft and good writing make this book a hit with many readers. Innovative form and thinking prose set the right words in the right places. The story brings readers an introspective reflection upon death, seen through the lens of a married couple whom it overtakes.

The form of the story weaves along three tracks: One moves the couple back in time from the occasion of their deaths; the next parallels that with a forward-moving tale of their early lives; and the final track contrasts with the first two the physical disposition of their bodies, and with other impersonal events unfolding in the days after their deaths, juxtaposing untended corpses with their living antecedents. So far so good. But as the actual story unfolded, I started having problems.

Now the theme of doomed flesh has been a recent innovation, but only in visual media. I first noticed it in nature programs that show what happens after the kill. In one, about the Amazon, my eyes popped as I saw piranhas strip some hapless mammal to its bones in forty seconds flat. In another, about Africa, my jaw dropped as the camera lingered upon insects I have never even heard of, showing them devouring a dying giraffe in a similar instant, almost before the animal’s head hit the ground.

Demise of the flesh is also the subject of the recent documentary about that body farm in Tennessee where the decomposition of human cadavers is studied – you know, the one broadcasting last year on an almost endless loop so you couldn’t avoid it no matter what. American crime serials like CSI now stress close-ups of drying or decaying body parts, meaty human bone fragments, blood spatter and what have you.

Film gave us Eyes Wide Shut, in which Tom Cruise leans in as if to kiss the dead streetwalker in the morgue. I used to imagine what would happen at that garish moment if Tom had slid out his warm, wet tongue to glide it along her chilled, bluish-green skin. Needless to say, the theaters would have been packed to the girders. As it stands, the movie was a total cop-out, not just for that but for the pathetically botched orgy scene as well.

Enough. What these visual treatments suggest is a market, so it was only a matter of time before writers tried to convert images to words. Crace attempts a seamless stitching, yet the postmortem descriptions stand stubbornly apart from the narration of the first two temporal strands. It's like reading two books. Compounding the problem is the third-person voice. Though understandable, it discourages sympathetic identification. The reader becomes an observer, not a participant.

Pushing away the reader as well is the couple, two British doctors of zoology. Here’s another idea with merit: zoology = nature = materialism. This couple expresses perfectly the impersonal quality the author seeks. But their status as British academics puts them in a league most readers cannot hope to love. Nothing I read of their lifestyle elicited my sympathy. Their clothing, housing, breakfast choices, entertainment and all-around attitude were as alien to me as if they had dropped from the sky. A colder and more cheerless pair I have never come across. Their icy standoffishness depicts a slice of humanity so removed from most that it cadges the imagination.

This book is about death, we are told, about how life is really an aberration, death our real destiny. Even a baby is born dying, we read. Life is fragile, fleeting, impotent – scarcely worth the effort except by pitiable self-delusion. The point is stated page after page, and even during the same paragraph, wherein three or four sentences express it in different words. Take away the creative writing that covers the repetition and say hello to a 200-page exaltation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Dwelling on ruined flesh has no more appeal for me in books than it does in the visual media, and I found the story hard to engage beyond a creeping feeling of mild disgust. Being Dead has won a major book award. Its writing really is superior; the contrast of life and death is its key literary innovation. This may be exactly what many readers are looking for, and for them the rest will be secondary. Then there are peculiar and narrowly focused minds that can fully appreciate the precise contents that flesh out the story. So with those two exceptions, I do not recommend this book.
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May 25, 2007 Dan Rivas added it Recommends it for: people who might die

What I learned from this book: do not die

I liked "Being Dead" very much, especially the form of the novel, the deft way Crace moves us between the moments after Celice and Joseph are murdered, the events that preceded their deaths, and the couple's meeting thirty years prior.

However, I often found myself annoyed with the book, the way it seems to try so hard a being pretty and grotesque at the same time. Many passages seemed overwrought, too heavy to convey their own weight, let alone the narrat...more

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Dec 26, 2007 Kirstie rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people interested in the end of life

I want to say this novel is morbid but that's not entirely true. Instead, peculiar would be a more fitting word. First, it contains the longest description of decomposing bodies and the organisms that profit from it that I've ever read. It recalled the detailed and forever memorable rotting of Miss Havisham's neglected wedding feast only, you know, with human corpses.

