Ten Wafer-Thin Looks at Death

One of the best-known of all wafer-thin books is also one of the greatest reflections on death in literature: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. There is something about our understanding of what it’s like to approach death and our experience of dealing with the death of people close to us that stops most pens from going on too long. Here, then, is a selection of ten well- and little-known slim books about death.

• The Death of a Nobody by Jules Romains, translated by Desmond MacCarthy and Sydney Waterlow (Signet Classics, 137 pages)
  • The Death of a Nobody was Jules Romains’ attempt to answer to an apparently simple question: when does a person die? Jacques Godard is a retired and widowed railway engineer who lives quietly in a little apartment in Paris. Romains takes us through his physical death, and then on through its aftermath, as the memory of Jacques Godard disappears from the thoughts of his neighbors, colleagues, and few remaining acquaintances in his little home town. A sobering tale for the majority of us who won’t have statues erected, streets named, or biographies written after our last departure. (For more, see this post on NeglectedBooks.com.)

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• A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Patrick O’Brian (Fitzcarraldo, Penguin, et al., 114 pages)
  • De Beauvoir records the last weeks of her mother, who is suddenly hospitalized after a fall and quickly declines after being diagnosed with cancer. Though a devout Catholic, her mother is unable to avoid feeling dread and fear as the inevitable approaches. “Death itself does not frighten me,” she tells her daughter. “It is the jump I am afraid of.” De Beauvoir’s observant, objective voice in this book has been compared to that of Joan Didion (see the slightly more than wafer-thin The Year of Magical Thinking about Didion’s coming to grips with the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne).

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• Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician by Shinmon Aoki, translated by Wayne S. Yokoyama (Buddhist Education Center, 142 pages)
  • Aoki, a writer and Shin Buddhest, takes a job in the 1970s working at a mortuary for no other reason than that he needed a job. At the time, the work was considered taboo by Japanese conventions. “You’re defiled!” his wife yells at him when she find out what he’s doing. As the book progresses, Aoki moves from his own experiences to explain the Shin Buddhist conception of death: “First, we lose our attachment to Life; at the same time we lose our fear of Death. finally, we feel peaceful and serene inside. Forgiving of all things, we enter a state where we hold all things in gratitude.”

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• In the Heave of a Sigh by Anne Philipe, translated by Helene Jervey Robinson (Wise Soul Press, 122 pages)
  • First written in the early 1960s, this is the memoir of the widow of the popular French actor Gérard Philipe, who collapsed and was hospitalized in 1959 at the age of 36. He was diagnosed with an advanced stage of liver cancer — a diagnosis his wife chose to withhold from him. “You were going to die, I would die a short time later,” she reasoned. Also published in 1964 as No Longer Than a Sigh, translated by Cornelia Schaeffer (Michael Joseph and Atheneum, 93 pages).

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• Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle (Chronicle Books, 91 pages)
  • Utterly unlike Kotzwinkle’s comic, fantastic fiction, this novella was originally published in Redbook magazine in the 1970s (back when popular US women’s magazines still carried serious fiction). It draws upon Kotzwinkle and his wife’s own experience of losing their first child at birth. In Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth, the narrator and a friend argue over their favorite books. The only one they agree on is Swimmer in the Secret Sea: “He thought it was beautifully formed, I thought it was wise and sad.”

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• Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther (Perennial Classics et al., 161 pages)
  • An account by reporter John Gunther (Inside U.S.A., Inside Europe, etc.) of the death of his son Johnny. First diagnosed in 1946, Johnny Gunther’s brain tumor and its treatment took his life barely a year later, days after he graduated from high school. This book, which Washington Post owner Katharine Graham once said was “only for the strong-minded or the very strong-hearted” used to be as ubiquitous in U.S. schools as A Separate Peace and led some young readers to fall in love with brave, handsome, stoic Johnny Gunther. It’s harder to read as a parent, though.

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• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman (Vintage, 128 pages)
  • “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together…. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on the toilet.” Forty different takes on what might follow our last breath. Funny, ingenious, shocking, moving: a tour-de-force (for my English readers, this is considered a high compliment in America and not a condescending put-down).

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• A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story by Peter Handke, translated by Ralph Mannheim (NYRB Classics et al., 96 pages)
  • An autobiographical novella based on the suicide of Handke’s mother in 1971. “My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.” Writing about her life and death, Handke decides, is a way of transforming himself into “a remembering and formulating machine.” Maggie Nelson used Sorrow as a goad in writing The Red Parts, about the trial of the man accused of killing her aunt in 1969.

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• Today by David Miller (Atlantic, 160 pages)
  • The death of the writer Joseph Conrad and the reactions of his family as observed by Lilian Mary Hallowes, his secretary. A sparely written account that manages, nevertheless, to squeeze in a cast of almost 40 characters. And using Hallowes as the narrator is a brilliant choice, as she sees (and experiences) not only shock and grief but the mixed feelings that almost any family will experience at the death of a figure who inevitably turned them into supporting players. (David Miller died in 2017, just a few years after publishing Today).

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• The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend by Sarah Manguso (Picador, 128 pages)
  • Manguso learns that a close friend of her early adulthood has committed suicide by throwing himself under a train, and this book is her reflection of his life and her own feelings in response to his death. The Guardians may be something of a milestone on the path of writing about death. As Leo Robson wrote in his Guardian review, Manguso “is less concerned with the phenomenology of grief than with the methodology of grief-writing. At every point, fear of appearing sentimental or glib or naive, rather than a range of corresponding positive ambitions, determines her approach.”