Begun in 1937, The Book Against Death represents a monumental, lifelong project by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Elias Canetti. As translator Peter Filkins notes in his afterword, this was a work Canetti "could never live to complete." Now published in English for the first time since Canetti's death in 1994, this major collection offers a profound journey into his aphorisms, diatribes, musings, and commentaries on and against death.
Interspersed with insights from literary giants like Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser, Canetti's disarming and often darkly comic reflections confront the inevitability of death and its pervasive politicization. He grapples with the despair of losing loved ones and the inherent impossibility of facing one's own mortality, while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the despot's chilling willingness to wield death as power. Yet, despite its dark themes, The Book Against Death is infused with an undeniable fervor and vitality, ultimately forming a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.
‘Bereavements provide the personal background to Canetti’s preoccupation with death, but there was also a political dimension. Though he spent the First World War in neutral Switzerland, the carnage and its aftermath darkened the horizon for his generation…. This book is therefore, among other things, a threnody for a generation of European Jews, the last for whom German was the natural language of literature…. [Canetti’s] conflicted relationship with Germany forms a fascinating subplot to the book.’ Daniel Johnson, Times Literary Supplement
‘Canetti would not shrug-off or laugh death out of his mind: he is sincere, clamorous, indignant and endlessly aggrieved. His disdain is boundless and therefore so is his book, for which no material is beyond incorporation. As with all acquisitive projects, it is never satiated – it acknowledges no terminus. It finished only when Canetti himself was finished by death…. He is always in defiance against seemingly eternal forces: power, society, religion, God, death. And it is not enough simply to think about something all thoughts are enlisted in the conquest of their subject. Canetti’s pensée amounts to an act of protest, a great refutation, culminating in the ultimate refutation of death.’ Jared Marcel Pollen, New Statesman
‘[A] captivating collection of Canetti’s notes…. If death involves fixity, then life demands movement. The Book Against Death refuses finality by remaining forever on the cusp of transformation. It will await its final revision until the end of time. It can’t save all of us, as Canetti longed to, but there is a small portion of immortality to be found in it nonetheless.’ Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post
Physical Info: 4.8 x 0.87 x 7.76 inches | 352 pages | French Paperback with Flaps