The Play of the Eyes

Here, Canetti describes his young adult life as he tries to make it as a writer in Vienna during the 1930s, and provides vivid accounts of the remarkable figures he meets along the way, usually in cafes, from Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, and Herman Broch, among others.

"Canetti uses a dramatist's gifts here to achieve emotional depth; his mother's death, sketched simply against the backdr...