Auto-da-Fé

This story was okay, and definitely hilarious at certain points. The major problem is that it is too darn long and continuously veers into tangential plots. My copy was close to 500 pages -- large pages with small print, something of a tome. Had this book been half the size or even less, the same story could've still been told, but more on point and focused -- and ultimately better.

While Canetti, who thoroughly deserved his Nobel Prize, has written a truly great work of literature, this is nevertheless a difficult and painful book to read. It's principal theme is the downfall into insanity of Peter Kein, the world's "greatest sinologist" and owner of the largest private library in the city. Kein, who starts out as an utterly antisocial character literally only cares about his books. With the misunderstanding that his housekeeper also loves the books, even if she doesn't understand them, he marries her only to find that she is deeply stupid and greedy. She slowly takes over his life and eventually ejects him from his library where he goes on to meet other grotesques. None of these people is even remotely likable and the world presented by Canetti is pure hell, mysogenistic, violent, and surrealistic. The tone is superficially that of Kafka but in the end, much more horrific.

good

FIRST LINE REVIEW: "'What are you doing here, my little man?'" So ironic that the first line of this difficult, strange and disturbing work of German modernism is a question I asked myself several times while working through its carnivalesque challenges. Especially since I was reading most of it while on a beach vacation in Florida. Says something about my reading choices, doesn't it? If you're in the frame-of-mind for some mind-bending insights into the fractured and highly disturbed world of a mega-bookworm, then this might just be up your alley. Many reviews consider it to be brilliant. I did, too, but just struggled too hard to finish it...hence the 3-star rating. It's me, not the book.

The story is consitent, well written, it draws a reader to follow the caracters, none of them pleasant but intriguing. It explores human desires and convoluted reasons for their actions. Canetti's prose remind me Frantz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht (all writing in German), the story also shows some affiiation with these authors. I believe that Canetti was self possessed and pompous but his prose and the narrative of this novel is of a high quality, perhaps even Clive James would agree. I recomend it to readers who are prepared to see the murky side of reality, in literature and life.

Modern society needs a clear picture of the four corners of the box in which human engineering by social regimentation is sorting everything. On the level of literary life, political economy can divide the themes of a navel like Auto-da-Fé into the nice square:Liberty, Equality,Virginity, VasectomyThe professor with no students is the virginity which destroys itself in each contact it has with the world in this novel.A functioning society is based on "Children last" rather than on any form of equality with lesser individuals. The head without a world is in love with "Children last."

The handling of language is magnificent but the story, with all due respect, seemed to me a bit too simplistic and a bit pathetic. I felt it was too naive and childish that most of the characters live in a self inflicted delusion and detached from reality in an exaggerated way. I know Mr. Canetti was granted the Nobel Prize so it could be that I failed, from my own ignorance, to grasp the symbolism underlying the story. On the upside, it gave me a glimpse into a probable cause os misogyny: fear.

Took me several months to read this book. The story crept through me and began to take over my thoughts--as schizophrenic as that appears, it's how I felt. I put the book down, and when I felt able to go on, sometimes page by page, I did so. Amazing, unforgettable, horrifying, remarkable, and beautifully translated; should be at or near the top of every must-read list of books.

Auto da Fe was written in 1935. Elias Canetti received the Nobel prize in 1981. The book is about a man living in Germany between the the two wars. He owns a library of 25,000 books. He knows nothing of women, and marries his housekeeper who turns him out of the flat. In the real world, he goes insane. There were no Nazis - who actually came to power in 1933 - and although there are no words to describe the Nazis, you realize from the book that they actually fed off a situation that already existed in Germany, namely that the people were already mad. Auto da Fe is a brilliant novel. One of the best I have read.Rodney Taylor.

