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On Aging: Revolt and Resignation

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Amery was not French. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to Belgium and joined the resistance in the late 1930s. He was captured in 1943 and tortured in Auschwitz, but survived to make the experience the subject of his greatest work, published in English as "At the Mind's Limits." After the war he moved permanently to Belgium and discarded his German name (Hans Mayer), replacing it with the French-sounding anagram under which his subsequent works were published. Like so many survivors of Nazi torture, he ended his own life. The essays in this collection are not profound in the same way as his Auschwitz book, but they describe the workings of a brilliant mind confronting a universal experience. They are worthy of our highest respect.

This book is a compilation of several radio lectures that the German- or Austrian-born author (the name is a pseudonym) delivered over French radio in, if memory serves, the 1950s. I confess to have made it only through the first section and part of the second. The tone is extremely bleak, the prose is difficult (all French prose defies easy translation, IMHO, and comes out sounding imprecise and windy), and the ultimate message is pretty unrewarding: It turns out that old age is even worse than you feared! Don't pick up this book looking for any solace.