Auto-da-Fé (novel)
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, Jonathan Cape, Ltd, 1946) refers to the burning of heretics by the Inquisition. The first American edition of Wedgewood's translation was titled The Tower of Babel (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). Publication history The book manuscript was finished in 1931, and the book was published in 1935, by Herbert Reichner in Vienna (Canetti's home at that time). It is Canetti's first publication. In 1943 Canetti got an offer to publish the book in English with Jonathan Cape, but it was decided to delay publication until after the war. It was eventually released in 1946. The book did not become widely known until after the worldwide success of Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960). Jonathan Spence observes that "there is nothing discreet, chaste, or high minded about the finest and wildest of all fictions that centre on a student of China, Canetti's Auto-da-fe." Plot and themes The novel is a dark and disorienting tale of the self-destructive character of totalitarian thinking. A writer for the Spectator described it as: "Appalling, magnificent ... [It] screams and bellows of evil, out of which a supremely mad, unfaceable book is orchestrated ... of which we dare not deny the genius." The protagonist is Herr Doktor Peter Kien, a famed and famously reclusive forty-year-old philologist and Sinologist who is uninterested in human interaction or sex, content with his monkish, highly disciplined life in his book-lined apartment in Vienna. He uses the least amount of furniture possible, to make room for his pacing through his lofty rooms, sleeping on a small divan. He holds books at a higher value than human life, and becomes obsessed with the protection of his library, which he fancies the largest private library in the city: 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. Kien categorically rejects the ignominiousness and immorality of working for money, and has been living on an inheritance from his father for over a decade. He publishes an article or two every few years, to the delight of the larger European academic community. He is constantly prevailed upon to accept various academic posts, but is absorbed in his studies and shuns social and physical contacts. He is obsessive-compulsive in his efforts to avoid contamination, and much of the book is a tortured comedy of his descent into madness and being thrown into close contact with a world that he doesn't understand: "You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself