The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

The Book Against Deathis 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, Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser.

‘Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalenceFar 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, New York Review of Books

‘Canetti invites – indeed, compels – judgement. His exacting presence honours literature.’
— George Steiner, 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, New Yorker

‘One of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius.’
— Iris Murdoch

‘The erudition is genuinely awe-inspiring.’
— Salman Rushdie

‘Before there was the mysterious W. G. Sebald, there was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti’
— Clive James, New York Times

‘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 Bruyère and Lichtenberg.’
— Swedish Academy, Nobel Prize in Literature 1981

‘This heterogeneous collage of vignettes, literary theory and personal musings against the notion of dying, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Auto-da-Fé (1947), is stitched together by a humorous, analytically sharp tone, with a healthy dose of anger and despair.’
— Ivana Cholakova, Frieze

‘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.’
— Raymond Williams (praise for Auto da Fé)

‘One of the few undoubted masterpieces of our time.’
— John Davenport (praise for Auto da Fé)

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-Fé; and the nonfiction book Crowds and Power.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781804270899
ISBN 10	180427089X
Title	The Book Against Death
Author	Elias Canetti
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Year published	2024-06-06
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.