Emil Cioran wrote for sixty years about the pointlessness of writing, preached suicide, and died at eighty-four. He is quoted more than almost any thinker of the last century and read less than almost any. His admirers treat him as an atmosphere. His detractors treat him as a pose. Both agree, without noticing that they agree, that his sentences are not the sort of thing one checks.

This book checks them.

Thirty-three of his central claims are stated plainly, given the strongest case that can be made for them, and then tested to see whether they survive. The results satisfy nobody. On the location of the human catastrophe, on why clear sight paralyzes, on utopia as a longing for the end of history, on conviction as the reliable seed of violence, on boredom as the naked experience of time, he holds up under pressure, and holding him up is not comfortable. On the value of a life never lived, on the exit he kept advertising, on the wisdom he attributed to his own insomnia, he collapses, and he collapses loudest where he is most often quoted.

Out of the wreckage a single pattern rises. Cioran is an exceptionally accurate witness to the human situation and an unreliable accountant of what that situation costs. He sees the wound and misreads the invoice. Correcting the arithmetic does not produce optimism. It produces something stranger and more usable: a picture in which the exits are closed, the complaint is withdrawn, and the only remaining skill worth acquiring is how to lose without conceding that a loss has occurred.

A book for listeners who have met the famous lines and suspected there was either more there or less.