Customer Reviews

Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971

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I bought this book after reading only one notebook entry, browsing in the bookstore aisle. I have never regreted the decision.

It's a most fascinating and eclectic collection of thoughts and profound observations. I have never put the book down with the same vision as I picked it up.

Call it gebrauchlit. Canetti's fragments are far more useful than all of the artsy-fartsy fiction that's prioritized for some dumb reason. I bitterly resent the fact that literature is fic-centric.

Canetti: "The French: they sit down for dinner as if for life everlasting."

But there's one thing I detest about Canetti: his pious admiration for Chinese writers. Which strikes me as a crock of phony-baloney fake-piety. The Chinese are so shallow, they couldn't even come up with a practical alphabet.

Canetti: "How often one is quick to revive grudges against those one has injured. Sensing the injustice of what one is doing, one justifies it with a dormant grievance from the past."

There's a running hatred-of-death in Canett's stuff. Obviously because he's not altogether convinced of the existence of a heavenly afterlife: "I know that everything is changing, and because I feel the ineluctable coming of the new, I turn to the old wherever I can find it. It might be that I just want to save and preserve it because I can't bear the passing of anything. But it could also be that I am testing it, to use against death, still unbeaten."

Canetti hates the possibility of reincarnation and so do I: "Wouldn't recurrence be even sadder than disappearance?"

Saul Bellow (whom I otherwise detest) used to speak possessively of the dead. To Saul they were "my dead". And I couldn't help but notice that Canetti indulged in the same shtick: "P. revolted me when he spoke of his spiritualist seances; he is convinced of an afterlife and wants to offer me these experiences and introduce me into his circle. But to me, my dead are sacred; I don't wish to find them again in a circle of strangers."

Here's a hilarious Canetti line that's straight from Beckettland: "I was nothing but a will; now I am a sound."