The Torch In My Ear by Elias Canetti. New York. 1982. Farrar Straus Giroux. hardcover. 384 pages. Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. 0374278474.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
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-FÉ - 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 is the second volume of Canetti’s memoirs. As the first volume, THE Tongue Set Free, was marked by Canetti’s first great admiration - that for his mother - The Torch In My Ear is above all else the account of Canetti’s admiration for the first great mentor of his adulthood, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus. Indeed, the title is a reference to Kraus’s magazine, THE TORCH. The book is also the 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, of Veza, and of Canetti’s mother are accompanied by those of Brecht (toward whom Canetti is severe, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. The sounds, as Canetti would have it, of these people are alive in the book, as are the sounds of Central Europe on the edge of the abyss - the epoch itself set free by Canetti’s words.
Elias Canetti (1905-1994), Bulgarian-born author of the novel Auto-da-Fé, the sociological study Crowds and Power, and three previously published memoir volumes (The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in my Ear, and The Play of the Eyes), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.