The Book Against Death

Nobel laureate Canetti (Auto-Da-Fé) began working on this sublime compendium following the death of his mother in the late 1930s, using his grief as a window onto the mounting human toll of WWII (“Canetti clings to his mother’s demise as generalized Thanatos mobilizes all around him,” writes Joshua Cohen in his introduction). Canetti continued adding to the work until his death in 1994, when it was left unfinished at more than 2,000 pages (this first-ever published edition is an abridgement). Setting himself up as an enemy of death (“I accept no death”), Canetti collects aphorisms, anecdotes, quotations, myths, and newspaper clippings, using them to ruminate on ways to defeat his adversary (discussions veer from medieval saints who seemed to evade death to bacteria who procreate by dividing, thus skipping death altogether). As the collection progresses, the inexhaustible stream of arresting insights and assertions (“Murderers also bring flowers to a grave”; “He died in his sleep. But in what dream?”) becomes complicated by Canetti’s reckoning with death’s persistence, as world events in the 1980s seem to him to reproduce the terrible carnage of the past. Critiquing himself as a failure, he nevertheless refuses to disavow the righteousness of his project, or to stop “looking for the place where everyone remains alive.” It’s a profoundly moving revolt against the very idea of inevitability. (Aug.)