The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

I read this on a glowing screen, huddled under my striped duvet, very late at night—a cozy spot for cuddling up with this manic scrapbook of death. It is culled from some 2,000 pages of notes, book extracts, one-liners, and news clippings Canetti compiled between 1937 and his death in 1994. 

The material is organized chronologically. Year after year, Canetti rails against death, his ardor and resistance undimmed, his outrage ever-keen at all loss of life. He finds it unnatural—an affront, an abomination, a theft, a crime, unjust and inhumane no matter the circumstance. 

Initially, this struck me as absurd; after all, aren’t death and life inextricable? But slowly, awe crept in; humility, too. Canetti’s outrage pierces the heart, because he insists there is no small loss: loss is loss. And in his time, same as our own, the impulse to diminish, to calculate, to minimize or balance death and what it represents is always omnipresent. Canetti never succumbs to this. For him, any death is always a total tragedy, an irreparable harm, an attack. Sebastián Sanchéz, in a review for Asymptote, writes, “The Book Against Death represents something of a guerilla campaign: the death of death via a thousand cuts, with the weapon of a thousand aphorisms and ephemera. To read it is to experience a sustained, gradual expansion of one’s conception of what death is, and the role it plays in human life.”

I found this book deeply helpful in protecting my own sense of outrage from erosion in this era of horrors.