Product Description

Auto Da Fe is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive Sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti builds up the elements in Kien himself, and his personal relationships, which will lead to his destruction. Between 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...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216870 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-23
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From the Back Cover
Auto da Fe is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With a 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 eventually he is 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 Fe was first published in Germany in 1935 as Die Blendung (The Building or Bedazzlement) and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove to be an influential one', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Auto da Fe still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling against the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.
Translated from the German by C.V. Wedgwood
'One of the few undoubted masterpieces of our time' - John Davenport
'A mad, magnificent work' - Spectator
'A strange, eloquent and terrifying book' - Philip Toynbee
'The work of a remarkable talent' - Observer

About the Author
Elias Canetti (1905-1994) 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.

Customer Reviews

Dark Masterpiece
Elias Canetti's Auto Da Fe is a fairly disturbing piece of literature. The most obvious theme is madness but delusion and isloation are also key factors. The protagonist is Professor Kien, a reclusive sociopath who although being a sensitive soul has no abilty to understand and relate to people. Although he is a misanthrope by nature there are touching moments when he considers people his friends and is temporarily relieved of his instinctive malevolence. In a moment of lunacy he weds his maid, a simple minded reactonary who largely causes his demise. We see him go from being independant and wholly immersed in his studies to being thrown out of his own home. He comes to rely on the minipulative dwarf; Fischerle, who suffers from delusions of grandeur and although robbing poor Kien blind does enlist the professor's brother to try and help him. The other character of note is the violence obsessed fascist Bennedikt Pfaff who is totally unable to relate to people without using his fists. Published in 1935 it tells of people who cannot empathise and cannot see the error of their ways. For Canetti, a jew living in Vienna, the outlook was not a pleasant one and the sense of impending doom is portrayed eloquently and with imagery that draws you in to the gloomy lives of its characters. The narrative is lucid and weaves in and out of the characters thoughts with subtlety and precision. I thoroughly recommend this book, the first fifty pages are the most difficult but persevere and you will be rewarded.

One of Those Great "Single Novels"
Every now and then through the course of literary history, a writer produces a great book and retreats back into another aspect of their life; in Canetti's case, this retreat was into non-fiction and the intense work he put into his decades-in-the-making study CROWDS & POWER. In the mid 1930's, however, he produced this novel, DIE BLENDUNG (THE BLINDING; translated into English as AUTO-DA-FE [UK] and TOWER OF BABEL [US]). I love this book, possibly because I'm a bibliophile and can relate, in a sick and twisted way, to the protagonist covering up all of the windows and walls of his Berlin apartment with bookshelves. He is a misanthropic, bitter unhappy man who is a top researcher in Sinology. Then comes his housekeeper and an odd hunchbacked dwarf, and the rest is, well, simultaneously repulsive and hilarious. I can see where some would leave it in midstream but I loved it from beginning to end and thought Canetti did a great job conveying that classic battle between the isolationist and his all-invasive surroundings.

Terrible translation of a horrible story
I have to agree with one of the other reviewers who bemoaned the quality of the translation of this book. While I wouldn't quite describe it as 'unreadable' (because I read it), I will never know how much of my negative reaction to the book is due to the terrible quality of the language. It reads like it was translated by someone with a limited grasp of English using an English-German dictionary and translating one word at a time. Certain bits are barely in English at all.
Trying to put his to one side, I'm not sure that a perfect translation would have allowed me to enjoy this book. It is the story of Peter Kein, a misanthrope who loves books more than people. He is duped into marriage by his housekeeper and then thrown out of his own house, falling in with the petty criminal Fischerle (who longs to be world chess champion) and forming an alliance with Pfaff, the doorman of his building who sees women as nothing more than punchbags, and who has beaten his own wife and daughter into their graves. As Kein's mental health deteriorates his brother comes to rescue him, only to precipitate his final descent into madness.
There are no sympathetic characters here. Kein is an unpleasant idiot, his wife is an unpleasant idiot, Pfaff is a deeply unpleasant idiot. I could just about muster some sympathy for Fischerle and his dreams, but he is, all in all, an unpleasant idiot. The book is a tragic farce about the petty evils of these monstrous people, and I'm really not sure what Canetti wanted us to gain from reading it.
There is the odd interesting moment, unexpected flashes of magical realism. Overall, though, this was a painful and unpleasant read, and I have no idea why I persevered to the end. Don't read it, its not worth it.