Customer Reviews

Auto-da-Fé

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I sympathize with the people who wrote bad reviews: this is not a book for many, many people. If you value reading books that seem to take place in the same world that we live in, with plausible human beings who act in ways that make quick sense - stay away. If you prefer to avoid the grotesque, the violent, and the disturbing, this book is also probably not for you.

None of these things, however, have anything to do with whether a book is good or not. A few people have said that Canetti's prose is difficult to understand: that is nonsense. You are allowed not to like this book, but if you can't comprehend prose of such clarity, the problem is yours, not the author's. The book reads like a hallucination, but the lines of the image are sharp, like Kafka's.

Someone else wrote that the book is a glimpse into the mind of a psychotic: this is also not true. The world that the author describes may be insane, but the characters all live and think with a strange internal logic that is completely coherent with their environment. A character deciding to become immobile to fend off the corrupting presence of his wife seems, here, to be a perfectly appropriate response. In this world, it makes sense; in our world, it does not, and if you like reading books that breathe the same air as you, don't bother with Auta da Fe.

But if you can accept this world, which is at a very disturbing angle to our own, then you will live through a strangely purifying experience. I can't explain why it happens, but encountering the horrible and comic events of this book, the greed and blindness of the characters, leaves you better in some way: freer of ambition and stupid vanities. Read it: you'll see what I mean.

I finished Auto Da Fe last night, and still can't decide whether it's the most nihilistic book I've ever read or one of the most humanistic. On one hand, Canetti treats his characters with unflinching (and, at times, comic, due to its extremity) brutality; they're all repugnant at best (lecherous murderers at worst), their desires are pitifully shallow, and, on the whole, they're painfully unintelligent. One might say that Canetti is the anti-Sherwood Anderson in this regard. Whereas the latter author strives to make the lives of his characters more significant through their "grotesqueness", the former uses said grotesqueness to render them less than human.

Despite all this, Canetti's humanism shines through due to the fact that Auto Da Fe is, ostensibly, a modern morality play. Human virtue would be rewarded, were there any to be found in the novel; as it stands, vice is clearly spelled out and its practitioners are punished. For instance, Canetti is obviously not suggesting that the reader should relate to or sympathize with the character of Peter Kein; he exists merely as an unfortunate example of intellectualism (and egoism) gone awry. At the same time, we shouldn't relish his downfall, but learn from it and apply its lesson (and the lessons of other characters) to our own lives. This is why it's hard for me to call Auto Da Fe nihilistic. While Canetti doesn't have much sympathy for fictional people, he seems to have boundless sympathy for the real ones which comprise his audience.

Also of note: earlier reviews have cited problems with the translation. This is absolutely not the case. Aside from a few errors here and there in grammar and tense, the novel reads very lucidly in English.

The history of Canetti's odd, inventive novel provides clues to its understanding. According to his memoirs, Canetti originally conceived the "Human Comedy of Madmen," a fictional cycle portraying eight characters. Of these, only one character lived on in his imagination: Brand the Book Man. Inspired by Gogol, modeled after Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," and informed by Jacob Burckhardt's "History of Greek Civilization," Canetti's surviving portrait is an allegorical odyssey of a recluse who lives only for his books.

Yet those already familiar with "Auto da Fe" know that there is no character named Brand in the book. During the year (1930-31) that Canetti finished his novel, he changed the main character's name from Brand [German for conflagration] to Kant and the novel's title to "Kant Catches Fire." Canetti explains in the second volume of his memoirs that the lingering emotions he felt from his presence when a mob burned down Vienna's Palace of Justice in 1927 made this new title "hard to endure." And so "Kant became Kien [German for resinous pinewood]; the ignitability of the world, a threat that I felt, was maintained in the name of the chief character." Likewise, he changed the title to Die Blendung [The Blinding], a reference to the biblical legend of Samson. It was under this title that the book was published in 1935, but it was soon banned by the Nazis.

