Being Dead
A haunting new novel about love, death, and the afterlife, from the author of QuarantineBaritone Bay, mid-afternoon. A couple, naked, married almost thirty years, are lying murdered in the dunes."Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell--just look at them--that Joseph and Celice were still...
show more
A haunting new novel about love, death, and the afterlife, from the author of QuarantineBaritone Bay, mid-afternoon. A couple, naked, married almost thirty years, are lying murdered in the dunes."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."
show less
Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780374110130 (0374110131)
Publish date: April 2nd 2000
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages no: 192
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Literature,
European Literature,
British Literature,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
Literary Fiction,
Mystery,
Contemporary,
Crime,
Death
I found this to be an extremely moving and beautifully written book. As you learn more about this couple it makes you think about lost opportunities and just as they are beginning to rediscover each other its all taken away from them.
This opens with a grisly murder in a beautiful spot and such counterpoints are the nature of the story and its telling. One thread of chapters starts near the “end” of the story and goes back (initially, but then forwards too), while the other thread starts many years earlier and only goes forward, ...
A beautiful study of character and emotion.
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 w...