Dying words

The Nobel prize winner explores the moment of death and beyond in a probing tale of a fisher living in near solitude

- By Chris Power

How should one write about death - not as experienced by those who merely witness it, but by the people doing the actual dying? Many attempts have been made. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy terrifies both us and his eponymous magistrate with the "black sack" into which Ivan is being pushed by "an invisible, invincible force".

In Tobias Wolff's Bullet in the Brain, a book critic is shot by a bank robber, triggering "a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmission" that throws up a random memory of a childhood game of baseball. Will Self, in the short story The North London Book of the Dead, looks beyond the moment of oblivion, suggesting that when we die we move to Crouch End or Grays, Thurrock.