HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Auto-da-fé by Elias Canetti
Loading...

Auto-da-fé (original 1935; edition 1984)

by Elias Canetti

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,341306,547 (3.98)110
This extraordinary novel, first published in German in 1935, is a COMEDIE HUMAINE of madness. It tells the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished scholar in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti build up the elements in Kien himself, and in his personal relationships, which will lead to his destruction. AUTO DA FE explores in fiction the theme of Canetti's other major - non -fiction work, CROWDS AND POWER: the relation of the individual to the mass, an issue especially relevant to any survey of fascism.… (more)
Member:b12davis
Title:Auto-da-fé
Authors:Elias Canetti
Info:New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984. 464 p. ; 23 cm.
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:None

Work Information

Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti (1935)

Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 110 mentions

English (23)  Spanish (3)  Dutch (2)  Catalan (1)  Danish (1)  All languages (30)
Showing 1-5 of 23 (next | show all)
Another intellectual book by a so-called great writer and thinker. One of those books where nobody says or behaves like a real person would in a given situation. A waste of time. ( )
  Gumbywan | Jun 24, 2022 |
I started with the thought that Canetti was saying something about man's ordeal in an oppressive society that is opposed to his values, but there were discrepancies. Instead of an everyman figure, he makes Peter Kien almost impossible to relate to, which muddies the thematic waters. Granted, Peter Kien is obsessed with books to a ridiculous degree, and perhaps only the most snobbish readers were ever expected to read this through, so sometimes the shoe might fit. It probably works better instead, as some critics point out, to view these peculiar characters as embodying different societies, some totalitarian, some more benign than others, all of them clashing with one another. Finally, Encyclopedia Britannica's entry presented me with a merger of both: the fruitlessness of reasoning with or against a fascist regime that only knows the power of the fist. This source also says it was meant to be the first of eight novels that would each explore the theme further.

For the first half of the book or more, I thought Kien moved through a world where only those close to him were absurd while the population at large was at least less so (suggested most by the boy he meets at the start, and the furniture dealers that Therese interacts with.) It later appears that possibly nobody in this novel can be counted on to think or behave rationally. It never becomes quite as absurd as in Kafka, since Kien lands himself a bit of justice from authorities albeit with help and under a false understanding. The essence of the madness in question is that each character remains wedded to their own version of reality and nothing - no evidence, no actions or words of others - can shake them free of it. Kien regards his books as living things, and his wife as dead. She is convinced he's a secret millionaire. Fischerle believes the world chess championship is his for the taking. There doesn't seem to be any basis for these perceptions besides wishful thinking. George offers the most rational (with flaws) perspective, but you won't meet him until the end.

My stubborn takeaway (from reading the characters as the oppressed) is something the opposite of what Herman Hesse was aiming at: rather than exploring what contribution academics ought to make to society, Canetti is more interested in the dangers that society can still impose on those who wish to remain aloof from it all. Taken literally, too little regard for the conflicting realities perceived by others can land you in a heap of trouble if you interact with people to any degree beyond bare necessities. Taken less literally ... Britannica is on to something.

Postscript: this 1930s novel proves weirdly prescient. Fischerle dreams of emigrating to America and becoming known as Mr. Fischer, world chess champion. In 1972, a Mr. Fischer from America became exactly that. ( )
  Cecrow | Jan 30, 2022 |
The book by Elias Canetti (German language, translated by C.V. Wedgewood under personal supervision of the author. This book, winner of the Prix International is the story of a man who is in love with books, lives in his own private library (what can be wrong with this picture)? The title tells us that this is not going to end well. The book was published in 1935. The setting is Austria.

1935 is the middle of the depression years and the rise of Hitler. Canetti, born in Bulgaria, moved to England in 1938 to avoid Nazi persecution and became a British citizen in 1952. His ancestors were Sephardi Jews. The author also won the Nobel prize for literature in 1981.

Politically leaning towards the left, he was present at the July Revolt of 1927 – he came near to the action accidentally, was most impressed by the burning of books (recalled frequently in his writings), and left the place quickly with his bicycle. He gained a degree in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1929, but never worked as a chemist.

I add all of the above because I think it is important in thinking about this book. Canetti is writing about obsessions, mob action, and group think. This work was his only novel.

Part I (a head without a world) was mostly engaging. I did not necessarily like our protagonist Peter Kien, but I did love the idea of living in a library but he was a bit of an egoist from the start. This first part tells how a man living in his head, interpreting things according to his own interest makes some disastrous decisions that literally ruin the man. At this part of the book, I am engaged in wanting the man to see the danger and escape and save his library.

Part II, (Headless world) the man escapes the disaster and so to speak, jumps from the fire pan into the fire. He goes to a dive called stars of heaven. Our narrator becomes a victim of a crooked dwarf who continues the abuse of the wife that the man recently escaped. The dwarf has his own obsessions and that is to be a world champion chess player in America. In the end of this section, the button serves the dwarf right.

