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Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi by Victor Brombert (Hardcover, 2013)

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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.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
The University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13
9780226062358
eBay Product ID (ePID)
182936492

Product Key Features

Book Title
Musings on Mortality: from Tolstoy to Primo Levi
Author
Victor Brombert
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Topic
Literature
Publication Year
2013
Number of Pages
200 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
226mm
Item Width
152mm
Item Weight
388g

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Victor Brombert
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi by Victor Brombert (Hardcover, 2013)

About this product

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

Dimensions

Additional Product Features

Best Selling in Books

The Concise 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene (Paperback, 2002)

First Day by Andrew Daddo (Paperback, 2014)

Save on Books

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