The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

Bulgarian literature

Original title – Das Buch gegen den Tod

Translator – Peter Filkins

Source – Subscription book

I should have got to Canetti sooner than this. I have Aut de Fe, his best-known novel, on my shelf and his non-fiction writing from his time in the blitz in London. Born in Bulgaria, he spent his first few years in Manchester. His mother then moved him back to central Europe. They eventually settled in Vienna. He spoke many languages and was the perfect example of the Jewish intellect in central Europe in those pre-war years. He escaped and was in London in the war. He wrote in German he started this book in the war years. A book that has years of him raging against death was abridged from over 20000 pages of notes he had on the subject and other thoughts he had collected together with the idea of the book against death. This came out after his death and was distilled to a few hundred pages.

15 June 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

I fear living historians. If they’re dead, I read them gladly.

I ;loved the last line about historians

He talks early on in the book about how the book came to him five years after his mother’s death. He seemed to have lost both his parents when he was at a young age. In addition to the war, it is easy to see why young Elias raged so much against death. He deals with death from mass deaths he mentions Saddam Hussein a lot in this regard. Then, To The Death of Saints, which discusses how writers have tackled death, is a book that goes from here to there. What comes across is a humanist view of the battle against death and how he tackled it in his life. He talks about a fellow writer I love, Thomas Bernhard, and yes, he likes him as a writer, but isn’t he obsessed with death? This is a man wandering in his thoughts, getting snippets of his fellow writers as he tries to learn what dearth is by raging against it. He is very much the character Dylan Thomas had in mind when he said rage against the night!

Everyone asks me about Thomas Bernhard, everyone wants to know what I think of him. I praise him and explain what he’s about, I try to help others better understand him. I elevate him to my disciple, and naturally he is, and in a much deeper sense than someone like Iris Murdoch, who is always so pleasant and light, while underneath it all she has become a brilliant and amusing popular writer. She is not really a disciple of mine, because she is so obsessed with gender. However, Thomas Bernhard is obsessed with death.

On the other hand, in recent years he has come under the influence of another, which conceals my own, namely that of Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria makes him susceptible to Beckett. Like him he gives in to death, rather than opposing it. He sees it everywhere and passively damns all to it.

Therefore I think that now, because of his empowerment through Beckett, Bernhard is somewhat overrated, but overrated by the higher-ups: the Germans have found their own Beckett in him.

The entanglement of my influence on Bernhard with that of Beckett is curious and obvious. It’s a little too simple to really please me. So, I declare here, for myself, that I have defended him too much out of generosity. I am not entirely sure if it serves him.

His thought around Thomas Bernhard

I know that post-war, he struggled to write another novel. One wonders if all this collection and raging against dearth was his way of dealing with the horror of the war years and the wiping out of his central European Jewish world. This is maybe his momento mori. He never quite finished. Part of me would happily love to have seen the total 2000 pages that made up his vision of the project even if he never got to thin it down I imagine there are some real gems to be uncovered from one of Europe’s leading thinkers of the time. I hope to get Auto de Fe read next year. I like this. I had hoped for something, maybe a little more digression and drifting, as this is collected in the years from 1942 until his death. One wonders how he would collect them if he had got around to it? But this is an exciting view of one man’s fifty-year struggle to deal with death. Have you a favourite book about death?