Trials
“I prefer any line of Kafka to my entire work.”
“He is,” Elias Canetti noted in 1947, “the only one who really gets to me.” And much later, just before his death: “I ...
Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti, born in Bulgaria in 1905, grew up in Manchester, Zurich, Frankfurt and Vienna.His novel Die Blendung (English title: Auto-da-Fé) was published in 1935. In 1938, he emigrated to London, where he recorded his studies for Masse und Macht (English title: Crowds and Power), published in 1960. From the 1970s, he lived mainly in Switzerland and became famous for his plays, autobiographical books and chronicles. In 1981 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1994.
I Have High Expectations of You
A young author shyly turns to Thomas Mann, the Nobel prize laureate for Literature, with his first novel, and is kindly fobbed off. Half a century later, the author himself travels to Stockholm ...
moreMy Book Against Death
Elias Canetti, who always described himself as death’s mortal enemy, waited his whole life to write this book. He intended to write “with utter ruthlessness, or else all would be rendered ...
moreLovers without Residence.
London 1940. The destruction wreaked by German bombing raids makes the situation faced by the émigrés who fled the Nazis even more precarious. In Amersham, an hour away from the capital, two ...
moreLetters to Georges
The newly married Elias Canetti also has a string of lovers. His brother Georges is drawn to good-looking men as well as to his motherly sister-in-law. And Veza Canetti is hopelessly in love with ...
moreSketches for Marie-Louise
England in the early 1940's: Veza and Elias Canetti meet another emigrant from Austria, painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky. Soon a love affair develops between the painter and the author. This ...
moreOn Writers
Elias Canetti, who has written great essays on literature and famously caustic memories of his literary peers, always kept diaries and notebooks which included spontaneous observations on ...
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