Second, we start out with this married couple in midlife being dead and go backwards. We learn enough about these two zoologists-w...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Michael rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: shit-books

This book is pure dreck. A litany of emotional and psychological generalizations. Its poetic interludes on life, death, love, science and God (or lack there of) are sophomoric and saccharine. It's what I would call a dumbshow of literary pap and sophistry. On top of that, it's bad writing:

"They are the dark co-ordinates of one straight line. Grief is death eroticized. And sex is only shuffling off this mortal coil before its time to plummet to the post-coital afterlife. Celice's haste to rush ou...more

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Sep 12, 2012 Madeleine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, mmix, our-libeary

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is such a gracefully, unflinchingly graphic tale following two main paths. The death of a middle-aged married couple -- which is told initially in reverse from the moment of their murder before it hurtles through the present, detailing the bodies' six days of exposure, discovery, and clinically detached removal and processing (which plays well against their ever-evolving daughter's reactions) -- collides with the simultaneously celebratory and tragic story of how the two first met.

The chara...more This is such a gracefully, unflinchingly graphic tale following two main paths. The death of a middle-aged married couple -- which is told initially in reverse from the moment of their murder before it hurtles through the present, detailing the bodies' six days of exposure, discovery, and clinically detached removal and processing (which plays well against their ever-evolving daughter's reactions) -- collides with the simultaneously celebratory and tragic story of how the two first met.

The character development (mostly approached in retrospect) makes for one of the richest cast of literary players I've seen in a while. Celice's awkward and naively confident blossoming into a ripe young lady clashes well with the more reserved woman she became in her 50s, admitting that she has never been fully satisfied in her marriage; the small gestures of touching affection she allows her husband, however, speak volumes about her capacity for love. Joseph's nearly 30 years of tender loyalty -- from the first gesture of shyly calculated courtship to his dying show of devotion -- contrasts achingly with his initial coldness. It is their conflicted daughter who adds just enough raw humanity to the plot after the two bodies have been discovered.

At 196 pages, it almost seems natural to say that I could have happily lapped up 100 more (this is the first time since reading "The Gunslinger" that I've started and finished a book on the same day), especially since the pacing of the plot and progression of the story makes the novel so wonderfully compelling.

Mr. Crace's gift for both language and storytelling added to the morbidly voyeuristic pleasure of this book. As bleak as the story is, it does capture the beauty of a love that has had decades of lessons in learning how to suit both partners. The small splashes of careful detail, the finely constructed pace at which the plot unravels and spins, the stunning language.... it all made for a delightfully jarring contrast to the perceptively ugly (though wholly natural and inevitable) act of dying.

When the book comes to a close with Celice and Joseph's killer nowhere to be found, it's really not that important. And that's okay. C'mon, it takes a formidable writing talent to leave a murder unsolved without leaving the audience unsatisfied. But also, that's not really the aim of the narrative because this book isn't about solving a murder: It's about the six days "of grace" Celice and Joseph spend together as nature goes to work indiscriminately returning two dead things to the earth and its elements. (less)

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Jan 22, 2008 Robert Beveridge rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished, cle-pub-lib

Jim Crace, Being Dead (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999)

Jim Crace's novel Being Dead is, for lack of a better term, an anti-murder mystery. Specifically, it is the antithesis of Heinrich Boll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Instead of getting a book where the murderer is known from the first sentence and working out the "why"s of the murder, we get a book where the murder is nothing more than a mechanism to reflect both on the past lives of the murdered couple and the mechanisms of de...more

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Jan 03, 2008 Kate rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Kate by: Conrad

Shelves: fiction, own, gift, gbr_ire_cmnwlth, 1945-2000

If only Jim Crace had narrowed his ambitions to a short story about decomposing bodies. It's really the tale of putrefaction that is well-told here, not at all that of the lives the decaying bodies have left behind, which smacks overpoweringly of contrivance.

