Party in the Blitz - Elias Canetti

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Résumé :
A stunning and unexpected new volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography. A surprise gift to celebrate the Nobel Laureate's 100th birthday.

Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, at 85, beset by the desire to come to terms with his years of exile in Britain, wrote Party in the Blitz. He waited half a century to confront these memories, perhaps because in order to be truthful, I should have to track down every needless humiliation I was offered in England, and relive it as the torture it was. Party in the Blitz dissects that torture with unrestrained acerbity, recounting the ordeal of being in a new country where not a soul knew his writing. But not one to be ignored, the godmonster of Hempstead (as John Bayley dubbed Canetti) soon knew everyone and everyone knew him. Enoch Powell, Bertrand Russell, Iris Murdoch, Empson, Wittgenstein, Kokoshka, Kathleen Raine, Henry Moore, Ralph Vaughn Williams: Canetti knew them all, and in Party in the Blitz he mercilessly rakes some of them over the coals. He detested T.S. Eliot and came to bitterly despise Iris Murdoch, with whom he had an affair: Every word of his devastating portrait of her quivers with rage. He must have been a frequent party-goer, as Jeremy Adler remarks in his excellent afterword, to judge by the well-informed distaste with which he recalls them. Gorgeously translated by Michael Hofmann, Party in the Blitz lives up to Canetti's injunction that when you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about....

Biographie:
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. His best-known works include his trilogy of memoirs The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes, and The Party in the Blitz...

Sommaire:
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. His best-known works include his trilogy of memoirs The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes, and The Party in the Blitz...