E. M. Cioran has been called the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche and "a sort of final philosopher of the Western world" who "combines the compassion of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning" (Washington Post). All Gall Is Divided is the second book Cioran published in French after moving from his native Romania and establishing himself in Paris. It revealed him as an aphorist in a long tradition descending from the ancient Greeks through La Rochefoucault but with a gift for lacerating, subversively off-kilter insights, a twentieth-century nose for the absurdities of the human condition, and what Baudelaire called "spleen."
The aphorisms collected here address themes from the atrophy of utterance and the condition of the West to the abyss, solitude, time, religion, music, the vitality of love, history, and the void. The award-winning poet and translator Richard Howard has characterized them as "manic humor, howls of pain, and a vestige of tears," but, as he notes too, in these expressions of the philosopher's existential estrangement, there glows "a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls 'amertume.'"
"Pitched at the knotty hearts of bruisers like being, suffering, self-knowledge, and despair, [the aphorisms in All Gall Is Divided] are themselves somewhat effervescent . . . with a slippery comedy that in true double-take fashion actually heightens the seriousness."
The New York Times Book Review
"More dark words from our century's great connoisseur of atrophy, unreason, and despair. . . An exceptional vision of the world, exceptionally well translated."
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Cioran's work serves as antidote to a world gone mad for bedside affirmation."
