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I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole
"A brilliant selection . . . Canetti's range astonishes." ―Claire Messud, Harper's
A career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner 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 a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably peripatetic writer named Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is a summa of Canetti’s life and thought, and the definitive introduction to a writer whose genius for interpreting world-historical changes was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an 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 politics, identity, mortality, and more. Sourced from Canetti’s landmark texts, including Crowds and Power , an analysis of authoritarianism and mobs; Auto-da-Fé , a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel about the fate of European literature; the famous sequence of sensory-titled memoirs, including The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear ; and never-before-translated writings such as the posthumous The Book Against Death , this collection assembles its luminous shards into the fullest portrait yet of Canetti’s remarkable achievement.
Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen ( Book of Numbers , The Netanyahus ), I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole leads us from Canetti’s polyglot childhood to his mature preoccupations, and his friendships and rivalries with Hermann Broch, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and others. This collection is also interspersed with aphorisms and diary entries, revealing Canetti’s formal range and stylistic versatility in flashes of erudition and introspective humor. Throughout, we come to see Canetti’s restless fascination with the instability of identity as one of the keys to his thought―as he reminds us, It all depends on with whom we confuse ourselves.
A career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner 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 a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably peripatetic writer named Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is a summa of Canetti’s life and thought, and the definitive introduction to a writer whose genius for interpreting world-historical changes was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an 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 politics, identity, mortality, and more. Sourced from Canetti’s landmark texts, including Crowds and Power , an analysis of authoritarianism and mobs; Auto-da-Fé , a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel about the fate of European literature; the famous sequence of sensory-titled memoirs, including The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear ; and never-before-translated writings such as the posthumous The Book Against Death , this collection assembles its luminous shards into the fullest portrait yet of Canetti’s remarkable achievement.
Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen ( Book of Numbers , The Netanyahus ), I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole leads us from Canetti’s polyglot childhood to his mature preoccupations, and his friendships and rivalries with Hermann Broch, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and others. This collection is also interspersed with aphorisms and diary entries, revealing Canetti’s formal range and stylistic versatility in flashes of erudition and introspective humor. Throughout, we come to see Canetti’s restless fascination with the instability of identity as one of the keys to his thought―as he reminds us, It all depends on with whom we confuse ourselves.
396 pages, Paperback
Published September 27, 2022
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About the author
Elias Canetti
133 books663 followersAwarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power."
He studied in Vienna. Before World War II he moved with his wife Veza to England and stayed there for long time. Since late 1960s he lived in London and Zurich. In late 1980s he started to live in Zurich permanently. He died in 1994 in Zurich.
Author of Auto-da-Fé, Party in the Blitz, Crowds and Power, and The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit
He studied in Vienna. Before World War II he moved with his wife Veza to England and stayed there for long time. Since late 1960s he lived in London and Zurich. In late 1980s he started to live in Zurich permanently. He died in 1994 in Zurich.
Author of Auto-da-Fé, Party in the Blitz, Crowds and Power, and The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 21, 2022
A comprehensive compendium of works written by the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti.
Many years ago, I read his novel, Auto-de-fe, which I remember in a dreamlike fashion. I also have the two volumes of his trilogy autobiography, still unread. All of these are excerpted in this book as edited by the novelist Joshua Cohen.
Canetti grew up in an extended Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria and then Manchester, England where his father died when Elias was 7 years old. He went on to lead a life among the great Eastern European writers: Kafka, Kraus, Broch, Musil, and an affair with Iris Murdoch. He is also best known for a mammoth treatise entitled, Crowds and Power, which is excerpted and still quite relevant to the times we live in.
I especially liked the essay, the Profession of the Poet", which is included in its entirety. A sample from this piece follows:
“the actual task of the poet… to keep open the doors between people-himself and others. He must be capable of becoming everyone: the smallest, the most naïve, the most powerless. But this desire to experience others from within can never be determined by the goals that compose what we call normal or official lives. This desire would have to be completely free from any hope of success or achievement; it would have to constitute its own desire; the desire for metamorphosis.” (from the essay “The Profession of the Poet”)
This is an excellent sourcebook for anyone interested in learning more about this unique writer.
