This is the most hauntingly beautiful book I have ever read. It’s been days since I’ve read it and thoughts of it come to me randomly and sweep me away to this sad little place that the book spurred in me. The entire novel, which opens with the random grisly death of a couple on a beach, carries this somber, sad tone, but it is tinged with this overwhelming sense of love. It’s hard to explain and describe, but I’m only writing this because I still can’t stop thinking about it.
While Jim Crace almost painstakingly describes the slow decomposition of the couple’s bodies, which sounds disgusting and awful and only mostly is, he also leads us through how they met and fell in love. He shows us the day they spent together leading up to the point they got murdered. We also follow the couple’s only daughter, for the latter half of the novel, in her discovery of her parent’s situation. It is brilliantly paced and, really, one of the most beautifully written things I have read.
No mystery is solved, aside from the mystery of how two people can spend their lives together and how they exist at the beginning and end of it all.
Read it. Read it now.
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