Customer Reviews

The Memoirs of Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes

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I'm at a loss to convey how great this book is. I think anyone who enjoys literature and fine writing should read it. Canetti was one of the leading writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, and he brings all his formidable talent and insight to this work.

The biography is excellent on many levels. First, it works as a simple biography. Canetti led a very interesting life, and he does an excellent job presenting the important events and influences that shaped him. Because of this, it is a required read for anyone who has enjoyed his other major works (_Auto Da Fe_ and _Crowds and Power_.)

Second, it is great literature. Canetti was an excellent writer, clear and lucid without being bland, with a wonderful ability to see and present the fundamental elements of individuals. His memoirs are full of rich and fascinating characters, which Canetti is able to present either in a few quick strokes or in full detail, depending on their role in his life.

Third, it is a fascinating record of the time. Canetti came of age during and after WWI, and spent much of his early adulthood in the intellectual turmoil of interwar Vienna. Canetti focuses mainly on the intellectual life, describing his interactions with Robert Musil, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus, Isaac Babel, and others. Inevitably, though, the memoirs also give some details of everyday existence in central Europe during this chaotic period.

The memoir is not told as a single continuous narrative. Instead, the book gives a series of vivid incidents and characters, the things that Canetti remembered about his life. Because of this, his memoir has a universally high level of power and detail, without long flat stretches of filler. It was his autobiography that finally generated enough support for Canetti to be awarded the Nobel Prize. In my opinion it is is best, most accessible work, and one which can stand with the greatest of 20th century literature.

I have never known better literature. I myself am not a good writer so I'll just say is this: Canetti heightend my sensitivity towards life - fundamentally. His autobiography showed me how complex and interesting life can be, if you see it through a mind like Canetti's who is able to describe his perception in a more profound yet boad way than anybody and who chose a corresponding path of life. I'm glad I read him while still in college, because otherwise I had not known how narrowminded I really was before I met Canetti.
My favorite book.

(PS. English is not my first language so please excuse whatever you don't like about my writing.)

what a book, what a writer! having read plenty of literary autobiographies, i am still stunned at the depth and insight of these three volumes. the first, tongue set free, is the most lyrical; the other two focus more on young canetti's developement as a writer and thinker. such is canetti's art that only after reading the books several times the reader notices all the things he is not told... although this autobiography is a great source of enjoyment to everyone who is interested in literature, it should be read with a bit of caution: never to forget that this is, despite everything, literary fiction. i am not implying that canetti is lying (he is not), but he has more purpose than just presenting his times and lifes, and some scenes (like the describtion of café museum) seem to be just describtions while they are full or literary quotes etc. i think it is this that sets canetti's work apart from other writers of the era.

I first read Auto-da-Fe on the recommendation of my German teacher at school. Even then, I was astounded by Canetti's humour and intelligence. I was delighted to come across a rather shabby hardbound copy of The Torch in my Ear on sale for £1.00 outside Surrey County Council Library recently.

I settled down to reacquaint myself with Canetti and, like a reunion with an old friend, I was overjoyed to rediscover his warmth, his wit, and his searing intellect. For such a clever man, though, Canetti is still aware he has a reading public eager to hear tales of the famous names, with whom he rubbed shoulders during his very brief time in Berlin. To learn that the great George Grosz was indeed a misogynist and Brecht a slave to fashion gave me that wry smile that I remembered from reading Canetti before.

For anyone wanting to gain a really deep insight into Central Europe in the 1920's and 30's, this is the book to read and not the titillating, ever-so-British accounts of Christopher Isherwood.

