e-Book Being Dead download

by Jim Crace

ISBN: 067088989X
ISBN13: 978-0670889891
Language: English
Publisher: Picador, 1999; 3rd edition (1999)
Subategory: Unsorted

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ePub size: 1377 kb
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Rating: 4.5
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Jim Crace is the author of six novels, including Quarantine (FSG, 1997), which won the 1997 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Библиографические данные.

Set contemporaneously. Jim Crace is the author of six novels, including Quarantine (FSG, 1997), which won the 1997 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Who was Jim Croce : James Joseph Croce was from Philadelphia, and played in a lot of bands, including one with his wife before finding his true success. Unfortunately his greatest success, of 4 hits didn't come until after he had died. Before his demise, his biggest hit was Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. When was Jim Croce born? Jim Croce was born on January 10, 1943.

James Crace (born 1 March 1946) is an English writer and novelist. His novels include Quarantine, which was judged Whitbread Novel of 1998, and Harvest, which won the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award, the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize. Crace was born at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, while it was a maternity hospital. He grew up on an estate in Enfield, north London and attended Enfield Grammar School

Jim Croce was born in south Philadelphia January 10th, 1943, and brought up on ragtime, country and Dixieland music. He played the accordion as a child and taught himself guitar, but did not play professionally until 1964, while he was at Villanova College in Pennsylvania.

Jim Croce was born in south Philadelphia January 10th, 1943, and brought up on ragtime, country and Dixieland music. There he formed various bands and played fraternity parties. He also worked on construction crews to support himself. Talking to Rolling Stone in London while on a promotional tour there two months ago, Croce recalled: I’ve had to get in and out of music a couple of times, because music didn’t always mean a living.

Time in a Bottle" is a hit single by singer-songwriter Jim Croce. Croce wrote the lyrics after his wife Ingrid told him she was pregnant, in December 1970. It appeared on his 1972 ABC debut album You Don't Mess Around with Jim and was featured in the 1973 ABC made-for-television movie "She Lives!"

You Don't Mess Around with Jim is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Jim Croce, released in 1972.

Books related to Being Dead. The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine. The Two of Us. Kathy Page.

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. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet." "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 they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."From that moment forward, Being Dead becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death.

Comments:

Levaq

I didn't expect to "like" this book after reading the first 30 of 196 pages. The graphic detail used to describe a murder and the early decomposition of two dead bodies made me wonder where in the heck this story could go. And, more importantly, why would I want to read it! Where does the story go?

It's a wandering timetable. We know the two main characters, Joseph and Celice, both professors of zoology married for 30 years, are dead and the forward movement not only includes their ongoing decay, but also their eventual discovery by police dogs and the introduction of their grown daughter, Syl, as she copes with her knowledge of their death. It also goes back to when they first met, as students sharing a study house at the shore. They are an unlikely pair, and yet, they come together through mutual attraction and what turns out to be a shared tragic experience, and live--at least according to their estranged daughter--an unremarkable life. The timetable further allows the reader to relive the last day of their lives, hour by hour, from the murder back to the moment they awoke and decided to spend the day together at the very shore where they'd met some 30 years earlier. The layout of the story was brilliant, and not in the least bit confusing.

The language (British English) is both lofty and gritty--probably not unlike Joseph and Celice. Some of the thoughtful insights about life and death are very, very poignant. For example, when Syl contemplates the loss of her parents:

"... Her gene supplies had closed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world's small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall."

I thought it was a very elegant way of illustrating both the fact that life always goes marching on, and the importance of our obligation to the dead (and dying) that we live life well. The title and thesis of the book are one and the same: "Being Dead." Highly recommend.

Michele Cozzens, Author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

Llanonte

This is certainly a well written, calm, thoughtful, dispassionate book. I found several aspects of the book thought provoking:

First, Jim Crace spends much more time and effort in this book viewing the interiors of the two female characters, Celice and her daughter Syl. In some ways the mother and daughter were much alike and Crace focuses most of his attention on Celice when she is a young biology graduate student, which is around the age of Syl when her two parents are murdered. He seems fascinated withh the ways women manipulate and seduce men. He also is very conscioius of the way men seduce women, as exemplified by Joseph's use of singing to seduce Celice as well as the mortuary assistant and the taxi drivers attempts to seduce Syl.

Second, Crace does not take us on a wild romp to bring justice to the faceless man that kills Joseph and Celice in the dunes by the bay. He takes a more dispassionate perspective of balance in nature rather than justice in human social networks. The murderer kills them and drives off in their car. We really don't hear from him again. But we do get a full description of the way their bodies decompose and begin the natural process of returning to the earth.

Third, whenever there is sex in the book, there is death. Joseph and Celice first make love while a fellow graduate student burns to death in the ocean cabin. Syl and Geo the taxi driver make love while she awaits news of her parent's dissappearance. Joseph and Celice try to make love in the dunes many years later and meet the murderer. Where there is death, there is new life is the mirror image of where there is new life, there begins death. In many ways this could be said to be one of the main themes of novel.

Fourth, the writing style is masterful with events from past and present very carfully woven together until they converge.

The book is short and can easily be finished in a couple of nights of reading before bed. Even though the subject is death, you will not have disturbed slumber, I promise you.

GODMAX

Jim Crace in Being Dead again succeeds in writing a compeling, philosophical novel. He does so in an amazing manner - creating a folk-custom of quivering, an all night vigil of mourning and remembrance, which is juxtaposed against a ultra-scientific world view. Similarly human emotion is juxtaposed against natural inevitibility.
Chapters alternate between the dead of the title - a couple, both middle-aged zoologists - and the "quivering" - recounting their life together from their original meeting until their death. The chapters of "being dead" are detailed, scientific descriptions of the process of flesh decaying. Yet despite the objectivity, through use of landscape and language, Crace succeeds in making the story move foreward in these chapters.
The "quivering" chapters provide the biography of the couple, primarily through the wife's experience. The sense of what draws the couple together and what drives them apart is equisite - a realistic view of a long marriage.
As the couple's disappearance is noted and their estranged daughter Syl accepts their death, the reader is lead to see in her distinct resemblances to her mother. This leaves the reader, at the end, with a sense of the circularity of nature.
Sprinkled through the book are paragraphs of a philosophical nature. I personally disagree with the proffered views but find them absolutely right for the characters to which they are attached (even when the character is the narrator). As such, I see this as an ideal book for a "book club" discussion, although I can scarcely envision a book club which consider reading such a difficult topic.