Customer Reviews

Anathemas and Admirations

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Although Ciorans general views on human existance are, typically enough, dark and desilussioned, his ideas and his voice are tremendously funny.Which should warn most of the readers, I suppose: this is not a book for energetic, life-craving people. But this Roumanian, who lived a lonely life in Paris, makes excellent reading in spite of what one might call an overall negative - and highly selfcritical- atitude to human existance. For Cioran, human weaknesses are not only prevailing human grandour, they also carry more "weight", as they are simply more truly human than the later. And how funny he is! I Can`t quote, unfortunatelly, as I don`t have the book with me, but Anathemas` short and poignant passages will make you laugh - that is if your attitude to life lets you pass through the books` initial (and apparent) gloominess. Give it a chance, and you might confirm some of your anxieties or soothe your apathy, only this time in company of great intellectual force, and with a scornfull, yet benevolent smile for the feeling of desilussionment.

Compared to his early, tortured writing this collection of later pieces is warm and funny. Not to say that Cioran has dropped his nihilistic stance, but a laconic, slightly more personal and witty voice predominates. My favourite book from Cioran.

This collection of cryptic and oblique pronouncements are from a man who is someone other than the "connoisseur of despair". Cioran's erudition is vast; this is not some guy who whips off nihilism like it was some intellectual flash-in-the-pan.

These laconic and sometimes witty, sometimes caustic aphorisms alternate with terse personal essays on friends and influences: Valery, Samuel Beckett, Mircea Eliade, Henri Michaux, Borges, and Scott Fitzgerald (?!).

Some of these thoughts and fragments seem like non-sequiturs generated in the darkness of lonely insomnia plagued Parisian nights. Many are so obtuse that comprehension is left scratching its head. Still, like one who finds a gold nugget in the streambed, the rare saying makes the search all worth while. Here are a few of the nuggets I found:

"Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions"

"To die is to change genre, to renew oneself . . ."

"Writing is the creature's revenge, and his answer to a botched creation"

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

"The principal defect of philosophy lies in the fact that academic philosophy is too bearable..." wrote Cioran (too bitterly for the general main stream); born 1911 in Romania, died 1995 in Paris: these two basic data of the CIORAN-curriculum vitae already are marking the subtle personal traumata: being divided by two very different cultural identities. Still loving Romania but emigrated and living safely in France, however not willing to integrate with French society he remained stateless not accepting any national identity. Obstinate he refused to receive the highest literary awards of his host country. Lost in exile - this was the everlasting frame of his mind. In an enthusiastic manner in his early years he engaged himself politically defending his Romania. Later on he was ashamed of such affectations and classified such poses as delirium, "kitsch", scrupulousness. High-skeptically he wrote, referring to the possibility of finding the real truth: "After all I know, that all these ideas and dogmatic thoughts are wrong and absurd. At last only human beings remain. And they are what they are. I am cured of the illness, to follow any ideology." Cioran liked characters as Nietzsche, Beethoven, Luther, Rousseau: He adored their individual strength to resist against the surrounding societies - he loved the stubbornness of these famous thinkers - though sometimes obstinacy seemed to be a subject for psychiatrists. During all his life in exile the backbone of his Romanian identity was broken and Cioran did not allow himself to use Romanian language any more (remember Elias Canetti and his metaphor of the "robbed tongue" and the phenomenon of hating fragments of the own identity and history). Cioran was attracted by the chronic despair of Soeren Kierkegaard and the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. His university diploma he wrote about the thesis of the "Elan Vital" in the writings of the French existence-philosopher Henri Bergson. "Elan Vital" for Cioran indeed did not mean cheerfulness - but alike an Arthur Schopenhauer or an Ambrose Bierce, filled with a badly mixture of too much brain and bile, he enjoyed to produce cool, relaxed and slyly cynical aphorisms ...

Each has his own ratio of universal fear embodying soul and mind. We cannot escape otherwise but deepening ourselves in it as much as each of us can. Thus, the fear gets tired of itself and this is what Cioran teaches us. Never avoiding the fear. Face it!

I have to be careful with whom I discuss Cioran. He is mordant, life un-affirming, and misanthropic, but he is also witty and an excellent stylist. This text has the best of both his approaches to prose: aphorisms and brief essays. The quips are as deadly as always and there is an essay formatted as a letter that shares Cioran's sentiments about Borges; I enjoyed reading one of my favorite authors on the topic of another one of my favorite authors.

Recommended to any literary type with a taste for black humor and well crafted prose.

Suspicious words are necessarily those that would try to qualify Cioran's life and works. Contradiction in the act of writing and thinking is one of Cioran's accepted facts.

His name should be futility, what an elegant, lush and ethical futility.

I miss you Emil... so much!