Book description
Auto Da Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished,
reclusive sinologist living in Germany 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 (1905-1994) born of Spanish-Jews parents, lived in in
Vienna until 1937 and spent much of his working life in Britain during
and after the war. He became a British citizen in 1952 but wrote in
German, the language of his childhood and youth spent in Vienna, Zurich
and Frankfurt.
