Dimensions
145 x 223 x 26mm
Exceedingly perceptive, at times amusing and always unpredictable, this autobiography by Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti is a fascinating and lively read. Canetti spent forty years in London, beginning in 1939, during which he moved in elite circles, numbering the great writers, artists, thinkers and politicians of the time among his friends and acquaintances. But he felt it was an era in which England, having given its best in World War II, lost its glory. Canetti started work on his England memoirs in 1985. Four separate drafts were begun, of which this book, unfinished at the time of his death in 1994, is the product. Restrictive covenants in Canetti's will prevented the publication of his manuscripts and papers for a time, but 'Party In The Blitz' was finally published in German in 2003.
In this sensational collection of portraits of those who were meaningful in his life, Canetti is an honest and often cruel observer of the personalities of those around him. T S Eliot, he believed, was an embodiment of the grip of decline in which English society found itself. He was intrigued by the English society party, finding in it evidence of a stiff-upper-lip attitude verging on social repression. Already well documented is Canetti's affair with Iris Murdoch. In writing of their rendezvous Canetti is, characteristically, unrestrainedly acerbic. John Bayley would later refer to him as "the god-monster of Hampstead". His style is at times staccato, at times elaborately philosophical, but always displaying the author's sharp-tongued wit and intelligence. This is a unique and personal account of an extraordinary man's life in the age of the Hampstead intelligentsia.
