Kafka's Other Trial

Perhaps the most revealing essay on Kafka ever published. At last Kafka is matched in thought and prose

Elias Canetti (1905-1994) is best known in the English-speaking world for Crowds and Power, Kafka's Other Trial and for the classic Auto-de-Fe. His family moved from Bulgaria to England, then Vienna, and he settled back in England in 1938. In 1981 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was cited by the Swedish Academy for his 'writings marked by a broad outlook and wealth of ideas and artistic power'.

In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancée Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently fallen in love. Broken and bereft, Kafka - at the height of his writing powers - turned the experience into his masterpiece, The Trial, where his lovers became the faceless prosecutors of Josef K. In Kafka's Other Trial, Canetti explores each letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancée, from their first tender moments together to his final letter and his refusal to reconcile. 
 
In this affecting book, he offers moving insights into the creativity of Franz Kafka and the torment he suffered as a man, a lover, and a writer.

Auto Da Fé

'Strange, savage, subtle, beautifully mysterious... one of the great novels of the [twentieth] century' - Iris Murdoch

One of the few undoubted masterpieces of our time

Elias Canetti (1905-1994) born of Spanish-Jews parents, lived in in Vienna until 1937 and spent much of his working life in Britain during and after the war. He became a British citizen in 1952 but wrote in German, the language of his childhood and youth spent in Vienna, Zurich and Frankfurt.

Auto Da Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction. 
 
Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis... 
 
Auto Da Fé was first published in Germany in 1935 as Die Blendung (The Blinding or Bedazzlement) and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Auto Da Fé still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.

Elias Canetti

Nobel Prize-winning author Canetti spent only a few weeks in Marrakesh, but it was a visit that would remain with him for the rest of his life. In The Voices of Marrakesh, he captures the essence of that place: the crowds, the smells - of spices, camels and the souks - and, most importantly to Canetti, the sounds of the city, from the cries of the blind beggars and the children's call for alms to the unearthly silence on the still roofs above the hordes. 
 
In these immaculately crafted essays, Canetti examines the emotions Marrakesh stirred within him and the people who affected him for ever.

Elias Canetti

The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

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