The Torch in My Ear
The Torch in My Ear
By Elias Canetti
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
"His exacting presence honors literature"—George Steiner
"Canetti is one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius"—Iris Murdoch
"Canetti is someone who has felt in a profound way the responiblity of words. . . There is no doctrine, but there is a great deal of scorn, urgency, grief, and euphoria. The message of the mind's passions is passion. 'I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, "Relax!"' says Canetti. His work eloquently defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness."—Susan Sontag
Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He is a master of many genres, having written both a great novel—Auto-da-Fe—and a great work of social theory—Crowds and Power. But Canetti's genius is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his autobiography. The Torch in My Ear, the second volume of Canetti's memoirs, is above all else the account of his admiration for the first great mentor of his adulthood, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus. The book is also a portrait of Canetti's first wife, Veza. Within the framework of these great passions, Canetti provides an astonishing account of the Vienna and Berlin of the 1920s. The voices of Kraus, Veza, and Canetti's mother are accompanied by those of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others.
Paperback
384 pages
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1983
6 x 9 inches
ISBN 9780374518042
Biography