Musings on Mortality

All art and the love of art," Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of Musings on Mortality, "allow us to negate our nothingness." As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed himself in literature. Death can be found everywhere in literature, he saw, but literature itself is on the side of life. With delicacy and insight, Brombert traces the theme of mortality in the work of a group of authors who wrote during the past century and a half, teasing out and comparing their views of death as they emerged from different cultural contexts. Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi-these are the writers whose works Brombert plumbs, illuminating their views on the meaning of life and the human condition. But there is more to their work, he shows, than a pervasive interest in mortality: they wrote not only of physical death but also of the threat of moral and spiritual death - and as the twentieth century progressed, they increasingly reflected on the traumatic events of their times.He probes the individual struggle with death, for example, through Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych and Mann's Aschenbach, while he explores the destruction of whole civilizations in Bassani, Camus, and Primo Levi. Throughout the book, Brombert roots these writers' reflections in philosophical meditations on mortality. Ultimately, he reveals that by understanding how these authors wrote about mortality, we can grasp the full scope of their literary achievement and vision. Drawing deeply from the well of Brombert's own experience, Musings on Mortality is more than mere literary criticism: it is a moving and elegant book for all to learn and live by.

"Musings on Mortality is a book suffused with wisdom and argued with the strong hand of a weathered and feeling literary scholar. To treat such tragic and inconsolable subject matter with such clarity and respect, with such equanimity and understanding, is to levitate above it, in stoic courage and willed serenity. It is hard to imagine such thematic criticism being done better than here. What a beautiful book." -Thomas Harrison, author of 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance"

Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor Emeritus of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and the wartime memoir Trains of Thought.