The main character is a leading Sinologist whose meticulous scholarship and linguistic expertise make him famous among an elite group, but Kien's lack of social skills ultimately defines him: he refuses to be part of the crowd (the dynamics of which is one of Canetti's real-life intellectual preoccupations). Kien's 25,000-volume library overtakes his entire apartment, the 40,000 characters of the Chinese alphabet challenge his intellect, and his only human relationships are daily contacts with a housekeeper of eight years and morning ventures to the bookshops that dot the city of Vienna. His cloistered life is shattered, however, when he decides to marry the housekeeper; her conniving greed is eventually wedded to the brute force of the building's superintendent, a retired police officer whose nascent fascism finds full expression in his treatment of Kien. Eventually, Kien conflates his fear and hatred of his wife with the misogyny he has learned from his vast readings.

Simultaneously bizarre and uncomplicated, the story reads like a 450-page Homeric epic filtered through the psychoses of the Brothers Grimm. Expelled from his book-dominated oasis, Kien descends into the underworld of Vienna, a journey that results in the destruction of the world as he knows it. Dwarfs, prostitutes, blind men--each of the major and minor characters develops his or her own perspective of the events through which they live; when their internally consistent yet outwardly incongruent worlds clash, the results alternate between absurdity and madness. What it is all supposed to mean will engage the patient reader's imagination for weeks.

One of the greatest novels of this century, this is a book you will not forget. It is a true masterpiece written, astonishingly, by a man hardly 25 years old. Chillingly prophetic, it is also stylistically of an overpowering beauty. A work of genius, ranking alongside the best of such giants as Kafka, Flaubert, or Dostoyevsky. It is a breathtaking descent into the darkness not only of an individual soul, but of a tormented century. It is Canetti's greatest triumph

Auto-da-fe is a piercing dissection of an intellectual obsessed with his library and his own "brilliant" thoughts. The author examines his characters as one would examine insects. Kien scurries around in the city, paying no heed to his surroundings, just focused on his own brilliant ideas. Aut-da-fe is a profound lesson to those who consider themselves "intellectuals" as it shows their downfall. One of the most original books in modern literature.

Blindness, old libraries, bookburnings, it's all here. This is another great book about Western Culture and its decline. It is a burlesque, symbolic, and tragic book. Very 1930's Europe. The characters seem to be taken out of Peter Brueghel the older's paintings; very human and very ugly, each ugly and tragic in his/her own unique way. And it is so insanely funny. It's sort of a 1930's Central European aristocratic version of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Peter Kien explores the innermost horror of his mind. He lives in a land of books until his solitude is invaded by the blue skirt - the horror of worldly feminity.

He is forced out of his secure environment into the fear of the city.

Canetti wrote the novel after seeing the University of Vienna in flames. He saw a man outside the university, unconcerned for those burning inside, crying "my papers, my papers". He saw Peter Kien. He saw humanity, civilisation.

After this, the most astonishing of novels, he concerned himself with the study of crowds and the politics of crowds.

On Brecht he said, "an overbearing man!"

On reading this, one can easily see why Canetti won the Nobel Prize. This is one of the most gripping novels I've read; every chapter is wrought with the tension that provides a basis for the entire work. I recommend this very highly.

This work is considered a great twentieth- century masterpiece. Written in 1931 when Canetti was twenty-six it is the story of the booklover and Sinologist Peter Kien who lives alone with his twenty- five thousand volumes until he is deceived and marries his housekeeper the sixty year old Theresa who he mistakenly believes will preserve his library when gone.
The book is written with a kind of ferocious descriptive clarity, and it goes on to tell the story of Theresa's conspiring with the fascist concierge of the building to disposses the distinguished professor, and send him reeling through a hellish world of dispossesion ending in madness and death.
The work is taken to be a parable of the self-destructive quality of a life devoted to intellect alone.
However the writer succeeds far too well in portraying the coldness of obsession, the inhumane character of life by mind alone.
And there is something grotesquely unreal, unsympathetic , not simply in the relations of the characters to each other but in the whole feeling and tone of the work itself.
This work has the feeling of having been written by a person with a very hard heart indeed.
Canetti in a small subsequent work wrote of Kafka, and one can see the same strange quality of human detachment in both writers. However the world of Kafka is so much richer in human feeling in fear, and even in sympathy that there is to my mind no comparison.
Canetti in pillorying an exclusive reliance on intellectual brilliance , it seems to me, is describing first and above all himself.

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.