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| Victor Brombert (photo from dailyprincetonian.com) |
I see in the Times that Victor Brombert died. He wrote a great little book called Musings on Mortality (2013), in which he traces the theme of death through the works of eight novelists – Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Woolf, Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi. Of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, he wrote,
Tolstoy’s singular achievement is that he conveys Ivan Ilych’s terror in the face of death not in philosophical or abstract terms but as a subjective and visceral experience.
On Camus’s The Plague:
The horrors of the epidemic – the inguinal fevers, the inflamed buboes, the dreadful agonies, the piles of corpses, the smell of death – should press home a lesson in reality.
On Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis:
Death viewed through the filter of time is the main theme of Bassani’s novel. The prologue unfolds under the triple sign of tombs, mourning, and memory.
Death is one of literature's great themes. Brombert tracked it brilliantly.
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