Crace's characters, and I noticed this in Genesis as well, are unavoidably false. The author has an odd way of saying "he is the type" - which should be the signal for "person you can relate to" - and then inventing a type you have never hea...more

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Aug 14, 2007 Meg Ingram rated it 5 of 5 stars

I absolutely LOVED this book. It was recommended to me by my good friend, Sarah, who warned me that it was a bit morbid. It is, but in a scientific and factual way. It's about what happens after you die...literally. As a society, we are so intent on covering death up, hiding from it, avoiding it, and ultimately ignoring the fact that it is inevitable. Granted, none of us want to meet our end in the manner that the couple in this book did (attacked, robbed, and left for dead during a romantic pic...more

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Nov 13, 2007 minnie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Read this over a long weekend break, and was left haunted by it. Joseph the Husband dies a short while after Celice after they have been budgeoned on a secluded beach while having a picnic.He dies with his hand on his wifes leg,and it is only moved when 6 days later the police have to force the bodies into temporary coffins. That little detail has stayed in my mind since reading this beautiful book about nature and death but also about marriage and the little routines and conflicts in married li...more

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Nov 23, 2012 Alex rated it 4 of 5 stars

I especially liked the darkness of this book and its unusual relishing of death, decay and other attendant processes. There are perhaps 2 opposite arcs in this book, heading directly at each other like 2 cars on a road:

On the one hand there is death, the dissolution of all things, our bodies, our lives and hopes, but also neighborhoods and places and everything. The tour de force here is the chapter on the decaying of the bodies, how naturally, easily, quietly we return to the undifferentiated s...more

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Sep 25, 2012 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Two professors of zoology, joseph and celice, a nerd and a wild spirit bored and annoyed with marriage, revisit the place they first had sex, in the dunes on the beach of a dying sea town. Naked and old, their heads are smashed in by a robber with a piece of granite, and then their bodies are left to nature. The narration jumps around, and back to earlier tragedies and unhappiness, ennui. Also flashbacks to the day it happened. A punk, drunk daughter starts looking for them, finds them in the mo...more Two professors of zoology, joseph and celice, a nerd and a wild spirit bored and annoyed with marriage, revisit the place they first had sex, in the dunes on the beach of a dying sea town. Naked and old, their heads are smashed in by a robber with a piece of granite, and then their bodies are left to nature. The narration jumps around, and back to earlier tragedies and unhappiness, ennui. Also flashbacks to the day it happened. A punk, drunk daughter starts looking for them, finds them in the morgue and is morbidly energized by their death, decides to change her life. existential

Competent, sometimes great fiction. Sometimes overwrought, sometimes could use a little warmth. A cold novel that not many will like. The meditation on death that this book is is both a realization that even in life we are already dying, and that death is of the body, as we see so very graphically. Not for the weak of stomach.

It's also about regrets and things never accomplished in life, and about bad relationships. But from the time they die until they are in the police tent, the man's hand is touching his wife's ankle, a little sign of stubborn love.

"Viewed from closer up, there were colors and motifs on Joseph and Celice that Fish could never leave. A dazzling filigree of pine-brown surface veins, which gave an arborescent pattern to the skin. The blossoming of blisters, their flaring red corollas and yellow ovaries like rock roses. And in the warmer, gaping caverns -- sub-rib, sub-flesh-sub-skull-- the garish blues and reds and greens of their disrupted, bloated frames. They were too rotten now and far too rank to hold much allure for gulls or crabs. They'd been passed down, through classes, orders, species, to the last in line, the lumpen multitude, the grubs, the loopers and millipedes, the button lice, the tubal worms and flets, the bon viveur or nectar bugs, which had either too many legs or none" (101)
.
The locals of the dying seaside town where the bodies lay, murdered, use the metaphor "Fish" for death. "We call it Fish." It swims, we say, a silent, unforgiving predator that comes at night out of the sea and speeds into the shallow, less resistant moisture of the streets. Fish comes and takes your father and your mother from their beds. All you'll hear, as their souls depart, is the shivering of fins. (99)

One of the most affecting parts is when the estranged, punk, dropout daughter descends into the "dungeons" of the morgue to look for her dead (missing) parents. Descriptive, hard-edged, corporeal, unsentimental. smells, others' grief.

Ends beautifully. "And still today and every day, the dunes are lifted, stacked, and undermined. Their crests migrate and reassemble with the wind. They do their best to raise their backs against the weather and the sea and block the wind-borne sorrows of the world. All along the shores of Baritone Bay and all the coast beyond, tide after tide, time after time, the corpses and the broken, thinned remains of fish and birds, barnacles and rats, of molluscs, mammals, mussels, crabs are lifted, washed and sorted by waves. And Joseph and Celice enjoy a living and unconscious end, beyond experience. There are the everending (no n) days of being dead.

