A fascinating look into life and death. Read this short book just to enjoy the fun (!), fresh language and imagery describing an age-old and often-avoided subject! ( )

An odd story told in two different time periods; the one just before and just after death, and their meeting some 30 years previously. I thought the author did a fairly good job on both except that I didn’t get a real understanding of what happened to Celice to make her accept Joseph. She was pretty scornful of him and men like him in general. She was pretty carnal back in the 70s and he was the total opposite. Even in the present tense parts of the book, it didn’t seem as though she liked him at all. I would have liked to see more of why she married him.

The details of physical death were graphic and kind of gross. All kinds of bodily fluids and degenerative processes. Ugh. And the telling of the crime and the absolute coldness and heartlessness in the attacker’s mind. I was kind of disappointed that he didn’t get caught, but that’s not what this book was about.

One thing that struck me was how similar the daughter is to Celice. She thinks her parents are old-fashioned and have always been as backward and conservative as she thinks they are. In reality, she is very much like her mother in attitude if not in execution. Casual sex and a feigned sense of self-esteem carry them both through their days. Celice turns into a very hard, unforgiving and unsensual woman. It’s easy to see that Syl will become the same.

A haunting little novel about a murdered couple. It explores the circuitous causes and meanings of their deaths, meandering through the past that brought them to that place at that time, while also following their decomposition before the bodies are found, and their daughter's search for them when they don't show up at work. It really tries to convey the banality of death, the commonplace and biological, to cut past the sentimental and romanticized ways in which we avoid really thinking about it, and yet show that it has meaning through its reality. It's a good novel, though admittedly morbid. I personally did not find it as heavy as some other reviewers have, perhaps because I'd already read Stiff by Mary Roach, and was somewhat desensitized to the idea of dead bodies. I also know that some people found the characters kind of stiff and unappealing, but I didn't find them particularly objectionable. Overall, a good read. ( )

I was drawn to this work because I'd recently enjoyed Mary Roach's collection of essays in "Stiff" and am of roughly the same age as poor Celice and Joseph who lie murdered and decaying in the sand dunes as this book opens. We Americans hide and disguise so much about death, cloaking our language in euphemisms or having words fail us altogether as we comfort loved ones "in this difficult time." My recent reading of fiction has veered either toward the slightly macabre and melancholy, or to English writers, so I was drawn with morbid fascination to Jim Crace's "Being Dead". Crace shifts perspective from the moments just after the couple's murder - to the receding hours just before, the advancing hours and days just after, and thirty years prior when they first met. What is lovely at the core of this "quivering" for rotting corpses is the elliptical way their lives together begin and end. We often read to know we're not alone, so it's especially comforting to read Crace's summary of the fragility and preciousness of life - "There is no remedy for death - or birth - except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall." ( )

Well this is an odd short novel about an elderly couple who after a picnic at the beach are brutally murdered. The author gives in depth scientific descriptions of the process of decomposition interspersed with their lives up until the point of being picked over by insects and micro-organisms. " Our births are just the gateway to our death's. Those who begin to live, begin to die." Whilst they lie on the beach undiscovered for several days their estranged daughter comes home to deal with their disappearance.
A very strange story and I will be interested to read more from this author. ( )