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Title: Auto-da-Fe by D. V. Wedgewood, Elias Canetti ISBN: 0-374-51879-3 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1984 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A strangely purifying book
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: "I ask you, he's not even a man!"
Comment: 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: Arguably the worst book ever written
Comment: As far as I can tell, the only reason anyone has ever bought this is because it's cheap in the used book stores and sez "Nobel Prize Winner" on the outside. (At least (blush) that's why I did).
People, stay away. This may be the worst book ever published. I say that after careful thought; this cannot be dismissed as shallow dark-and-stormy-night-ery, formulaic flatulence, or pathetic poetastery - it is bad on a much larger scale. It is a truly monumental combination of mean-spirited misogyny, flimsy characterization, dumb Dumb DUMB dialogue, and story line stolen from a whiny junior high school diary. To this day I cannot imagine why I stayed with it to the end, and regret having done so. If you are currently in the middle of this book, STOP NOW - don't throw good brain cells after bad.
It has occurred to me that Auto-da-fe is perhaps a bold experiment aimed at exploring the boundaries of literature - can one write a good novel without believable plot, engaging characters, human sympathy, or readable language? The answer is "no".
Perhaps the translation is at fault - perhaps the original is merely a badly written, pretentious, over-wrought mistake with maybe even a redeeming feature or two. In this case, the translation ought to be an object of careful study in the world's academies of translation technique (do such exist?) as an example of How Not To Do It.
Another thing I regret is that when I purged this malignant tumour of a novel from my shelves, I took the cowardly and unprincipled action of donating it to a charity book bazaar rather than consigning it to a dumpster; I expect St. Pete to have a few words for me on this subject when I show up at the pearly gates...
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Title: Crowds and Power by Carol Stewart, Elias Canetti ISBN: 0374518203 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Memoirs of Elias Canetti : The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes by Elias Canetti ISBN: 0374199507 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 26 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman, Harold Bloom ISBN: 0060188707 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: A Simple Story (Library of Modern Jewish Literature) by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hillel Halkin, Schmuel Yoseph Agnon ISBN: 0815606184 Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Trade) Pub. Date: 01 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Fish Can Sing by Halldor Kiljan Laxness, Magnus Magnusson ISBN: 1860469345 Publisher: Harvill Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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