Elias Canetti's extraordinary, massive, memoirs are a tour de force of literary recollection. This is truly a total portrait of the development of an artist and intellectual. We are presented with early scenes of Canetti's difficult childhood with remarkable detail, which read just as well as the great novels of Mann, Broch, and Musil. The portrait of 1920's Vienna is where this text really shines-Canetti's association with the intellectual and artistic elite is a true pleasure. Through his deep friendship with such luminaries as Broch, Musil, Mann, and many many others, Canetti is slowly brought into his own as a brilliant novelist, playwright, thinker, polymath, etc. His main preoccupation concerns the nature of Crowds, and the modern struggle between the individual and the demands of society. Canetti's attunement to his political surroundings with the rise of Fascism and the horrors of the Second World War. Yet this great collection of memoirs is not restricted to the political or sociological-its scope is virtually limitless in Canetti's miraculous attempt to capture the life of the mind.

Published in three parts--"The Tongue Set Free," "The Torch in My Ear," "The Play of the Eyes"--the memoirs of Elias Canetti are variable in their quality and interest. (A fourth volume, "Party in the Blitz," was cobbled together posthumously from fragments.) The first volume's opening sections lovingly describe the Sephardic community where he was raised (in what is now Bulgaria), childhood exploits (including his attempt to take an axe to his cousin and her retribution when she pushed him into a pot of scalding water and nearly killed him), the competing maternal and paternal dynasties, his family's flight to England, and the curse of his grandfather on Canetti's father. Yet, after the death of his father, Canetti seemed locked in an emotional struggle with his mother; their hot-and-cold warfare takes up much of the first two volumes. (For a writer whose disdain for Freud is nearly always palpable, he certainly--and unintentionally--offers himself as a case study.)

The trilogy follows Canetti only through the mid-1930s, when he finally published his first book (and only novel), "Auto-da-Fe"--which I've come to regard as a singular masterpiece. If you've read the novel, there are numerous passages that explain its background, genesis, and meaning, and these, I feel, are among the most valuable sections of the memoir. More generally, Canetti details his intellectual development and the many people, living and dead, who influenced him. A consummate name-dropper, the author recalls his meetings and friendships with numerous contemporary writers, artists, and musical celebrities in Berlin and in Vienna: Kark Kraus (with whom he became somewhat obsessed), Brecht, Broch, Babel, Berg, Grosz, Musil, and many others.

Sadly, if in the first volume, Canetti's tongue is "set free"; by the second and third volumes it is forever wagging; many of these profiles are gossipy and surprisingly lifeless. More often than not, Canetti treats these celebrities as reflections of (or impediments to) his own intellectual aspirations--how so-and-so inspired, mocked, or repulsed him, or how he aggravated them, either intentionally or inadvertently. Canetti's portrait of Brecht, for example, is frustratingly vague; the older writer is often described in terms that would just as equally describe Canetti himself: "The things I said to [Brecht], and that annoyed him, weighed less than a thread. . . . He did not much care for people, but he put up with them; he respected those who were persistently useful to him; he noticed others only to the extent that they corroborated his somewhat monotonous view of the world."

There is even a single encounter with James Joyce, who came to the first reading of Canetti's play "The Comedy of Vanity" and who made during the intermission what was probably a quip about shaving "with a straight razor and no mirror" (there is a reference in the play about shaving in front of mirrors). Canetti bizarrely inflates this sentence--the only thing Joyce said to him--into a criticism, "a declaration of war." (I've read the section three times and I'm still unable to understand the source of the umbrage.) The most powerful portrait, not ironically, is the least threatening: Canetti befriends Thomas Marek, a philosophy student who is completely paralyzed from the neck down, and the resulting chapters are both touching and lively.

In all, there is much in these three volumes about Canetti's growth as an artist and about the heady renaissance in Berlin and Vienna, as well as the portentous rise of the Nazis (who banned Canetti's novel). Taken in small doses, the prose is alternately beautiful or biting; used as a reference, the account serves as a guide to a vibrant artistic scene. But there is also too much: too much abstraction, too much navel-gazing, too many self-aggrandizing encounters with lesser dignitaries who, more often than not, rankled the young, would-be author. For the scholar willing to sift through the muck, there's the stuff of a great biography here, but not a great memoir.