“All art and the love of art,” Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of
the deeply personal 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 penetrating 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 vastly 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 and the
growing sense of a collective historical tragedy. 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. For Kafka and Woolf, writing seems to hold
the promise of salvation, though that promise is seen as ambiguous and even
deceptive, while Coetzee, writing about violence and apartheid South
Africa, is deeply concerned with a sense of disgrace. 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.