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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Book Against Death
The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Elias Canetti's powerful, disarming, and often bleakly comic observations, diatribes, musings, and commentaries on and against death. Evoking despair, melancholy, and fury, Canetti examines the inevitable demise of all beings--from the ant, the fish, and the worm to an executioner, a court painter, and a Greek god--while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Interspersed with material from philosophers and writers such as Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser, The Book Against Death is ultimately a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.
Canetti famously refused to die before he'd read all his obituaries and corrected them.
"I accept no death."--Elias Canetti (1905-1994)
Book Details
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publish Date: Nov 5th, 2024
- Pages: 432
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 7.99in - 5.32in - 0.92in - 0.68lb
- EAN: 9780811237994
- Categories: • Essays• Ethics & Moral Philosophy• Memoirs
About the Author
Canetti, Elias: - 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, The Play of the Eyes, and The Party in the Blitz; the novel Auto-da-Fé; and the nonfiction book CrowdsandPower.
Filkins, Peter: - 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.
Cohen, Joshua: - Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction 2022 for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. He lives in New York City.
Praise for this book
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 "The New York Review of Books"
Canetti invites--indeed, compels--judgment. His exacting presence honors literature.--George Steiner "The New Yorker"
Canetti led his life without compromise, fear, or guilt, and [reading him is] like discovering, without warning, a complex and satisfying work of art.--David Denby "The New Yorker"
Even twenty years after his death, one thing is certain: Elias Canetti is alive and kicking.--Tobias Schwartz "Der Tagesspiegel"
His style is suave yet enrapturing, his memory and attention to detail simply extraordinary ... One feels that in Canetti, modern European culture found its ultimate keeper.--Ilan Stavans "Forward"
A diary of aphorisms circling the abyss, a project undertaken in the hopes that his own death would die--out now in a translation from the German by Peter Filkins. It's one of those great books premised on its own failure, which increasingly I feel are the only books worth writing. Every page is alive with animus, ardor, humor, sufferance, with venom for death and its posturing acolytes...--Dan Piepenbring "Harper's"
In The Book Against Death, the author assumes the role of a Roman orator, marshalling words against death the way one would a tyrant, as if one could banish it with speech, ridicule it out of existence--Jared Marcel Pollen "The New Statesman"
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. An unfinished book is the only thing I know of that never dies.--Becca Rothfeld "The Washington Post"
An extraordinary performance of magical thinking that stems not just from profound grief but from obdurate ethical principle ... Canetti's enduring commitment to a hopeless cause energizes this unusual, and unusually stirring, work.--Sam Sacks "Wall Street Journal"