- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
In the late 1920s Elias Canetti was a young chemistry student in Vienna who cared far more for literature than for laboratories. He was deeply influenced by the satirist Karl Kraus, whose lectures he attended for years, and by a summer in 1928 spent working for a publisher in Berlin, a city that struck him as a madhouse beside easygoing Vienna. Around 1930 he planned a cycle of eight novels, a human comedy of madmen. Only the first was ever written.
He finished the manuscript in 1931, and it was published in Vienna in 1935 as Die Blendung, The Blinding. Its hero, Peter Kien, is a renowned scholar of Chinese who lives for a private library of about 25,000 volumes and despises human contact. He marries his housekeeper, Therese, because she seems to treat books with reverence, only to be driven from his own flat. He drifts through Vienna's underworld in the company of a swindling chess-mad dwarf, Fischerle, and a brutal caretaker, while his brother, a Paris psychiatrist, tries too late to save him. In the end Kien sets fire to his library and dies in the flames.
Canetti said the injustice of the 1927 Schattendorf verdict and the July riots in Vienna, when police shot 89 demonstrators, fed into the book. He gave each character an acoustic mask, a fixed set of phrases and rhythms that exposes the person behind it, and the result is ferociously comic as well as dark. Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch praised it, and Broch persuaded him to call his hero Kien, a word for resinous, easily lit pinewood.
The timing was cruel. Within three years Austria had been annexed by Nazi Germany and Canetti, a Jew, had fled to London. An English translation by C. V. Wedgwood appeared in 1946 as Auto-da-Fé, the name for the Inquisition's burning of heretics, and in 1949 it won a French prize for the best foreign book. Yet wide recognition came only in the 1960s, after the success of Crowds and Power.
The Swedish Academy, awarding Canetti the Nobel Prize in 1981, observed that the novel gained its full force in the decades after it appeared, read against the background of Nazi power politics and world war. It has since been the subject of a large body of criticism, including a book-length study titled The End of Modernism.
Why it matters
Auto-da-Fé survived the Nazi years to become a lasting warning about intellect sealed off from humanity, and about how quickly a closed mind can turn to destruction.
About Elias Canetti
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who wrote in German, author of Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power and a celebrated memoir trilogy; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
More about Elias Canetti
- Elias Canetti sketched 50 characters in EarwitnessIn Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1974), Elias Canetti revived the ancient art of the character sketch with fifty brief, comic portraits of human types.
- Elias Canetti wrote Kafka's Other TrialIn Kafka's Other Trial (1969), Elias Canetti used Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer to illuminate the inner life behind The Trial.
- Canetti's memoirs portrayed Vienna between the warsElias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
- Elias Canetti wrote The Voices of MarrakeshElias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh, a short book of impressions from a 1954 journey to Morocco, became a classic of travel writing.
- Elias Canetti spent 30 years writing Crowds and PowerElias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
- Elias Canetti's notebooks became The Human ProvinceElias Canetti kept notebooks of reflections for decades; a selection from 1942 to 1972 was published as The Human Province.
- Canetti's memoir preserved a lost Sephardic worldElias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free (1977) preserved the vanished world of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in his Bulgarian birthplace, Ruse.
Sources
- Elias Canetti Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
- Auto-da-Fé (novel) Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti EBSCO Research Starters
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