Many years ago, I read his novel, Auto-de-fe, which I remember in a dreamlike fashion. I also have the two volumes of his trilogy autobiography, still unread. All of these are excerpted in this book as edited by the novelist Joshua Cohen.
Canetti grew up in an extended Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria and then Manchester, England where his father died when Elias was 7 years old. He went on to lead a life among the great Eastern European writers: Kafka, Kraus, Broch, Musil, and an affair with Iris Murdoch. He is also best known for a mammoth treatise entitled, Crowds and Power, which is excerpted and still quite relevant to the times we live in.
I especially liked the essay, the Profession of the Poet", which is included in its entirety. A sample from this piece follows:
“the actual task of the poet… to keep open the doors between people-himself and others. He must be capable of becoming everyone: the smallest, the most naïve, the most powerless. But this desire to experience others from within can never be determined by the goals that compose what we call normal or official lives. This desire would have to be completely free from any hope of success or achievement; it would have to constitute its own desire; the desire for metamorphosis.” (from the essay “The Profession of the Poet”)
This is an excellent sourcebook for anyone interested in learning more about this unique writer.
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June 26, 2024'It is difficult to believe in the transmigration of souls. Would it not be much harder to believe that one never returns?'
I love the cover more than anything else (which is obviously not ideal). The tone was a problem for me. The writer (much to my disappointment) tends to use a hundred lines to say what can be expressed with less (that sort of vibe which is in stark contrast to what I usually gravitate to; I simply lack the patience for it). Ultimately, (and simply) not for me (but I'm open to try his other work at a later date, maybe?). At least Cioran makes me laugh, not Canetti. Not moved, not impressed, sort of indifferent I suppose. Few chunks made me go 'hmm? this seems promising' but always sort of quietly disappointing. Not 'mad' about it, in every sense of the word. But bearing in mind I'm two-timing Canetti with Borges, so I am probably the one to blame for this 'lacklustre' experience.
Some chunks I thought were more decent/ held my attention more than others :
'She herself had a profound need to use German with me, it was the language of her intimacy. The dreadful cut into her life, when, at twenty-seven, she lost my father, was expressed most sensitively for her in the fact that their loving conversations in German were stopped. Her true marriage had taken place in that language—.'
'—in a very short time, she forced me to achieve something beyond the strength of any child, and the fact that she succeeded determined the deeper nature of my German; it was a belated mother tongue, implanted in true pain. The pain was not all, it was promptly followed by a period of happiness, and that tied me indissolubly to that language. It must have fed my propensity for writing at an early moment, for I had won the book from her in order to learn how to write, and the sudden change for the better actually began with my learning how to write Gothic letters. She certainly did not tolerate my giving up the other languages—.'
'It is said that for many people death is a release, and there is scarcely a person who has not at some point wished for it. It is the ultimate symbol of failure: whoever fails on a grand scale comforts himself by thinking it possible to fail even more, and he reaches for that monstrous dark cloak that covers us all equally. But if death did not exist, then we could not fail at anything; every new attempt would rectify weaknesses, shortcomings, and sins. Unlimited time would lead to unlimited courage. From an early age we are taught that, here at least, everything in the known world ends. Limits and narrow straits everywhere, and soon a last, painful strait that we cannot extend. Everyone looks down this narrow strait; whatever might come after it is seen as inevitable; all must bow to it, regardless of their plans or means. A soul may feel as expansive as it likes, but it will be squeezed until it suffocates at a point it cannot determine. What does determine it, that is a matter for the powers that be and not the single soul itself. The slavery of death is the core of of all slavery, and if this slavery were not accepted, no one could wish for it.'
Sort of preachy, and kind of 'drags', no? Also, where is that sweet, teasing aftertaste of uncertainty (which is always sort of endearing and lovely in general)? None of that, apparently. I also didn't enjoy how the narrator is so 'sure' of how the other characters are 'feeling' or 'thinking' (even though it's just a projection of his own self/views). The 'aphorisms' (or what seem to be as so) in the latter half also felt sort of overly confident and slightly condescending (in tone if not literally), and not in a darkly comic way (like how Cioran can be for instance).
