The Book Against Death

The Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti all his life declared himself a “mortal enemy” of death—and here, in English at last, is his landmark book on the subject

The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Elias Canetti’s powerful, disarming, and often bleakly comic observations, diatribes, musings, and commentaries on and against death. Evoking despair, melancholy, and fury, Canetti examines the inevitable demise of all beings—from the ant, the fish, and the worm to an executioner, a court painter, and a Greek god—while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Interspersed with material from philosophers and writers such as Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser, The Book Against Death is ultimately a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.

Canetti famously refused to die before he’d read all his obituaries and corrected them.

“I accept no death.”—Elias Canetti (1905–1994)