Cioran is a little bit one note for sure - you despite this being a collection of wide-ranging aphorisms, he achieves a remarkable unity of tone and topic over the length of this book. On the surface, you might find his writing to be almost absurdly depressive - he put a lot of work into writing about being sad, anxious, and petty. But as a fellow depressive I can relate to his lines of thought. For me, depression doesn’t spring from pain or really even sadness. Rather it’s a void where no feeling can enter, a think wall of opaque jelly that separates you from the world, a world that you very much want to participate in but feel incapable of, separated as you are from the causeways of living. Throughout this book, Cioran develops a line of thought that has as many connections with Buddhist conceptions of life as suffering and abnegation of the self as it does with any kind of western pessimism or cynicism.
I think it’s a bit deceptive to call this a work of philosophy. If you read the book, you’ll see pretty quickly that Cioran doesn’t have much patience for philosophers. Instead, this seems to me to be a man struggling to in the first place, justify his desire to live in the face of the meaningless of existence, and secondly to articulate and exorcise the neurosises that keep him from taking part in the world, where we are given so little time to feel and experience so much. Cioran mentions an affinity for diary and letter writing - this seems to me to be a kind of polished up notebook, or, if it he had been writing today, a very highbrow Twitter stream. Personally, i like this style very much, and it jives very well with the author’s sensibility. ( )

There are many truths written in this book of anachronisms. Too bad it will never make any difference in this wicked world. ( )

Cioran gives us 12 chapters of epigrams on how suffering is joy, how wonderful it is to be miserable, and how anyone with an ounce of introspection or reflection would jump off the nearest cliff immediately.

It gets pretty old pretty quick, though there is usually a good one every page or so.

This seems to suffer from translation difficulties. As is usually the case with philosophy, the translator seems to have chosen words which are precisely the same in meaning as the originals, and ignoring idiom entirely. This always fails: philosophers may flatter themselves that their words have precision, but they are not mathematicians (nor even logicians, generally), and as such they rely on idiom more than they care to admit. ( )

E. M. Cioran (Rumanía, 1911-Francia, 1995), tras obtener una beca del Instituto Francés para cursar el doctorado, fijó su residencia en París en 1937. Entre las obras de este rumano singular, apátrida desde 1946, que escribía en francés y acabó obsesionado con España, destacan Breviario de podredumbre, La tentación de existir, Ensayo sobre el pensamiento reaccionario y otros textos, El aciago demiurgo, Del inconveniente de haber nacido, Desgarradura, Ese maldito yo, De lágrimas y santos e Historia y utopía.

Wenn es Dir mal zu gut geht, lies dieses Buch, dann hat sich das schnell erledigt. ( )