And to be even more nit-picky about this, I didn't enjoy his bit about Confucius. I feel like if one is to write about a figure of that calibre, it has to be fucking impressive, no? Otherwise it just falls flat like a distasteful namedrop/flex. He also writes women in the ways that sort of - makes one involuntarily squint in mild disgust and/or rolls one's eyes? Werner Herzog raised the bar too high with regards to this, and 'unfortunately' I've only read him recently, so I can't help but compare. While Canetti sort of have this constant fear/thought about 'women' disliking him; Herzog thinks that they fucking love him to the extent that he doesn't feel deserving of them (yet confesses that his life would make no sense at all without them). It's as if each time Herzog talks about the women in his life, a thousand gardens grow (understatement).
June 12, 2024
This may have been one of my favorite books I’ve read in recent memory. Learning of a man’s life during the most pivotal moments of modern time, maturing around the most brilliant minds (Haydn, Freud, etc.) was fascinating.
Canetti tells stories so candidly, but the weight of each trying time he endured is so vivid and real. Included are his biographies, excerpts of early works and successes, ——and most captivatingly—the psychology or people, crowds, and life and death as his life progressed. All tie together and show the fluidity of thought as one matures, grows old, and ultimately is forced to encounter their own mortality.
A brilliant collection by a brilliant mind.
Canetti tells stories so candidly, but the weight of each trying time he endured is so vivid and real. Included are his biographies, excerpts of early works and successes, ——and most captivatingly—the psychology or people, crowds, and life and death as his life progressed. All tie together and show the fluidity of thought as one matures, grows old, and ultimately is forced to encounter their own mortality.
A brilliant collection by a brilliant mind.
June 29, 2024
Really makes me want to read more Elias Canetti!
It’s a wonderful introduction to his varied work, from the stupendously strange novel to the more conventional memoirs and non-fiction. Canetti’s accounts of interwar Vienna are especially lovely, and makes you mourn the death of that artistic community along with many of its members.
It’s a wonderful introduction to his varied work, from the stupendously strange novel to the more conventional memoirs and non-fiction. Canetti’s accounts of interwar Vienna are especially lovely, and makes you mourn the death of that artistic community along with many of its members.
August 10, 2023
Literally incredible that’s all I can say
February 14, 2024
Very enjoyable, had no clue who Elias Canetti was before I picked this book up because I found the title amusing. Canetti is the definition of a masterful writer as most of his memoir I found to be lacking eventfulness, yet I could not seem to stop turning the page. His study of crowds that which won him the Nobel Prize really struck me as well even though it did not take up much of the book.
November 7, 2022
A fascinating selection of Canetti's varied works, biographical, fictional and philosophical.
The fragments that shone brighter than the rest were the memoirs and his essay on the ideal of 'the poet', especially.
The fragments that shone brighter than the rest were the memoirs and his essay on the ideal of 'the poet', especially.
November 7, 2024
"No sooner does the mere possibility of success appear on the horizon, than he tries to escape. His mistrust of success has become so great that he only wants to want it, not have it." pg.3
A compilation drawn from Canetti’s seminal works, including Crowds and Power (exploring authoritarianism and the psychology of crowds), Auto-da-Fé (a modernist novel reflecting on the decline of European literature), Tongue Set Free and Torch in My Ear (sensory-driven memoirs), as well as the posthumous Book Against Death. This collection offers the most comprehensive portrayal to date of Canetti’s extraordinary intellectual legacy.
"This prolific writer of nothing, what is so important for him to tell no one?" pg. 4
Part I: Notes & Memoirs - Offers a searching portrait of the author's personal background and creative evolution, highlighting the events, key figures (particularly his mother), and intellectual influences that shaped his development as a young man and artist.
"All life, so far as he knows it, is laid out in distances-the house in which he shuts himself and his property, the positions he holds, the rank he desires-all these serve to create distances, to confirm and extend them." pg. 316
Part II: Auto-da-Fé - The novel is structured in three parts, each offering a distinct perspective on society through Canetti’s lens. One part follows a deeply intellectual scholar who attempts to retreat from the world, finding solace in his erudition and solitary routines in the library. His peaceful existence is disrupted by nearly illiterate, yet life-worn figures who represent the outside world—people driven by a desire to profit from everything and seek pleasure through physical indulgence. The novel culminates in a chaotic climax, where the clash of these contrasting worldviews leads to madness, as individuals attempt to impose their own perspectives on each other.
