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Life on the Ceiling, life on the beach
Saturday, November 23rd, 2002 07:14 pmOh joy! I have a hospital appointment! And because this is counted as 'moderately disabling', it's quite soon, in NHS terms: February. bastards
( on drugs )
I also finished reading Being Dead, by Jim Crace. Maybe because of the painkillers, I am immensely taken by the way he uses language:
( excerpt )
The story is simple: a middle-aged married couple (Joseph and Celice) who are marine biologists. They are victims of a random killer (on page 1). The rest of the book tells the story of their truncated lives, and the story of their daughter as she discovers their fate. Cheery stuff.
But it's wonderfully clear and unsentimental. This is a biologist's life-after-death, in the precise, detailed descriptions of the shore-life which overruns the bodies, in the nature of decay, in the way that what is left is only deeds.
The prose is crystalline and assigns as much emotional weight to seaweed and sand-skippers as to the suicide of Celice's colleague - which is described in glorious iambic pentameter ( - another excerpt ).
Crace doesn't glorify their deaths: he doesn't promise salvation to them or to their insufficiently-grieving daughter: he simply describes their lives, their deaths, their subsequent decay. There's another story buried in there, of a death when they were students, and I wonder how the balance will shift in my head as I assimilate the interwoven plots ...
Hmm. Am missing the Mekons (combination of medication, loss of nerve and poverty). Back to bed with a good book, and never let it be said I don't know how to have a good time.
( on drugs )
I also finished reading Being Dead, by Jim Crace. Maybe because of the painkillers, I am immensely taken by the way he uses language:
( excerpt )
The story is simple: a middle-aged married couple (Joseph and Celice) who are marine biologists. They are victims of a random killer (on page 1). The rest of the book tells the story of their truncated lives, and the story of their daughter as she discovers their fate. Cheery stuff.
But it's wonderfully clear and unsentimental. This is a biologist's life-after-death, in the precise, detailed descriptions of the shore-life which overruns the bodies, in the nature of decay, in the way that what is left is only deeds.
The prose is crystalline and assigns as much emotional weight to seaweed and sand-skippers as to the suicide of Celice's colleague - which is described in glorious iambic pentameter ( - another excerpt ).
Crace doesn't glorify their deaths: he doesn't promise salvation to them or to their insufficiently-grieving daughter: he simply describes their lives, their deaths, their subsequent decay. There's another story buried in there, of a death when they were students, and I wonder how the balance will shift in my head as I assimilate the interwoven plots ...
Hmm. Am missing the Mekons (combination of medication, loss of nerve and poverty). Back to bed with a good book, and never let it be said I don't know how to have a good time.
