Sketches 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 book is the first publication of a fair copy that Canetti gave to Marie-Louise in 1942, containing his thoughts on Chinese poetry, fairy tales and legends, his fearful reflections on the ubiquity of germs, and his sarcastic vision of the end of the bombings. "All weapons will be abolished and in the next war only biting will be allowed." Canetti's notes are both echoes of an era and prophetic, and his great topics – language, death, time, utopia – are all here. English writer and German literature expert Jeremy Adler summarizes the history of the manuscript and explains its significance for the genesis of Canetti's great oeuvre, the AUFZEICHNUNGEN ("SKETCHES").