Auto-da-Fé
by Elias Canetti
Summary
Peter Kien is a reclusive sinologist in Vienna who loves his twenty five thousand book library more than he loves any living person, and the whole novel follows what happens once he lets someone else into that closed world. Impressed by what looks like his housekeeper Therese's protectiveness toward the books, when he catches her turning away a schoolboy who had asked to see them, Kien marries her, convinced she will help guard the library rather than threaten it. On their wedding night Therese throws books onto the floor to clear space for herself, and that single act starts Kien's collapse: Therese soon dominates the apartment, and eventually forces him out of his own home entirely.
Cast out into Vienna's underworld, Kien falls in with Fischerle, a hunchbacked dwarf who dreams of becoming world chess champion and who defrauds Kien of what little money he has left in order to fund his own escape to America. Fischerle eventually contacts Kien's brother Georges, a successful psychiatrist working in Paris, who comes to Vienna and tries, and ultimately fails, to pull Peter back from what is now a genuine psychological collapse: delusions of having murdered Therese, hallucinations of his own books already burning in a pawnshop. Fischerle himself never reaches America; he is murdered by an associate before he can escape. Kien's own end matches the delusion he could not shake: alone again in his apartment, surrounded finally only by his books, he sets himself and the entire library alight.
Elias Canetti writes each of his major characters as sealed inside a private language that genuinely cannot reach anyone else, which is what makes the comedy here so bleak rather than simply absurd. Reading it means sitting inside minds that never really touch, even when they are shouting directly at one another, and it suits a reader drawn to savage, uncomfortable comedy over anything gentler.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Elias Canetti the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power. Auto da Fé, published in German in 1935 as Die Blendung and translated into English in 1946, is his only novel; Canetti spent the following decades writing nonfiction instead, most notably the 1960 study Crowds and Power, which first brought him wide recognition well before the Nobel arrived, and an autobiographical trilogy completed in the 1980s.
Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family, and lived across much of Europe before settling for decades in Britain, becoming a British citizen in 1952. The English critic Kate O'Brien, reviewing the novel in The Spectator in 1946, called it appalling and magnificent, and the sinologist Jonathan Spence later called it the finest and wildest of all fictions centered on a student of China.