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May 21, 2011 Linda Lipko rated it 4 of 5 stars

I tremendously enjoyed this book, though, it does seem incongruently odd to say that I liked a book about "being dead".

The writing is magical, lyrical, complex and compelling. Two Middle aged Zoologists, Joseph and Celice have long struggled with a marriage that simply doesn't mesh. Successful in their field, yet by societal standands, they have failed in many areas, including raising a daughter who is self sufficicent and other directed.

It an attempt to find one last chance at romance, Joseph...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Alex Telander rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2001

“‘It’s not as if . . . ,’” she said. And then her scalp hung open like a fish’s mouth. The white roots of her crown were stoplight red.” A couple suffers a horrific fate at the hands of a granite-club-wielding murderer, while they enjoy each other on the beach of Baritone Bay, where they first met. This is the premise of Being Dead, from English novelist Jim Crace, author of Quarantine and Signals of Distress. “Crace is a writer of hallucinatory skill,” says John Updike.

The novel begins with the...more

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Nov 02, 2010 Michael Armijo rated it 3 of 5 stars

Imaginative descriptions in this one...

The author certainly puts thought into his words. I was amazed. This book was on a recommended list by Michael Cunningham (author of THE HOURS). I certainly see what Cunningham saw in this exquisitely original piece that did win the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. I'm only giving it three stars because the subject matter (a murder and the aftermath description of the decaying bodies) is disturbing. It made me think twice when the author wrot...more

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Mar 03, 2010 Grady rated it 5 of 5 stars

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...more

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Dec 01, 2009 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

An unsparing and concise meditation on death, taking for its protagonists the rotting corpses of two murdered zoologists, husband and wife. Sans spoilers this book is not for the squeamish. Crace is something of a mystical Darwinist, and he uses this platform to extrapolate a number of haunting perspectives on the heroics of decomposition, many of which take on ghostly qualities as the novel consistently refuses to draw any spiritual significance from existence. Part of the novel's impact is in...more

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Jun 11, 2009 Virginia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Crace will be in Austin this fall, teaching the fiction workshop. This is the first book of his I've read, and it was perfect for my current study of perspective.

The novel focuses on the deaths of two zoologists--Celice and Joseph--tracing backwards from their murders. The narration steps completely out of the story at times, following the furtive paths of "what if" or "had things been different". I usually dislike endeavors of the sort, more distracting than supporting, but Crace executes the...more

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Sep 15, 2012 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: romance, social-commentary

"But no one said that bodies weren't sincere. There's nothing more sincere than death. The dead mean what they say."

I want to say that this book is emotionally morbid but I'm not sure I can say that. I mean to say that it is and at the same time it isn't. It describes death on such a biological and creepy level in a way that I never let myself think about, and this is in a sense, the reason why I liked it so much. It describes the body that has been separated from the spirit and seems to be a he...more "But no one said that bodies weren't sincere. There's nothing more sincere than death. The dead mean what they say."

I want to say that this book is emotionally morbid but I'm not sure I can say that. I mean to say that it is and at the same time it isn't. It describes death on such a biological and creepy level in a way that I never let myself think about, and this is in a sense, the reason why I liked it so much. It describes the body that has been separated from the spirit and seems to be a heartless description of ones death, but at the same time, it shows the beauty of science and decomposition. This decomposition is beautiful because it's just the way it is and makes you somehow feel okay with the fact that bodies disintegrate in such a putrid way. We're just bodies without breath or heartbeat. When those are gone, we're not who we once were so there's no reason to have emotional attachments to the body after death. Our bodies all become earth again and feed the world around us. How can this symbiotic relationship between earth and body be ugly or disturbing, especially if a person is no longer a person after death?

