Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

With sensitivity and insight, Princeton University emeritus literature professor Bromberg (Trains of Thought) studies the work of eight 20th-century authors and their literary approaches to mortality and death. He notes that Tolstoy’s singular achievement in The Death of Ivan Ilyich is his depiction of death, “not in philosophical or abstract terms but as a subjective and visceral experience.” By contrast, Aschenbach’s fatal dalliance in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice can be interpreted as representing the peril of aestheticism for an artist in thrall to Dionysian desires. In Franz Kafka’s narratives of entrapment, death is “an ever-lasting reality of pain in the present—not in fact death, but a permanent dying,” while in Camus’s The Plague, a “lethal microbe” serves as a metaphor for blind adherence to ideology. Brombert also examines suicidal ideation and the trauma of WWI in the writings of Virginia Woolf, genocidal imagery in the apartheid fictions of J.M. Coetzee, and reflections on the Holocaust in the work of Giorgio Bassani and Primo Levi. The simplicity and directness of Brombert’s style gives his discussion of the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of the works under scrutiny great clarity, and his study of the authors in their native languages allows him to discuss nuances of the text that might otherwise have been lost in translation. Agent: Chris Calhoun, Chris Calhoun Agency. (Oct.)