Book Review: The Book Against Death

By Conor Barnes 🔶 @ 2025-04-22T01:12 (+12)

This is a linkpost to https://parhelia.conorbarnes.com/p/book-review-the-book-against-death

Though Elias Canetti is best known for his book Crowds and Power, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his genre-spanning works—including a novel, plays, and memoirs—he considered his intended masterwork, The Book Against Death, “the only book that I was born to write”. He was never able to begin it. Instead, he accumulated notes for the unwritten book until he died in 1994. These notes were gathered and posthumously published as The Book Against Death in German in 2014, and a few months ago in English, translated by Peter Filkins.

As somebody having recently written a book about death, I ordered it immediately upon learning of it. The notes, organised chronologically and grouped by year, are aphorisms, fragments, quotations, stories of individual deaths, stories of cultural rituals around death, diary entries, and more. They are full of a vigorous hatred of death, and my own words cannot do justice to his fervour.

The notes become more cynical over time, more exhausted — his frustration at not having written his book is painful to read. The final years of his life are marked by how much world history events troubled him and how his hatred of death did not diminish.

I am left pitying that he seems to have never encountered transhumanist writing. Though he saw death as inevitable, and had concerns around genetic manipulation, I like to think that he would have found profound joy in knowing his hatred of death did not make him an orphan of European continental thought but rather a cousin in a family of technologists.

Canetti does not merely hate the death of old age, but death in all its forms (and it’s notable how little he writes of his own aging and his own anxiety at the end of his life). Above all is his hatred of war, mass death, and those who maintain their power through killing others.

While I've been reading the book, I've also been reading John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis and have found the pairing quite powerful. I can't read Green’s book without crying ,and whenever the sorrow of that book overwhelms me, Canetti’s note from 1944 comes to mind: “Dear God, let them all live!”

The book benefits from Canetti’s literary depth. I quite enjoyed his literary references from central Europe (he lived in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Vienna). It also benefits from the fact that his long life bridged the old and new world of Europe. I was startled while reading his final notes. A little after he ruminates on Saddam Hussein he visits the cemetery where his tombstone shall be and reflects on the curiosity that James Joyce’s tombstone is very nearby. The startling thing is Canetti's brief aside that Joyce attended a reading of his in the 1930s and did not like Canetti.

Why read this book? For all of us who want to eliminate suffering, I think it is good to read the work of somebody who hated death, who comes from his own intellectual tradition, as an example of someone who refused the temptation to treat resignation as wisdom.

Most of all, to paraphrase Canetti, I also think that we become inured to death. This book can help to shake us out of this inurement. This is an unpleasant shaking, but it helps to remember that confronting death can be easier for us than it was for him — it is not impossible that in the decades to come we will defeat disease, achieve biological immortality, and find a way to put away the sword of mass death hanging over us. There is a little hope and much work to be done. I hope that readers of this book are invigorated to do that work, and I strongly recommend its reading.

I want to share a few of the notes I marked. These are not representative but are the notes that struck me most — which tended to err away from lengthier notes and his diary entries and erred toward his exhortations to himself and his thoughts on animals.

Highlights

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.

1943

• The most audacious thing about life is that it hates death, and the religions that obliterate this hate are contemptible and desperate.
• And what is the original sin of the animals? Why do animals suffer death?
• O, the animals, beloved, savage, dying animals; flailing about, gobbled up, digested and consumed; digested and rotting in their own blood; fleeing, conjoined, lonely, spotted, hounded, shattered; uncreated, robbed by God, abandoned to an illusory life like foundlings!

1944

• Dear God, let them all live! Let all who are already dead return! Let us all joyfully see those whom we have never yet known!

1947

• If the entire ocean were poisoned, as well as all other bodies of water, and humans were to avoid any contact with water, as it would be deadly to do so, then, and only then, would we be able to fully grasp what it means to live in this world today.
• Adam strangles God; Eve looks on.

1951

• You are always asked what you mean when you berate death. They only want cheap hopes doled out by religions ad nauseam. But I know nothing. I have nothing to say about it. My character, my pride stems from the fact that I have never flattered death. Like anyone I have sometimes, very rarely, wished for it, but there is no one who has ever heard me offer a single word of praise for death, nor can anyone say that I have bowed to it, or that I have ever accepted or validated it. It seems to me as useless and wicked as ever, the fundamental curse at the heart of existence, the unresolved and incomprehensible, the knot in which everything has always been tied up and captured, and which no one has ever dared slice through.
• We would have to conceive of a world in which murder never existed. In such a world what would all other crimes look like?