What's also interesting is the beauty of the 'Quiverings' described at the beginning of the book where people of the past mourn the loss of their loved ones in a theatrical and clamorous manner. In truth, it was my favorite part of the book because I found myself so jealous of those who can mourn death and celebrate their loved ones in this way (although it didn't allow those who'd rather have a quite goodbye their wishes). In my culture, events after death are so solemn and controlled. I remember standing at my grandfather's funeral in the cemetery in a group of 60 silent people wanting to scream and claw open the casket just so that I could see him one last time, just so that I could make noise of what I was feeling inside. It took all that I had and the greatest self-control in the moment to keep it all inside and in the end, controlling my emotions probably was the most disrespectful expression (although probably the most respectful thing for my widowed grandmother at the time). Why do we see silence with death as respectful? Why do we suppress ourselves and let our culture dictate the way that we mourn the people who mean the most to us. After all, our relationship with the individual is personal and not entirely dictated by social norms, why should the way we say goodbye be so controlled?

This book seems to have much potential for increasing one's fear of death, but in the end I think that it has done the opposite in my case. After all, we all start dying the moment we are born and life wouldn't be so special if it never had an end.
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Sep 22, 2012 Beth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: audiobooks, national-book-critics-circle-award

Joseph's grasp on Celice's leg had weakened as he'd died, but still his hand was touching her, the grainy pastels of her skin, one fingertip among her baby ankle hairs. 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, woul...more Joseph's grasp on Celice's leg had weakened as he'd died, but still his hand was touching her, the grainy pastels of her skin, one fingertip among her baby ankle hairs. 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 here were still a man and wife, quietly resting, flesh on flesh, dead, but not departed yet. It was as if they had been struck by lightning, but the thunder, separated from its faster twin, had yet to come, with its complaints, to shake and terminate the bodies lying in the grass. Time was divided into light and sound. There was a sanctuary for Joseph and Celice between the lightning and the thunderclap. Such were their six days in the dunes, stretched out, these two unlucky lovers on the coast. This is our only prayer: may no one come to lift his hand from her leg. Let thunder never find its voice. Hold sound and light, those battling twins, apart. There is a meadow that separates death's chilly gate and the tumbling nothingness beyond in which our Joseph and Celice are lying, cushioned by the sunlight and the grass, and held in place by nothing firmer than his fingertip. (I have the audio of this, so I am guessing on the punctuation here.)

Being Dead is a fascinating book. Jim Crace takes the murder of a middle-aged couple, both zoologists, and uses the incident to explore the biology of death and decomposition, the nature of love, courtship, and family relationships, the aging process, and facets of guilt and responsibility. The narrative of this tale at the seacoast is very like the motion of the water in the nearby sea--moving toward the coast and away again, sometimes with currents crossing. The tale moves both forward and backward from the moment of the murder, but also forward from the time the couple first met. It flows between the narratives of their courtship, of the events on the day of the murder, of the gradual realization by others that they are missing and the resulting search, and of what happens on the beach to the couple as their bodies lie awaiting discovery and burial. The language is both detailed and beautiful, the relationships and personalities complex, but also unremarkable. The book, despite the interwoven narratives, is smooth and cleanly constructed. This book is not about what happens--it's not particularly plot or action driven--it is about what is, who we are, how we connect or fail to, what we become.

Definitely glad to have happened on this in my search for a relatively short but high-quality novel available in audio! It deserved the National Book Critics Circle Award that it won.(less)

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Oct 27, 2012 Kellie Uhrig rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you are considering reading this book, you need to know that it is NOT a mystery. That's what I thought. I'm usually not a big mystery reader, but had read some Louise Penney this year and two Gillian Flynn books, so I thought I'd give this one a try because it was on the NYT notable books of the year for its pub year. I guess I assumed way too much from the name and the fact that I found it in the mystery section at Half Price Books.

What you also need to know about this book is that you sho...more

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Mar 02, 2009 Dustin rated it 2 of 5 stars

This probably should have been a short story. The characters were too flat to be interesting for 200 pages. Crace paints their lives in absolutes. They always sleep in separate beds, Joseph always says "I'm too short to do (whatever)". They're characters with catchphrases and static manners of being: passionless, dull, dissatisfied. Which maybe is appropriate given that the novel is about the moment they fell in love and the moment they die, but that doesn't make it interesting. Why couldn't the...more

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Oct 16, 2010 Lynda rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was much better than I thought it would be, and in fact I am about to start reading it again so that I can make notes. Considering that this book was about a murder it was a very calm book and the only violence was in the brief passage decribing the actual death. Joseph and Celice met when they were both students , grew up , married and had a daughter. They went on to live produtive but unexciting (according to their daughter) lives. The book drifts effortlessly backwards and forwards telli...more

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Jun 13, 2009 Juliet Wilson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

This isn't a novel for the squeamish! It starts with a murder and then describes in great detail the decomposition of the murdered bodies as they lie in sand dunes. We are introduced to the insects and other creatures that start to feed on and colonise the bodies. This is a bit icky, but is also a wonderful illustration of the place death has in the processes of life and the place that humans have in the wider ecosystem.

