- Published: 04/08/2011
- ISBN: 9781847083555
- 129x20mm
- 336 pages
The Play Of The Eyes
Elias Canetti
The third volume of Canetti’s autobiography is set in Vienna between 1931 and 1937: years when the European catastrophe, already clear to anyone with eyes to see, was approaching its horrifying climax. To this great intellectual and spiritual self-portrait Canetti adds wonderful portraits of his friends and rivals: Herman Broch, Robert Musil, Fritz Wortruba, Alban Berg and Alma Mahler. Canetti brings these legends to life for modern readers as never before. Central to the book is Canetti’s account of his friendship with the mysterious Doctor Sonne, a mentor whose effect on his life and work was enormous.
£9.99
The Play of the Eyes has a memorable power and freshness that could only come from a man of passion, disarming in his almost child-like quirkiness of vision and in his unfading sense of the world as a place of bizarre menace
Independent
It is not only individuals that come to life in thie extraordinary book: we get a strong impression of the intellectual atmosphere prevailing in Vienna and Strasbourg
Guardian
It is a measure of Canetti's literary genius that the intimate and the intellectual are entwined so inextricably in his life that his tripartite autobiography amounts to nothing less than an essenital social history of the first third of our century
Jewish Chronicle
From the Same Author
Elias Canetti on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Karl Kraus and Veza
Elias Canetti
‘It was natural that the rumors about both these people should reach me at the same time; they came from the same source, from which everything new for me came at that time.’
