Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

“Elegant, beautifully written literary criticism, examining how eight major writers—‘From Tolstoy to Primo Levi’—dealt with death in their fiction.” —The Wall Street Journal

“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.

Winner of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks award for outstanding literary criticism.

“Suffused with wisdom and argued with the strong hand of a weathered and feeling literary scholar. . . . 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

“A brave and eloquent book.” — Peter Brooks, author of Henry James Goes to Paris

“The simplicity and directness of Brombert’s style gives his discussion of the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of the works under scrutiny great clarity.” —Publishers Weekly

“Brombert’s eloquently written book is for serious lovers of literature.” —Library Journal

© 2013 The University of Chicago Press (Ebook): 9780226070933

Release date

Ebook: 15 October 2013