Crace, Jim. Being Dead. New York: Picador, 1999.

Jim Crace is one of the most amazing writers living today. Where's his Booker? I first fell in love with his The Devil's Larder after reading excerpts in Harper's, I think. The book is a long series of shorts about food, much of them eerie or even evil in tone and subject matter. One piece is about that unlabeled can in the back of your cupboard, imploring "you" to leave it there, unopened and unlabeled, as a way to live with mystery in your life. Another piece is obsessed with colon polyps.

This book is a "tour de force" which I don't think I've ever said in this forum. It begins with the deaths of a couple of married zoologists, murdered on the beach. Then the narrative shatters and goes off in three directions. One heads backwards from the moment of death, hour by hour until the morning of the last day of this couple's lives. Another heads forward, getting into incredibly close detail about what's happening to the corpses as they rot and fester on the beach. A third shoots back to the past, telling (forward) the story of the week this couple first met, at the very same beach where they've died. Crace braids these three together into a completely coherent narrative. It's as fun to watch as I imagine weaving on a loom would be.

The other great thing about Crace (at least, from the two books of his I've read) is/are his narrators. It's third-person omniscient the whole way through, and what it enables him to do is not be comprehensive and exhaustive like some 19th-century one (but even some times he goes into this role; he's a journalist by trade and seems to thrive off research and knowing), but rather he achieves this fantastic distance from his characters, where he (and so we) can assess them in full.

Plus you get incredible images and language:

She had, she thought, taken her still-burning cigarette with her into the common room. It was just possible that she had left it standing on its end on the veranda floor. That was her habit, balancing a narrow cigarette to knit its thinning scarf of smoke while she was busy doing something else (107, italics added).

There are dozens of these turns of phrase filling the book, tossed off as if they were the most natural, normal way to describe something. And maybe you can argue a first-person narrator can do this, but mine can't.

These days, the first person seems too limiting. It's like the third person is a documentary film shot with multiple handheld video cameras, and the first person is nothing but a talking head. Or, like, the third person is an exhibit of paintings done in various media by various artists, and the first person is your bathroom mirror.