The bodies are those of Joseph and Celice, who when they had been alive wer...more

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May 20, 2012 Garrie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Celice and Joseph are battered to death with a lump of granite in the dunes of Baritone Bay and that's pretty much where they stay for the duration of the book. I struggled with this at first because it is just, as it says on the cover, about being dead. But as Crace slowly steps back from their brutal exit he shows us snatches of their relationship, that started thirty years ago back at Baritone Bay, I started to be dragged in. As the beach and its vast array of insects and wildlife start to sl...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

No, this not another zombie novel. Not even close. Actually, a better title might be “Scientists in Love”, although that fails to capture the dark, haunting tone, that shadows these pages.
Joseph and Celice, are middle-aged zoologists. In the opening chapter, they are found murdered in a remote area of the dunes. As their bodies begin to decompose, the narrative takes us on a serpentine journey through this couple’s lives and we witness their chance meeting in college, a long, sometimes bumpy thi...more

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Mar 02, 2010 Jenniferk rated it 3 of 5 stars

I recently stumbled upon Jim Crace in the discount hardcover section of Barnes and Noble in the form of "The Pesthouse." Pesthouse completely blew my mind and i was hungry for more. While incredibly interesting and at times cringe-worthy, I found "being dead," left a little to be desired. There was a peeping tom element here that was different. I enjoyed peeking into the very ( to me) foreign lives of a rather mundane, long-married couple. Also, while reading the bits about the decomposing bodie...more

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Dec 07, 2009 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is as original a concept for a novel as I have run across lately.

I take Mr. Crace at his word that he fully intended a novel of atheistic vision. He obviously wanted to take a frontal look at the death and decomposition of this couple from that point of view. Therefore, he had to plot the thing so that they die in an isolated area. He was thus able to avoid the immediate intervention of the embalmer. He wanted a couple to die nearly simultaneously. Murder was the answer there. He set up all...more

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Dec 10, 2011 Sarah Laing rated it 4 of 5 stars

I greatly admired this book, but in someways I wondered if it were a writer's book. The language was beautiful, as was the interweaving of The Goatherd's Ancient Wisdom. It was quite specific and ghoulish in its description of the violent murders. It concentrated on three quite short periods of time, eking out what happened. Each episode overlapped slightly, was hinted at, and revisited. Meaning accumulated, so by the end you had a full understanding of the characters and the events. I loved the...more

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Aug 25, 2010 Mon rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a book about ordinary people.

This is painting by Van Gogh in 1888 titled Shoes The objects painted are the artist's own processions - they are well used, experienced and passive. Now, instead of a full analysis of Van Gogh's artistic merit (which can be found in any high school art essay), try to picture his thought when he was painting this pair of shoes. Were they chosen with particular intention? Not really, since he did another painting with a black pair of boots in the same manner....more

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Dec 17, 2012 Ian Mapp rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a beautiful book - invoking images of McEwan at his best.

We have two zooligists who return after 30 years to the place where they met. After a bit of alfresco sex, they are murdered with a rock by an unknown (and for the books purposes, unimportant) assailant.

This allows the author to cleverly move backwards and forwards through time. As the bodies are left exposed for 6 days, the process of death and the way nature deals with it, is spared no detail. Its not morbid at all and strangely...more

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About Jim Crace

James "Jim" Crace is a contemporary English writer. The winner of numerous awards, Crace also has a large popular following. He currently lives in the Moseley area of Birmingham with his wife. They have two children, Thomas Charles Crace (born 1981) and the actress Lauren Rose Crace, who played Danielle Jones in EastEnders.

Crace grew up with his siblings Richard, Cyril, and Graham in Forty Hill, a...more

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“There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.” — 15 people liked it

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