Part III, (The World in the Head). In this section; the brother of Peter, the psychologist, comes to be the hero to rescue his brother and return all back to normal which is what this reader wanted but knew that this would not be how it ended.

I grew weary of reading this absurdist, modernistic work by the third part and wished that the author would have taken a lesson from Beckett and spare the reader by writing less words. But then Beckett wrote later than our author so maybe Beckett took a lesson from Canetti. But I was pulled out of the morass by the section on the evils of women through mythology and history. This book could be attached for its misogynist bent, it's feel of antisemitism, its use of cripples, hunchbacks, and dwarfs. That is why I needed to think about this book from the time period it was written. I needed to know that the author was actually a bit of a ladies man, that he had Jewish roots, and that he had experienced the burning of books in the revolt of 1927. I actually found the section about the women through history to be quite interesting.

Some quotes
pg 57 "Every human creature needed a home, not as home of the kind understood by crude knock-you-down patriots, not a religion either, a mere insipid foretaste of a heavenly home: no, a real home, in which space, work, friends, recreation, and the scope of man's ideas came together into an orderly whole, into--so to speak--a personal cosmos."

Pg 396 "madness, he said with great emphasis, and looked at his wife with penetrating and accusing gaze (she blushed), madness is the disease which attacks those very people who think only of themselves.

pg 416 "He loved his library so dearly; it was his substitute for human beings."

Themes/symbols; themes of obsession, blindness, fire. mussel shell, blue ( )
1 vote Kristelh | Feb 24, 2019 |
Elias Canetti was a philosopher whose non-fiction work won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981; auto-da-fe is in fact his only work of fiction. I decided to read it out of curiosity following a visit to Ruse in Bulgaria, where Canetti was born, and reading about him in Claudio Magris’ Danube, in which he describes auto-da-fe as “one of the great books of the century, his only truly great book.” It was written – and is set - in Vienna during the inter-war years, but that is irrelevant; it is both timeless and universal.

Canetti’s novel deals with the world that we all create in our minds, and how everything that happens – or should happen – is filtered through this world view. Taking this to its logical – and extreme – conclusion, Canetti’s protagonists are the central figures and righteous heroes of their worlds, in which all their actions are totally justifiable and moral, irrespective of the consequences of those actions, whether – as in the case of the central character, Peter Kien - they are self-destructive, or whether destructive of other people.

Peter Kien is an obsessive misanthrope who lives with and for books – primarily his own library of books on ancient Chinese literature, a subject on which - the reader is led to believe - he is the most eminent and acclaimed authority in the world. He loves books more than anything else, and - to the extent that other people impinge at all on him - he judges them purely on the basis of their relationship to books. Thus it is that, mistakenly interpreting the behavior of his housekeeper as evidence of a love and reverence for books – she wears gloves to dust them in order to keep her hands clean – he impulsively decides to marry her; this is the beginning of his downfall.

The housekeeper, Therese, is equally obsessed, but her obsession is money – her lack of it throughout the whole of her life. In her own eyes, she is a women of extraordinary virtue, which makes her lack of financial security even more unjustifiable. The symbol of her virtue is the long starched blue skirt that she always wears; for her new husband the skirt will become the symbol of all that is evil. The lack of affection shown to her by Kien – he expects nothing at all to change in their relationship; he had married her purely as a reward for her imagined esteem for books – soon leads Therese to see him as the major obstacle to her security. She begins to demand changes in their living arrangements – in the rooms that are “her’s” and in the furnishing of the apartment – which Kien, in order to escape her intrusions into his inner world, accedes to. Her goal in life becomes getting hold of his money; she skims the housekeeping money all the time and banks it, but that is not enough; she makes sure that she is named in his will, but – waiting for him to die is too remote a consummation - eventually resorts to physical violence in order to gain access to his bank account – all totally justifiable in her eyes.

Kien escapes from Therese physically – although, by this time, she has become an indelible part of his mental furniture – when she throws him out of his apartment. He starts living in hotel rooms, having taken his beloved library with him – in his head. Each night, he carefully “unloads” each volume and stacks it carefully with all the others on the floor on paper that he carries with him in his valise. He spends his days visiting book shops where he enquires about books that he already owns and which we – and the bookshop owners – understand that he is never going to buy. He had finally understood that Therese was after his money, and – in order to thwart her – he has emptied his bank account and carries the cash around with him.

