I know a writer who stops reading as soon as he starts on a book. He does that, he says, because he doesn’t want his style to be polluted by others’. This is a hothouse plant, it seems, susceptible to diseases from outside. To me, it seems more advisable to contract as many of these infections as possible; Salter’s disease, Babel’s disease and more. They fortify your constitution and break the monotony of a so-called “style”, which is often nothing more than a mannerism. True style, Schopenhauer says, is reserved solely for those who have truly thought.



In A Beautiful Young Wife (translated by Sam Garrett), a successful, older microbiologist wins the heart of a woman who embodies the novella’s title. The tragedy of it is: she doesn’t make him any younger. Instead he makes her older. Standing at the mirror, he sees a beautiful young woman and a man who, at 50, wears the face he deserves.

Squinting through his electron microscope he gets the better of zoonotic viruses, but the remedy he reaches for to combat the march of the years simply magnifies his awareness of the illness that is age, a malady both progressive and incurable. His revolt against death fails, his hubris runs aground on his own limits.



1 Atomised by Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq remarks that never before in history has man spent so much time thinking about ageing and dying. When the quantity of anticipated pain becomes larger than the quantity of anticipated pleasure, he writes, taking one’s own life is the only workable prospect. The brilliant molecular biologist (as distinct from microbiologist) Michel Djerzinski, untouched by love or compassion, designs the foundations for the New Human. This new creature possesses a cell structure that allows it to reproduce into eternity, with absolutely no faulty mutations, thereby opening up the prospect of a sedated, peace-loving brand of human free of the ruthless aggression of individualism.

2. The Possibility of An Island by Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq embroiders further upon his infectious train of thought. The reader follows two incarnations of Daniel, a French comedian. The first, on whom all newer and better clones are based, suffers from every single bane of existence, while the 24th incarnation of Daniel lives in gentle, everlasting light. Inside him, however, there lives on an echo of the avidity that has led mankind to its downfall. It is more or less impossible to think about the total lack of desire and pleasure without feeling slightly nauseous. We are enamoured of our misery and addicted to our fate. Human shortcomings are the only thing that make our species vaguely interesting. Without vices, the life of a man is about as interesting as that of a roundworm.

3. My Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

Canetti picks up the lance with all the earnest of a Don Quixote. In a hefty collection of reflections, he tries to outflank death and render it innocuous. Whereas Montaigne advised us to rob Death of his strangeness and tip our hats to him in passing, Canetti went on for 52 years formulating his energetic exorcisms, afraid of all the things that will not happen after death. He is an endearing patriot of life, and declares his love for living in precisely the same, simple words Meister Eckhart used seven centuries earlier: “I live so that I may live.”

4. Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel

Babel situated these stories against the backdrop of a campaign against the Poles in 1920, and in doing so rose like a sun above the horizon of Russian literature. The Cossacks take the lives of Jews, Poles and kulaks with indifference – with nonchalant ease, they again and again cross the ultimate boundary that is the taking of another human life. “Then I stomped my master Nikitinsky,” one of his Cossacks says, because he refuses to end his enemy’s life with a bullet. “I stomp the enemy for an hour, or more than an hour, because I want to get to know life, what life’s all about.”

‘Rich beyond all dreams, but doomed’ … Antoine de Saint-Éxupery posing in front of his plane. Saint-Éxupery was piloting a Lightning P-38 jetfighter when he disappeared during a reconnaissance mission in the Mediterranean in 1944. Photograph: STF/EPA

5. Burning the Days by James Salter

Among the family portraits at Salter’s house in Bridgehampton, there hung a picture of Isaac Babel, a close relation. Both men were soldiers. Babel on horseback, Salter in a plane. He knew the passion of the hunt in dying light above enemy territory. Every pilot is an heir to Icarus. Burning the Days is his processing of his days as a fighter pilot, ladies’ man and young writer. He writes about the lives of the gods, about living like a god. “Frailty, human though it may be, interests me less.”

6. Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery

During his training, Salter crashed his plane into a residential neighborhood. He survived. The pilot of the mail plane in this novel will not. Trapped between approaching storm fronts and with his fuel gauge bottoming out, he is forced to climb ever higher. He knows what his end will be, he knows how and when. Serene, reconciled with death, he and the radio operator soar above glimmering cloud banks in the milky light of moon and stars. “Among these frozen jewels they were wandering, rich beyond all dreams, but doomed.”

7. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

The characters in this novel reach for the stars, under the influence of every kind of hard drug they can get their hands on. They are children of the rush and enemies of the hangover. They, too, are heirs to Icarus. They all end up dead or insane, but not before they have sat down at the table with Jesus and shot dice with his father. (God cheated.)

8. You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett

This collection provides a peerless case of a mind cut loose. In the story Notes to My Biographer, the narrator is a manic inventor, who has applied for 26 patents and outlived three wives. We are slowly sucked into his psychotic delusions, his powerful, manic energy. His son is at his wits’ end. He weeps. The last sentence is unforgettable: “In the distance the shimmering pier juts into the vast darkness of the ocean like a burning ship launched into the night.”

9. Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche

This looks like a book of runaway hubris, but that’s not quite right. Not long after Nietzsche wondered aloud in it how much truth a person can bear, he provided the answer himself by embracing a horse he saw being whipped in the streets of Turin. He paid for his mutiny against the gods with 12 years of madness. Our rebellions against the limits imposed on us by gravity, biology, the stupidity of others and death itself bear witness to our hubris and our urge to be free. Nietzsche knew that his name would one day be linked to “a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.” Hubris confirmed by the course of events is not hubris, but a prevision of destiny.

10. All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir

Anyone who fears death would do well to read this novel. Raymond Fosca doesn’t imagine that he is immortal, he actually is. After sipping an elixir of eternal youth, he has now spent six centuries in the hell of eternal repetition. Reluctantly, he allows himself to be swept away by love once more – in the knowledge that it will all lead to naught. The girl will die some day, while he himself will live on for a century of centuries. This book teaches the reader the most important lesson of all: relief at one’s own mortality.