Brilliant ... 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 ... This volume lacks Canetti’s dramatic works, but there is more than enough without them. Personally, I’ve copied out citations from the notebooks...and have ordered the memoirs entire.
Might be the closest thing Canetti ever gets to an equivalent tribute by a 21st-century talent. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and essayist Joshua Cohen has drawn from old and new translations of Canetti’s autobiographies, voluminous collections of his notes and aphorisms, and his sole published work of prose fiction...to create a primer on one of the great questing voices of the 20th century ... Cohen admits that he stripped some of these pages almost arbitrarily from the walls of Canetti’s vast mind palace — whatever bright details caught his eye on a given day ... For all the biographical ground covered in this volume, there is not much about Canetti’s personal affairs in adulthood, literal or figurative.
