Volume 47, Number 6 · April 13, 2000
A Rare Species
By John Banville
Being Dead
by Jim Crace
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 196 pp., $21.00
Of the two limiting phenomena of life, that of our coming into the world and that of our going out, it is hard to say which is the more mysterious; certainly we know which is the least acceptable. How can it be that a human being, this extraordinary congeries of affects and emotions, desires and fears, wickedness and good, should at a certain point in time simply cease to be? Even those who believe in the afterlife are baffled and in some cases shocked out of their faith by the fact of death. At any moment we may look about at the world in the certain knowledge that a hundred years hence every animal now living will, with the exception of a few turtles, be dead. As Nietzsche puts it, with his usual insight and devastating candor, 'The living are only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that.'
Review, 3023 words
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