Kien encounters a humpbacked dwarf, Fischerle, who lives on the fringes of the criminal underworld and who becomes his living companion and “servant”. Fischerle is obsessed with chess – he plays it all the time in his head against himself – and knows that – if only he can get to America – he will become the world chess champion. He sees in Kien his ticket to America, and devises a scam to exploit Kien’s obsession with books in order to get hold of his money. The dwarf had his hands on Kien’s money a number of times, and could have just stolen it, but – whether out of a warped sense of integrity or fear of getting entangled with the law – he has to do it “legitimately”. He recruits three of his acquaintances in order help him with his scheme. Thus we meet another group of characters each with their own obsessions; the newspaper seller who for some reason adores Fischerle and will do anything for him, even though he despises her; the beggar who poses as a blind man - and who hates buttons, because he has to maintain his disguise and thank people even when they put buttons instead of coins in his bowl - and who dreams of nothing but a world of women whom he can possess; the insomniac salesman who becomes convinced that Fischerle and Kien are dealing in drugs that will give him the sleep he craves. There are many other characters, whose inner worlds - and how these shape their actions - we get a glimpse of. We also see the joint delusions that groups of people and mobs can create, and how easily group think and group action can result from and be justified by very diverse individual delusions.

When Fischerle’s scheme – and Fischerle himself – comes to an end, Kien becomes convinced that Therese has starved to death, as a result of him locking her up in the apartment, but knows that at his trial for her murder he will be totally vindicated and found innocent. Even when she shows up, he refuses to believe that she is more than a figment of his imagination. Kien ends up in the custody of the caretaker of his apartment – a vile character for whom physical violence is both and end and a means – and who involves him in his obsession with spying on people.

Eventually, Peter’s brother George, who is a very successful gynacologist- turned-psychologist in Paris, gets to hears of his brother’s plight and comes to Vienna to help him. George too has his own obsessions; he admires the minds of insane people so much that he feels guilty when he successfully treats them. He rescues his brother from the clutches of the caretaker and via his skill at communicating with the insane, gets to understand that Therese is the root of Peter’s problems. George charms Therese - he became a psychologist to escape the attentions of women, who find him irresistible - out of his brother’s apartment; he reinstalls him there, arranges to support him financially, and returns to Paris, with a sense of satisfaction at having – for the first time in their lives – communicated with his brother, who is by now totally detached from reality.

The totality of the obsession of each protagonist leaves no room for any insight into the minds of others, making each of them vulnerable to becoming instruments of the others’ obsessions; Kien – serially - to Therese, the dwarf, the caretaker, and ultimately his brother; after throwing out her husband, Therese soon succumbs to the violence of the caretaker; the dwarf can only influence the world by the deviousness of his chessboard-honed wits, and eventually becomes a victim of the type of direct action that he is too small and weak to even think of using. Even George, who knows only how to be charming – whether it be with women or the insane – is a slave to both.

There is nothing redeeming in this novel; in vain you keep hoping for a “happy ending” or someone who seems to live in this world, rather than the one inside their head. It is a caricature – but not an unrealistic one - of what it is to be human. It is also a remarkable work of imagination. ( )
4 vote maimonedes | Oct 16, 2018 |
Per leggere questo libro di Canetti occorre uno stomaco forte.
Niente sangue a fiumi intendiamoci, ma una discesa nell'orrore del reale.
Non c'è astio, critica, lacrime o disperazione per quel avrebbe potuto essere: c'è solo quello che è.
Molti scrittori parlano del male del mondo ma lo fanno con amarezza, con dolore, con rimpianto per una umanità impossibile. Canetti sembra un entomologo che senza pathos descrive una realtà fisica ineluttabile.

Per leggere questo libro occorre avere nervi saldi: quando l’autore insiste e insiste e insiste nello spingerti da dietro verso il fondo del pozzo ti viene voglia di girarti di scatto e dirgli, “ma vai al diavolo, Elías, datemi un Dumas!”

Vorrei non avere letto questo libro: così potrei ancora buttarmici sopra e – angoscia o non angoscia - avrei ancora una magnifica esperienza da fare.
( )
1 vote icaro. | Aug 31, 2017 |
Showing 1-5 of 23 (next | show all)
no reviews | add a review

» Add other authors

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Elias Canettiprimary authorall editionscalculated
紀, 池内Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Hamelink, JacquesTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Ryömä, LiisaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Wedgwood, C. V.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Zagari, BiancaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Zagari, LucianoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
To Veza
First words
‘What are you doing here, my little man?’
Quotations
You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind. Daily life is a superficial clatter of lies. Every passer-by is a liar.
No mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is all too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of his victim.
Novels should be prohibited by the State.
Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates.
Without corporal punishment no one ever got anywhere. The English are a tremendous people.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

This extraordinary novel, first published in German in 1935, is a COMEDIE HUMAINE of madness. It tells the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished scholar in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti build up the elements in Kien himself, and in his personal relationships, which will lead to his destruction. AUTO DA FE explores in fiction the theme of Canetti's other major - non -fiction work, CROWDS AND POWER: the relation of the individual to the mass, an issue especially relevant to any survey of fascism.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.98)
0.5 1
1 8
1.5 3
2 14
2.5 6
3 53
3.5 26
4 110
4.5 17
5 121

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,218,662 books! | Top bar: Always visible