Author(s): Elias Canetti; Joshua Cohen (Editor)

Essay

A career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Joshua Cohen

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.

Here, in his own words, is one of the twentieth century's foremost critics--a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably peripatetic writer by the name of Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I am Whole: An Elias Canetti Reader reintroduces us to an individual who saw the world precisely for what it was, while never losing his sense of wonder or his 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. Drawing on texts including Crowds and Power, Canetti's analysis of authoritarianism and mobs; Auto-da-Fé, a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel; the autobiographical works The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear; and never-before-translated writings such as The Book Against Death, this collection assembles a full intellectual portrait of this diagnostician of the modern temperament.

Edited and introduced by the inimitable Joshua Cohen (Witz, Book of Numbers), this book leads us from the circumstances of Canetti's childhood to his adolescent obsessions to his mature preoccupations. I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I am Whole is also peppered with aphorisms and aperçus, revealing Canetti to be one of the great humorists of his era, not to mention one of its most versatile writers. Above all, we come to see Canetti's fascination with the instability of identity as one of the keys to his thought--as he reminds us, It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.

"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

Author Biography: 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." Joshua Cohen is the author of Witz, Book of Numbers, and, most recently, The Netanyahus. His writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The London Review of Books, n+1, and The New York Times, among other publications.