A brilliant selection . . . Canetti's range astonishes. --Claire
Messud, Harper's
**
A career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias
Canetti, edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen.**
He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison,
he never killed anyone. He neither won nor lost a fortune. All he ever
did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life
dimension, both of feeling and of thought.
Here, in his own words, is one of the twentieth century's foremost
chroniclers: a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably
peripatetic writer named Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1981. I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole
is a summa of Canetti's life and thought, and the definitive
introduction to a writer whose genius for interpreting world-historical
changes was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an abiding skepticism
about the knowability of the self. Born into a Sephardi Jewish family in
Bulgaria, Canetti later lived in Austria, England, and Switzerland while
traversing, in writing, the great thematic provinces of his time:
politics, identity, mortality, and more. Sourced from Canetti's landmark
texts, including Crowds and Power, an analysis of authoritarianism and
mobs; Auto-da-Fé, a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel about the
fate of European literature; the famous sequence of sensory-titled
memoirs, including The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear; and
never-before-translated writings such as the posthumous The Book
Against Death, this collection assembles its luminous shards into the
fullest portrait yet of Canetti's remarkable achievement.
Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen (Book of
Numbers, The Netanyahus), I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am
Whole leads us from Canetti's polyglot childhood to his mature
preoccupations, and his friendships and rivalries with Hermann Broch,
James Joyce, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and others. This
collection is also interspersed with aphorisms and diary entries,
revealing Canetti's formal range and stylistic versatility in flashes of
erudition and introspective humor. Throughout, we come to see Canetti's
restless fascination with the instability of identity as one of the keys
to his thought--as he reminds us, It all depends on this: with whom we
confuse ourselves.
