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The Book Against DeathStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionIn 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 - interposed 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 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. 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.' 'Canetti invites - indeed, compels - judgement. His exacting presence honours literature.' 'Canetti led his life without compromise, fear, or guilt, and [reading him is] like discovering, without warning, a complex and satisfying work of art.' 'One of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius.' 'The erudition is genuinely awe-inspiring.' 'Before there was the mysterious W. G. Sebald, there was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti' 'By virtue of his abundant wit and stylistic pithiness, Canetti stands out as one of the foremost aphorists of our time, a man who, in his phrasing of life's ironies, is sometimes reminiscent of great predecessors like La Bruyere and Lichtenberg.' 'This heterogeneous collage of vignettes, literary theory and personal musings against the notion of dying, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Auto-da-Fe (1947), is stitched together by a humorous, analytically sharp tone, with a healthy dose of anger and despair.' 'The power of Canetti's method, in its flexibility and its range, achieves that rarest of contemporary feelings: a clear and terrible vision of human inadequacy which itself does not harden into contempt and spite.... the most important literary expression, in the last forty years, of the processes of delusion.' 'One of the few undoubted masterpieces of our time.'
Author Biography: 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. |