1954

• How clever was the Buddha's father! And how shameful is the legend of the Buddha's first encounter with aging, illness, and death! Would it all have been different if his father had introduced him to someone who was aging, ill, and dying when he was a boy, such as playmates or pets, such as dancers, women, and musicians?

1955

• Tell stories, tell stories, until no one else dies. A thousand and one nights, a million and one nights.

1956

• Each year should be one day longer than the previous: a new day on which nothing has ever happened before, a day on which no one has died.

1962

• [..] I am too old. I hate hardly anything. I have reached the point where one likes everything simply because it is there. I am beginning to grasp for the first time that there are philosophers who say that all that exists is good. It's true, the disciples of death still fill me with disgust. Yet I have found no solution. I am consumed with the same doubt as always. I know that death is horrible. What I do not know is what can replace it.

1964

• A society in which people suddenly disappear, but no one knows that they are dead, as there is no death, there is not even a word for it, which pleases them.

1967

• The greatest struggle in life is to not become inured to death.
• And what if God had withdrawn from Creation out of shame for having created death?

1977

• "You go to sleep," he says to the child, "but you don't wake up again." "But I always wake up!" the child says joyfully.

1978

• The last book that he reads: unimaginable.
• There is no such thing as a dignified death. For others there are only deaths that can be forgotten. These, too, are undignified.
• "How do the immortals measure time?" written in a notebook, January 1932
• "The first blessings of extended life we will most likely extend to animals. We will gaze at ancient mice and guinea pigs like we do petrified snails today." written in a notebook, June 1932

1980

• For me it is not about abolishing it, which is not possible. It's about condemning it.
• The greatest secret of any person is the date he will die. It is no less so just because I've written something about it.
• That animals eat each other is not horrendous, for what do they know of death! Rather it's that humans, who know what death is, continue to kill, that is what is horrendous.
• [...] But we would not detest anyone if we knew they would soon die. [...]

1982

• Any opposition to death can appear to be only about your own death. That would be too little. That would be nothing at all. How can I make it obvious enough and beyond any doubt that what I am really opposed to is death, and less so the brvity of life, as opposed to the consequence of death--which poisons every thought. Death is our cancer, it infects everything, it cuts into every life, it is everywhere and always possible. You reckon with it, even when you least expect to. What's astonishing is that we live as if we had nothing to do with death. This duality: that we encounter it everywhere and nevertheless behave as if we can avoid it, that everyone recognizes its worthiness and yet some deny it (since we build houses, make plans, give assurances)--this duality is a kind of fundamental falseness at the heart of existence.

1983

• A race between medicine and nuclear physics. Neither has reached the finish line.

1985

• There, each is haunted by the ghosts of animals they have eaten, until he breaks down and confesses.

1988

• No death ever ends.

1990

• The "childish" thing about you is that seventy-eight years after the death of your father, when you were seven, you still have not accepted it. This childishness, precisely this kind of childishness, is what the world really needs.
• In sparing animals, a person grows younger. It's the hunt that makes him old.
• A machine gun capable of firing as many shots as there are people who are still alive.

1991

• All who missed out on life. All who were never loved. All who could not love. All who could not watch over a child. All who never traveled to other countries. All who never knew the many different kinds of animals. All who never heard a foreign language. All who were never astonished by faith. All who did not wrestle with death. All who were not overcome by the need to know. All who were not allowed to forget how much they knew. All who never swayed. All who never said no. All whose stomach never made them feel ashamed. All who did not dream of the end of murder. All who let their memories be stolen. All who never succumbed to their pride. All not ashamed of the honors conferred. All who did not shrink away, who could not disappear. All who could not lie unless it was for a good cause. All who did not tremble before the lightning bolt of truth. All who did not hunger for dead gods. All who were not comfortable with those whose talk they could not understand a word of. All who did not free any slaves. All who did not drown in compassion, who were ashamed that they had never killed anyone. All who did not allow themselves to be located out of gratitude. All who refused to vacate the Earth. All who could never forget what an enemy is. All who could never be freed from their honest ways. All who never gave too little. All who never let themselves be deceived, and all who let themselves forget how badly they were deceived. All who were not beheaded by their own hubris, all who did not smile knowingly. All who did not laugh magnanimously. All the lives missed out on.

1994

• It is time for me to sort matters out again within myself. Without writing I come undone. I sense how my life dissolves into dead, dull speculation when I no longer write down what is on my mind. I will try to change that.