Consider, for example, Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of as an example of another existential map of our secular age. The book is penned as a response to what he calls, cribbing from French critic Charles du Bos, le réveil mortel. On Barnes’s account, a first, clunky translation of the phrase remains the best. Though “ ‘the wake-up call to mortality’ sounds a bit like a hotel service,” in fact this translation’s metaphor hits just the right note: “it is like being in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting, and at some ungodly
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