From Publishers Weekly
It's easy to see why Bulgarian Nobel Prize winner Canetti's memoir of his years of British exile caused a stir upon its German publication: frank to the point of rudeness, acerbic to the point of crankiness, the author (who died in 1994) had a long memory and several scores to settle. The book's most sustained invective is directed at T.S. Eliot and Iris Murdoch, and whether one agrees with Canetti or not, his eloquently sustained loathing is bracing stuff. For Canetti, Eliot's commanding power over literary life in England signaled the country's decline from its 17th-century heights. That "a libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante... thin lipped, cold hearted, prematurely old" could consign Milton and Keats to the margins while controlling the careers of numerous living writers was to Canetti an outrage that the years did nothing to assuage. And his recollections of "the bubbling Oxford stewpot," Iris Murdoch—with whom he had an affair—are, if less than gallant, a useful corrective to the sentimentalities of the Murdoch industry. Canetti also presents numerous other figures, from sinologist Arthur Waley to politician Enoch Powell, from sculptor Henry Moore to historian C.V. Wedgewood, in bold, unsparing strokes. But through all his varied adventures, Canetti's affection for the English people and their institutions remains undiminished. Part memoir, part history, part sociological enquiry, this volume is the rough-edged pendant of a remarkable career.
(Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Booklist
In 1939 Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti fled north of London to Hampstead and there with his wife, Veza, weathered Hitler's air war among a most distinguished company of fellow novelists and poets. The future Nobel laureate, a man of withering observation and of supreme self-centeredness and introspection, Canetti recalls those who crossed his path in those desperate years. Always quick to judge and often betraying what seems mere petty jealousy on his part, Canetti savages his comrades. He cannot abide that T. S. Eliot might be patient with those whose talents were less exalted. Canetti's opinion of Dylan Thomas is only slightly more generous. Despite Canetti's stated disdain for the social whirl and his claim to feel nowhere else "more miserable and solitary than at parties," he makes a remarkable number of appearances at them and uses these events as observation platforms into the world of English classism. Students of literary life of this era will find this memoir overflowing with general observations, but specific, unprejudiced insights may be substantially fewer in number.
Mark KnoblauchCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an alternate
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edition.
