Product Description

Romanian-born E.M. Cioran moved to Paris at the age of 26, remaining there nearly six decades until his death in 1995. He was called "a sort of final philosopher of the Western world" and "the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche"; the bleak aphorisms of All Gall Is Divided make a strong case for either appellation. "With every idea born in us," he declares early on, "something in us rots." Throughout the book, he addresses the futile attempts of man to impose meaning on a meaningless existence--"That there should be a reality hidden by appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope"--and nurses an ongoing fascination with the possibilities death holds for release from life's madness. (When the Dead Kennedys sang, "I look forward to death / This world brings me down," they might as well have been taking notes from Cioran.) Grim stuff, but presented in brilliant, crystalline form--particularly in the translation by Richard Howard, which retains Cioran's cold, detached viewpoint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #557299 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-25
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .71" h x 4.44" w x 8.20" l, .60 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

From Amazon.com
Romanian-born E.M. Cioran moved to Paris at the age of 26, remaining there nearly six decades until his death in 1995. He was called "a sort of final philosopher of the Western world" and "the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche"; the bleak aphorisms of All Gall Is Divided make a strong case for either appellation. "With every idea born in us," he declares early on, "something in us rots." Throughout the book, he addresses the futile attempts of man to impose meaning on a meaningless existence--"That there should be a reality hidden by appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope"--and nurses an ongoing fascination with the possibilities death holds for release from life's madness. (When the Dead Kennedys sang, "I look forward to death / This world brings me down," they might as well have been taking notes from Cioran.) Grim stuff, but presented in brilliant, crystalline form--particularly in the translation by Richard Howard, which retains Cioran's cold, detached viewpoint.

From Publishers Weekly
Ambrose Bierce produced a small book of mordant paradoxes he called The Devil's Dictionary (1911). This is Cioran's existentialist equivalent. Often aridly clever, it can quickly elicit indigestion, but on occasion its bleak terseness strikes a chord or hints at an autobiography. Cioran (The Trouble with Being Born) was born in Romania, emigrated to France in the 1930s and died in Paris in 1995. "Inside every citizen nowadays," he writes, "lies a future alien." An outspoken non-believer, he opines, "For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa." A passionate pessimist after decades of exile, occupation and war, he insists, "To hope is to contradict the future," and "Had Noah possessed the gift of foreseeing the future, there is not a doubt in the world he would have scuttled the ark." As laconic and intense as his aphorisms appear to be, it seems obvious that his heralded translator, in playing his own word games, has often stretched the irony, sometimes vitiating it. At their sardonic bestA"Shakespeare: the rose and the ax have a rendezvous"ACioran's lines have a staying power. This is especially so when he expresses his thirst for doubt and his despairing delight in the world's contradictions. Ideas, he believes, are undermined by exhaustive analysis. Pithy cynicism is the antidote he offers. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
More dark words from our century's great connoisseur of atrophy, unreason, and despair. Aphorist and essayist Cioran (191195) is surely one of the postwar era's most unusual, original, and challenging writers. Romanian by birth, Cioran moved in 1937 to Paris, where he lived and committed to print his deeply pessimistic thoughts about the crisis and collapse of modern culture. His first book, A Short History of Decay, appeared in 1949, and his last, The Trouble with Being Born, came out in 1975 as Alzheimer's disease closed in on him. With the publication of this 1952 title, all eight of his aphoristic works have now been published in English, all superbly translated by Richard Howard, whose stature as one of our finest poets is highly relevant. Cioran's peculiar genius resides in the quality of his prose, and Howard's finely nuanced English ably conveys the gloomy ferocity of his imagination. ``By the intensity of its conflicts,'' writes Cioran in a characteristic mood, ``the sixteenth century is closer to us than any other; yet I see no Luther, no Calvin in our time. Compared to those giants, and to their contemporaries, we are pygmies promoted, by the fatality of knowledge, to a monumental destiny.'' Cioran takes nothing for granted. He strains against civilization, common sense, and reason at every point. This strain itself becomes the only positive force in his strange world: ``Adrift in the Vague, I cling to each wisp of affliction as to a drowning man's plank.'' If life is as miserable as he says it is, why not commit suicide? ``Only optimists commit suicide, Cioran explains. The optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?'' An exceptional vision of the world, exceptionally well translated. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.