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"

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"

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"

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation

Pub date: 2024-05-14

Length: 432 pages