Auto-da-Fé

"Auto-da-Fé" (original title "Die Blendung", "The Blinding") is a 1935 novel by Elias Canetti; the title of the English translation (by C. V. Wedgwood, 1946) refers to the burning of heretics by the Inquisition. The book was banned by the Nazis and did not become widely known until after the worldwide success of Canetti's "Crowds and Power" (1960).

The protagonist is Peter Klein, a middle-aged philologist.

He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o'clock. [Elias Canetti, "Auto-da-Fé" (J. Cape, 1971), p.11]

Klein is absorbed in his studies of Chinese and fears social and physical contacts, but he is pressured into marrying his ignorant housekeeper Therese Krummholz, who robs him with the help of Benedikt Pfaff, the proto-fascist apartment manager. Klein descends to the depths of society as his brother tries in vain to cure him, reaching an apocalyptic end amid his books.

Bibliography

*William Collins Donahue, "The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé" (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

References

External links

* [http://www.ibiblio.org/uncpress/chapters/donahue_end.html Preface to Donahue, "The End of Modernism"]