I WANT TO KEEP SMASHING MYSELF UNTIL I AM WHOLE

The world according to the winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in literature.

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Cohen offers a collection of excerpts from the work of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti (1905-1994) representing the writer’s life, perceptions, and interests. Born to a well-to-do Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti moved to England as a child. After his father’s sudden death, at age 31, when the author was 7, his mother returned with her children to continental Europe, where Canetti remained until 1938, when the Nazis were on the rise. Vibrant childhood memories include family celebrations of Purim and Passover, the birth of a brother when he was 4, a devastating accident, and his triumph at learning to read. Although he had studied for a degree in chemistry, Canetti found his true vocation as a writer: “Without writing I am nothing,” he noted in 1994. “I sense how my life dissolves into dead, dull speculation when I no longer write about what is on my mind.” Identity, freedom, and power became recurring themes in writings that, according to Cohen, aimed to “shatter our superficial vocabularies and politicized identities of false belonging.” In 1927, Canetti witnessed a violent uprising in Vienna that proved to be the seminal event inspiring his 1960 study, Crowds and Power. “I realized,” he wrote, “that there is such a thing as a crowd instinct, which is always in conflict with the personality instinct, and that the struggle between the two of them can explain the course of human history.” Cohen intersperses chronological samplings of Canetti’s published works—two, “The Profession of the Poet” and portions of The Book Against Death, appear in English for the first time—with aphorisms and diary entries from his journals. Canetti espoused specific literary affinities—for Cervantes and Stendhal, for example—and he extolled the sensibility of the poet, who carried within him “the literary legacy of mankind” and was capable of sublime empathy with “the smallest, the most naive, the most powerless.”

A well-chosen introduction to a lauded intellectual.