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In ‘The Book Against Death,’ Elias Canetti rants against mortality

Elias Canetti described “The Book Against Death” as “the only book that I was born to write;” it was also a book he could not finish, or even properly start.

He grew up in Bulgaria, England, Switzerland, Austria and Germany, and by adulthood he spoke Ladino, Bulgarian, English, French and, above all, German, the language in which he wrote the masterpieces that earned him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1981. His memoirs are full of passionate accounts of his omnivorous reading, and in “The Book Against Death” he is capable of referencing a scholarly article about elephants in one breath and the writings of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in the next. No line better distills the tender spirit of “The Book Against Death” than this: “Above all, when I am dead, what I will miss: the voices of people in a restaurant.” Canetti did not fret about the state of his soul; he worried himself sick about the fate of all the detritus that makes up a life:

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