Novel
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Die Blendung
Elias Canetti · 1935
Synopsis
Peter Kien, a renowned sinologist, lives as a recluse amid a library of twenty-five thousand volumes. He marries his housekeeper, Therese, convinced that she will look after his books; but, with the help of the caretaker Benedikt Pfaff, she seizes the apartment and throws him out into the street. Kien then sinks into the city's underworld, guided by Fischerle, a hunchbacked dwarf and chess player who thinks only of robbing him.
Context
The novel was written in the years following the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice on 15 July 1927, which Canetti regarded as the founding experience of his reflection on crowds. The manuscript was completed in 1931 and appeared in Vienna in 1935 from Herbert Reichner, almost without echo; after the Anschluss, it could no longer be distributed in German. It took the third German edition, in 1963, for it to find its public. C. V. Wedgwood's English version appeared in 1946, Paule Arhex's French one in 1949, under a title borrowed from the American edition and abandoned in 1968.
Who it is for
Nearly six hundred pages without a single likeable character, in a cold language that describes madness from the inside. One must accept that the narrative takes on each character's delusion without ever correcting it.
Prizes and reception
Prize for Best Foreign Book in 1949 for its first French version; it is its author's only novel.
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