Elias Canetti's Memoirs

They've been in print for some time now, but I've only just got around to reading the three volumes of Elias Canetti's memoirs. He's an amazing writer who published a modernist European masterpiece when he was only twenty-six (Auto-da-Fé) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. He was also personally acquainted with just about every major German writer of the first half of the twentieth century - Berthold Brecht, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus - to name just a few. He even managed to get a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna before he decided to be a writer. Oh - and he had an affair with Gustav Mahler's daughter.

Volume One — The Tongue Set Free

Volume Two — The Torch in My Ear

Volume Three — The Play of the Eyes