Jim Crace, Being Dead *****

Being Dead is well titled. It is about being dead. The book starts with the murder of a middle-aged married couple amid the dunes of an isolated bay in England. They are killed just after consummating a return to the scene of their first passion, thirty years before. The story moves forward and backward from there, chronicling the decay of their bodies, the day leading up to their death, and their courtship.

What I really like about Being Dead is how Crace manages to emphasize the physical (and aggressively non-spirtitual) details while also showing how human thoughts and feelings bring meaning to them. His prose is poetic and naturalistic at the same time.

Calcium and water usurped the place of blood and oxygen so that her defunct brain, almost at once, began to swell and tear its canopies, spilling all its saps and liquors, all its stored immersions of passion, memory, and will, on her scarf, her jacket and the grass.

I read an interview with Jim Crace as I neared the end of Being Dead. He came across as rather obnoxious and arrogant, making me think I might not like his other work.