I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole: An Elias Canetti Reader

by Elias Canetti, Joshua Cohen (Editor)

Overview

A dazzling collection from the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, chronicling the twentieth century with keen insight and wonder.

"A brilliant selection . . . Canetti's range astonishes." —Claire Messud, Harper's

He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison, he never killed anyone. He neither won nor lost a fortune. All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought.

I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is a summa of Elias Canetti's life and thought, and the definitive introduction to a writer whose genius for interpreting world-historical changes was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an abiding skepticism about the knowability of the self. Born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti later lived in Austria, England, and Switzerland while traversing, in writing, the great thematic provinces of his time: politics, identity, mortality, and more. Sourced from Canetti's landmark texts, including Crowds and Power, an analysis of authoritarianism and mobs; Auto-da-Fé, a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel; the famous sensory-titled memoirs, including The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear; and never-before-translated writings such as The Book Against Death, this collection assembles its luminous shards into a revealing portrait of Canetti's remarkable achievement.

Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen (Book of Numbers, The Netanyahus), I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole spans Canetti's polyglot childhood, mature preoccupations, and friendships with literary giants like James Joyce and Thomas Mann. Interspersed with aphorisms and diary entries, it showcases Canetti's formal range and erudite yet introspective voice. Throughout, his restless fascination with the instability of identity emerges as a key to his thought—as he reminds us, It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374719272
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/27/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Elias Canetti was born in 1905 into a Sephardi Jewish family in Ruse, Bulgaria. He moved to Vienna in 1924, where he became involved in literary circles while studying for a degree in chemistry. He remained in Vienna until the Anschluss, when he emigrated to England and later to Switzerland, where he died in 1994. In 1981, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, and artistic power.” His best-known works include his trilogy of memoirs The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes; the novel Auto-da-Fé; and the nonfiction book Crowds and Power.

Joshua Cohen is the author of several novels, including Witz, Book of Numbers, and The Netanyahus, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the London Review of Books, n+1, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.

Elias Canetti was born in 1905 into a Sephardi Jewish family in Ruse, Bulgaria. He moved to Vienna in 1924, where he became involved in literary circles while studying for a degree in chemistry. He remained in Vienna until the Anschluss, when he emigrated to England and later to Switzerland, where he died in 1994. In 1981, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, and artistic power.” His best-known works include his trilogy of memoirs The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes; the novel Auto-da-Fé; and the nonfiction book Crowds and Power.
Joshua Cohen is the author of ten books, including the novels Book of Numbers, Moving Kings, and Witz. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His book, The Netanyahus, won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Table of Contents

Introduction
A Note on the Contents

Part I: Notes and Memoirs
1. From Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes, 1954–1971
2. From The Tongue Set Free, Part I: “Ruschuk, 1905–1911”
3. From Notes from Hampstead
4. From The Tongue Set Free, Part II: “Manchester, 1911–1913”

Part II: Auto-da-Fé
5. From Auto-da-Fé, Part I: “A Head Without a World”
6. From Notes from Hampstead
7. From Auto-da-Fé, Part II: “Headless World”

Part III: Memoirs and Senses
8. From The Torch in My Ear, Part II: “Storm and Compulsion” (Vienna, 1924–1925)
9. From Earwitness: Fifty Characters
10. From The Play of the Eyes, Parts III and IV: “Chance” and “Grinzing”
11. From The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

Part IV: Crowds and Power
12. From The Torch in My Ear, Part III: “The School of Hearing” (Vienna, 1926–1928)
13. From Crowds and Power: “The Crowd”
14. From Crowds and Power: “The Entrails of Power”
15. From Crowds and Power: “The Survivor”
16. From The Human Province, The Secret Heart of the Clock, and The Agony of Flies: Notes, 1942–1993

Part V: Death and Transformation
17. “The Profession of the Poet”
18. From Das Buch gegen Tod [The Book Against Death]

Editorial Reviews

Praise for I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole

"A brilliant selection . . . Canetti's range astonishes . . . Canetti’s evocation of his early childhood in Ruse, Bulgaria, is Tolstoyan in its lucidity and immediacy . . . He expounds movingly and wisely about what matters to him most—art and death." —Claire Messud, Harper's

"I Want to Keep Smashing Myself pays homage to Canetti’s often unpredictable and unusual approach to thinking about modern life and its travails . . . This is a different Canetti than the authoritative voice found in Crowds and Power, [but] the preoccupations in even the most personal of his essays are the same: to understand the contradictions of modern society and social relations and work out the tensions between the self and others." —Farah Abdessamad, The Nation

"A primer on one of the great questing voices of the 20th century . . . The time is right for (re)reading Canetti, who observed with bleak equanimity the various hellfires that presaged our present era of shock and collapse, without ever losing his illusionless faith that there might yet be salvation in witnessing." —Stephen Phelan, Los Angeles Review of Books

"An impressive career-spanning collection . . . Varied and powerful, this is a great introduction to Canetti’s work." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Vibrant . . . A well-chosen introduction to a lauded intellectual." —Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Elias Canetti

“Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti’s great strength . . . [He] is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words . . . His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.” —Susan Sontag, The New York Review of Books

"Canetti invites—indeed, compels—judgment. His exacting presence honors literature." —George Steiner, The New Yorker

From the Publisher

2022-07-13
The world according to the winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in literature.

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Cohen offers a collection of excerpts from the work of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti (1905-1994) representing the writer’s life, perceptions, and interests. Born to a well-to-do Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti moved to England as a child. After his father’s sudden death, at age 31, when the author was 7, his mother returned with her children to continental Europe, where Canetti remained until 1938, when the Nazis were on the rise. Vibrant childhood memories include family celebrations of Purim and Passover, the birth of a brother when he was 4, a devastating accident, and his triumph at learning to read. Although he had studied for a degree in chemistry, Canetti found his true vocation as a writer: “Without writing I am nothing,” he noted in 1994. “I sense how my life dissolves into dead, dull speculation when I no longer write about what is on my mind.” Identity, freedom, and power became recurring themes in writings that, according to Cohen, aimed to “shatter our superficial vocabularies and politicized identities of false belonging.” In 1927, Canetti witnessed a violent uprising in Vienna that proved to be the seminal event inspiring his 1960 study, Crowds and Power. “I realized,” he wrote, “that there is such a thing as a crowd instinct, which is always in conflict with the personality instinct, and that the struggle between the two of them can explain the course of human history.” Cohen intersperses chronological samplings of Canetti’s published works—two, “The Profession of the Poet” and portions of The Book Against Death, appear in English for the first time—with aphorisms and diary entries from his journals. Canetti espoused specific literary affinities—for Cervantes and Stendhal, for example—and he extolled the sensibility of the poet, who carried within him “the literary legacy of mankind” and was capable of sublime empathy with “the smallest, the most naive, the most powerless.”

A well-chosen introduction to a lauded intellectual.

Kirkus Reviews