SOURCE: Banville, John. “A Rare Species.” New York Review of Books (13 April 2000): 30, 32.

In the following review, Banville praises Crace's literary talent and experimentation, but criticizes the “dulling” prose style of Being Dead.

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...