Why read a book or see a movie about death? I told my mother-in-law that I was reading a number of graphic memoirs about cancer, surviving it or not, and she asked me, "Why would you even do that?" I answered her that I thought it was interesting how people faced this all-too-common terrible disease, and even death. My wife says, "I'm not sure why you would want to read something so sad," but she does read dystopian books all the time, which she says are sci fi and not the same thing, and maybe I'd agree, in a sense.
The argument may in a sense be about real vs. cartoon violence, though I am sure the writers of dystopian novels wouldn't want readers to dismiss their work as mere fantasy or escapism. I guess as a life long English major/teacher, I am inclined--as is all English studies--to read more tragedy than comedy, to read about, as Woody Allen noted in his film: Love and Death, so that one might find more "significance" or "meaning" there. So I like to read about death, it interests me. My parents are dead, I'm 60, most of my 20 sets of uncles and aunts are now dead, but I don't think it's just psychoanalytic; I think I was always interested in it; it's a serious subject, and I like to see how a great writer deals with it.
I expect to die, and would like to attend to that fact instead of ignore it. In the fall I read Anna Karenina and I found powerful how Tolstoy describes the death of Levin's brother, so traumatic for him. But I was equally impressed in my late teens or early twenties reading Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illych" on the same subject. I liked John Green's The Fault in Our Stars with a similar theme. I liked Warren Zevon's last album, done while he was dying of cancer, and Johnny Cash's last album, accomplished under the same conditions, though neither were their best works. Just: facing that, as artists, because that's what they do, they use their art, and language, to help us see what that was like for them. As we will have to do. I think of Beckett, Waiting for Godot and all his work, making meaning in the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: "I can't go on: I'll go on."
So I don't always agree with Hitchens (I don't know him well enough to call him Hitch, his nickname and the title of his memoir), but I think he is one of the best writers I have read; always provocative, a stylist who knows how to use language, sardonic, politically left (one exception, on Iraq!), funny, insightful, hard to ignore. I always read him when I could in op ed pieces or magazines because he had something fresh to say, something to push my thinking. He wrote a provocative book that ticked off a lot of believers, particularly Christians, God is NOT Great: Why Religions Poison Everything, that was so good it was nominated for a National Book Award. And then he dies of esophageal cancer (ha ha, some of the "Christians" said: how ironic and telling that a guy who used his voice to denounce God has his VOICE taken away by Him).
I am also a person who lives by his voice, as teacher and writer, so I was curious how a man who also lives by his voice deals with The End, how he uses language to work through the passage to death, and I was not disappointed, he is "alive" and fresh and provocative and insightful in his prose as ever he was in public debates or his writing, until the very last words he pens, which are in fact here, even just excerpts, notes he makes on books or quotes he wants to work into an insight, right up to the very end, trying to make sense, to keep using language, to connect.
"I can't go on; I'll go on," right to the end. A really great writer. I learn always from him how to respond non-clichedly to the world, to think of ideas and situations in new ways, to be unique and not just parrot what everyone else is saying on a topic. I learn here something about how to live, even in the bleakest conditions, as he does, right to the end. Regardless of whether you agree with him on any topic, you have to admit that passion and commitment. He's funny in surprising ways, in the book, and not sappy or sentimental, ever.