This is a most remarkable novel written in 1935 by this Bulgarian Nobel winning novelist. This immediately appears to be an excellent translation of the German (I'm no expert but suspect the poor ratings given by others confuse the 'original style' as a poor translation?). The book is quite long 430 pages of dense small text.The basic story centres around fiftysomething Peter Kien, a scholar of all things Oriental and bibliophile. He's insular, intellectual, virginal, never married, slightly misogynist, uptight, knowledgeable and alone. Peter has a huge library which means everything to him. He has a younger brother called George who's a psychologist who he hasn't seen for many years. After eight years in service his housekeeper Therese plots to marry Peter believing him extremely wealthy. She is poorly educated, cannot read well, also fifty but imagines herself thirty, money grapping, scheming and sour individual. After a single incident of brain manipulation by pretending to revere a book, they end up marrying. On the wedding night, wearing a fulsome blue dress (which keeps repeating in the story - a representation of the Virgin Mary?) she either actually or otherwise puts him off - they don't consummate the marriage and Peter realises his mistake. But too late - she controls, beats and schemes to get written in his will, take over Peter's flat etc. They both seem to enter periods of madness and deliberate misunderstandings (for example a key early one is that the wealth Therese imagines Peter has gets confused by Peter as an inheritance of Therese (to spend on more books)). They have delusions and accidents, Therese falls for a shop assistant, Peter falls off a ladder (trying to turn all his books round so the spine/title cannot be read) and there's a whole period of belief he's died - this introduces the simple yet respectful ex-policeman, caretaker Benedikt, another strange character. Peter is eventually forced to leave with his bankbook/money locking Therese in the flat. He finds the Jewish, dwarf, criminal chess-champion gang leader Fischerle who recues Peter from a mob stealing his money. Yet Fischerle regrets his actions when he could have had some himself and then precedes to form a gang (a hawker, Blind man, his ex-wife and sewer man)to con Peter of all the money whilst being his hotel room librarian. Peter believes he's murdered Therese and ends up being arrested (alongside Therese) and keeps quiet whilst being interrogated - A letter Fischerle sends brings George to analyse Peter. {I've given no more of the story away than is written on the back covered)Please don't confuse this as a standard story and novel, the style is dense, difficult, deep, imaginative, philosophical and rather surreal. There aren't many characters, there's the reality motives story underlying the internalised, delusional view of the world of the people involved. The book is a cross between Bely's Petersburg, Gunter's Tin Drum and Faulkner's Absalom. "Auto de Fe" means `Act of faith' more factual `Act of Penitence' and I guess Peter is allowing his actions to amend for his person.Some quotes/passages (the first earlier example describes how Peter has yet to discover blindness, and sort of summaries the whole delusional basis of the book):"Blindness is a weapon against time and space; our being is one vast blindness, save only for that little circle which our mean intelligence - mean in its nature as in its scope - can illuminate. The dominating principle of the universe is blindness. It makes possible juxtapositions which would be impossible if the objects could see each other. It permits the truncation of time when time is unendurable. Time is a continuum whence there is one escape only. By closing the eyes to it from time to time, it is possible to splinter it into those fragments with which alone we are familiar.""She would not forgive him for being alive when he was dead, but she was ready to overlook it, since he still had his will to make""it was Christ with Toothache""Quicker and quicker came Therese's fears. Sometimes he had murdered his first wife, sometimes he had murdered her. She thought the skirt away from the corpse; the skirt confused her more than anything; she was sorry for his first wife, because he'd treated her skirt so badly. She was ashamed of the wretched funeral. She hated the bloodhound. People have no manners and school children don't get the cane often enough. Men ought to work more and women can't cook these days. She could give them a piece of her mind. What's it got to do with the tenants? They all come and peep."Finally if you haven't been persuaded to read this brilliant book (sorry that's my poor review not the book) I'd mention it's in three parts titled `A head without a world', `Headless work' and finally `The world in the head'. A lot of effort required but an easy 5 stars.

A book about the everyday life of a man who dislikes people but finds comfort in his books and his mind. It's actually very enthralling. Seeing the main character navigate the ways of life via his marriage to a most ill-matched partner, I just could not stop reading. I found it captivating, possibly because I see so much of myself in the Professor.I highly recommend this read!

A dark, hilarious and surreal book. The narcissistic solipsism of the characters is at once fantastic and frighteningly real. Read again and again.

Great novel from the Nobel Prize winner.