Canetti, Elias "Auto-da-Fé"

1935 

(German title: Die Blendung)

 

 Reviewed by Marianne
 from Let's Read


 

What a book! Did I like it? Hm, hard to tell. It is described as grotesk, obscure, weird, … And weird it is.

The book tells the story of Peter Kien, a sinologist and philologist who lives very reclusively in his apartment with his books. He marries his housekeeper but he slides more and more into madness.

Peter's brother Georg is a famous psychologist in Paris. Alerted by one of Peter's acquaintances, he comes to Vienna in order to help but, alas, is not successful.

This is a very complex book that cannot possibly be explained in a few words. Its a book of obsession and criticism, of society at the time but also a warning about what was to come. After all, this was two years after the nazis gained power in Germany and many people, like the author, feared for the future. And they were right, as it turned out.

The meaning of the English title is explained in Wikipedia:
An auto-da-fé was the ritual of public penance carried out between the 15th and 19th centuries of condemned heretics and apostates imposed by the Spanish, Portuguese, or Mexican Inquisition as punishment and enforced by civil authorities. Its most extreme form was death by burning.

The book was first published in English with the title "The Tower of Babel".
The translation of the original titel "Die Blendung" would be translated into "Blinding as a punishment", "Glare", "Deception", or even in the sense of "Verblendung" as "Infatuation". All these words could be used as the title of the book. In the German book description, it is said that "like Joyce's 'Ulysses', 'The Blinding' is a powerful metaphor for the lonely reflective mind's confrontation with reality." Sounds correct to me.

Book Description:

"'Auto-da-Fé' is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Vienna between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction.

Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis...

'Auto-da-Fé' was first published in Germany in 1935 as 'Die Blendung' ('The Blinding' or 'Bedazzlement') and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. 'Auto-da-Fé' still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print."

Elias Canetti received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981 "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Auto da Fé by Elias Canetti

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

Elias Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. Auto da Fé is an interesting story, confusing, even disturbing at times. If I were asked to use only one word to describe this writer’s only fiction work I’d probably call it weird.

At first, it seems to be a critique of society. On the one hand, there’s the well-to-do people (represented by the sinologist Peter Kien) who exaggerate the value and importance of education and reading to such an extent that it makes them unable to understand or at least cope with real life. On the other hand, there’s the common people who fight for survival every day and who have learned to care a lot about money, so much, in fact, that they don’t shrink back even from murder.

However, I think that the novel’s original German title – Die Blendung which is 'blinding' or 'deception' in English – hints at something else. Each one of the protagonists of the Auto da Fé is to a certain degree obsessed by something: Kien lives for and through his private library of 25,000 volumes stored in the four rooms of his flat; his wife Therese – the former housekeeper, an old maid who deceived the inexperienced and asexual Kien into marrying her after eight years – only thinks of money and property, beauty and sex; the caretaker of the house is wrapped up in his past as a police officer and keeps living out his violent traits in order to press money from the tenants who he’s 'protecting' from bad lots like beggars and door-to-door salesmen; and last, but not least, the crippled Jewish crook Siegfried Fischer, called Fischerle, who is obsessed with chess and with going to America in order to prove that he’s better at that game than the current world champion, for which scope he – of course – needs a lot of money.

The obsessions of all those people result in an inability to see the world the way it really is. They always give information, conversations, and events a meaning which is consistent with their very own idea of a perfect life. So in a way, all of them create an imaginary world within themselves which differs from reality to a certain degree.

But you should see for yourself…

An interesting fact about the background of the story:
Elias Canetti wrote it in the early 1930s under the impression of rising National Socialism in Germany and of the first auto-da-fé of books on 10 May 1933. Even being Jewish himself he could hardly have imagined then what was still to come … the concentration camps. Heinrich Heine's saying that 'Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings' unfortunately proved right…

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:
http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2012/12/auto-da-fe-by-elias-canetti.html

Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti (Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers)

This book is bizarre.  It’s like a Grimm’s fairy tale with insane characters, or a cautionary tale with a moral that’s not a moral because it’s so nihilistic.  This, Canetti seems to be saying, is what happens if an intellectual dissociates from the real world and hears no voice other than his own.  He becomes dogmatic and he falls victim to the venality of the ignorant.  It’s sobering reading.

Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born Jew who spent most of his childhood in Germany and wrote in German, though he spent part of his life in England because of the Nazis (who banned his books).  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981 although Auto-da-fé (1935) is his only novel.  It’s on many to-read shelves at Good Reads and has provoked both enthusiastic reviews and dismissive comments, (the latter mostly from people who failed to finish it).

Set in Vienna and Paris, the story begins with a chance meeting between Professor Kien and a clever little boy.  The boy has inadvertently stood between Kien and his view of the books in a bookshop.  The professor goes for walks early in the morning before the bookshops open so that he won’t be tempted to buy any more – he already has a library of 25,000 books and anyway, the books in the bookshops are inferior and not worthy of him.

He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately, the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o’clock. (p11)

But still, he’s not happy to have his view obstructed.

I read and blogged this book on AUgust 21st, 2010.  To read the rest of my review, please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/auto-da-fe-by-elias-canetti/