Musings on Mortality

"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 modern writers: Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi. Illuminating their views on the meaning of life and the human condition, Brombert ultimately, reveals that by understanding how these authors wrote about mortality, we can grasp the full scope of their literary achievement and vision.