Overview

In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that 'by definition, he could never live to complete', as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti's aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death - published in English for the first time since his death in 1994 - interspersed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate is a disarming and often darkly comic reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicization, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one's own death, while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Infused with fervour and vitality, The Book Against Death ultimately forms a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.

Full Product Details

9781804270899

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti’s great strength.... [He] is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words.... His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.'  — Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books 'Canetti invites – indeed, compels – judgment. His exacting presence honors literature.'  — George Steiner, New Yorker

'Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti’s great strength ... [He] is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words ... His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.'  — Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books 'Canetti invites – indeed, compels – judgment. His exacting presence honors literature.'  — George Steiner, New Yorker

Author Information

Elias Canetti was born in 1905 into a Sephardi Jewish family in Ruse, Bulgaria. He moved to Vienna in 1924, where he became involved in literary circles while studying for a degree in chemistry. He remained in Vienna until the Anschluss, when he emigrated to England and later to Switzerland, where he died in 1994. In 1981, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 'writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, and artistic power'. His best-known works include his trilogy of memoirs The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes; the novel Auto-da-F; and the non-fiction book Crowds and Power. Peter Filkins is the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann's collected poems, Darkness Spoken, as well as three novels by H. G. Adler, The Journey, Panorama and The Wall. He published a biography, H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds, in 2019. Filkins's fifth collection of poems, Water / Music, appeared in 2021. He teaches at Bard College. Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection Four New Messages, and the non-fiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called 'a major American writer' by the New York Times, 'maybe America's greatest living writer' by the Washington Post, and 'an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today' by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel's 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Netanyahus. He lives in New York City.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available