Description
In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the projectthat by definition, he could never live to complete', astranslator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword.The BookAgainst Deathis the work of a lifetime: a collection ofCanetti's aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentarieson and against death published in English for the firsttime since his death in 1994 interspersed with materialfrom philosophers and writers including Goethe, WalterBenjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981Nobel Prize in Literature laureate is a disarming and oftendarkly comic reckoning with the inevitability of death andwith its politicization, evoking despair at the loss of lovedones and the impossibility of facing one's own death,while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred duringwar and the willingness of the despot to wield death aspower. Infused with fervour and vitality,The Book AgainstDeathultimately forms a moving affirmation of the valueof life itself.<