"This urge of mine to know everything about all people, no matter when or where they lived, as though my salvation were contingent in each one, his peculiarity, uniqueness, the course of his life, and then what they should be together." pg. 346
Part III: Memoirs & Senses - These volumes capture the vibrant artistic atmosphere of 1920s Vienna and Berlin with freshness and vivid detail. Highlighting when Canetti was an aspiring, unpublished writer who found himself among the intellectual elite. As we progress through time the tone shifts dramatically. Now an ambitious and self-assured writer, he adopts a more negative stance. His portraits of other authors feel less insightful and more patronizing, with little of the depth that marked his earlier work.
"It is the hours in which one is alone that amounts to the difference between death and life." pg. 372
Part IV: Crowds & Power - A series of essays shaped by human groups and their dynamics in a way that had never been done before. His primary focus is the crowd, which can emerge from something more basic, like a pack, but evolves into a force with distinct, crowd-like characteristics. Depending on its type, a crowd develops an implicit "crowd-mind," a collective consciousness not unlike a beehive. Presenting page after page of remarkable observations and conclusions about what makes each type behave as it does.
"The very last book he reads: unimaginable." "I'm curious about the last conversation. With whom will it be?" pg. 384
Part V: Death & Transformation - With powerful, disarming, and often darkly comic observations, diatribes, and reflections, Canetti delivers a searing exploration of death. He evokes despair, melancholy, and fury as he confronts the inevitable demise of all living beings. At the same time, he vehemently protests the mass death wrought by war and the tyrannical use of death as a tool of power. Interwoven with quotes from philosophers and writers like Goethe, in the end it is a poignant affirmation of life's intrinsic value.
Ultimately, everything converges to illustrate the evolving nature of thought as one matures, ages, and is eventually confronted with the inevitability of their own mortality.
A compilation drawn from Canetti’s seminal works, including Crowds and Power (exploring authoritarianism and the psychology of crowds), Auto-da-Fé (a modernist novel reflecting on the decline of European literature), Tongue Set Free and Torch in My Ear (sensory-driven memoirs), as well as the posthumous Book Against Death. This collection offers the most comprehensive portrayal to date of Canetti’s extraordinary intellectual legacy.
"This prolific writer of nothing, what is so important for him to tell no one?" pg. 4
Part I: Notes & Memoirs - Offers a searching portrait of the author's personal background and creative evolution, highlighting the events, key figures (particularly his mother), and intellectual influences that shaped his development as a young man and artist.
"All life, so far as he knows it, is laid out in distances-the house in which he shuts himself and his property, the positions he holds, the rank he desires-all these serve to create distances, to confirm and extend them." pg. 316
Part II: Auto-da-Fé - The novel is structured in three parts, each offering a distinct perspective on society through Canetti’s lens. One part follows a deeply intellectual scholar who attempts to retreat from the world, finding solace in his erudition and solitary routines in the library. His peaceful existence is disrupted by nearly illiterate, yet life-worn figures who represent the outside world—people driven by a desire to profit from everything and seek pleasure through physical indulgence. The novel culminates in a chaotic climax, where the clash of these contrasting worldviews leads to madness, as individuals attempt to impose their own perspectives on each other.
"This urge of mine to know everything about all people, no matter when or where they lived, as though my salvation were contingent in each one, his peculiarity, uniqueness, the course of his life, and then what they should be together." pg. 346
Part III: Memoirs & Senses - These volumes capture the vibrant artistic atmosphere of 1920s Vienna and Berlin with freshness and vivid detail. Highlighting when Canetti was an aspiring, unpublished writer who found himself among the intellectual elite. As we progress through time the tone shifts dramatically. Now an ambitious and self-assured writer, he adopts a more negative stance. His portraits of other authors feel less insightful and more patronizing, with little of the depth that marked his earlier work.
"It is the hours in which one is alone that amounts to the difference between death and life." pg. 372
Part IV: Crowds & Power - A series of essays shaped by human groups and their dynamics in a way that had never been done before. His primary focus is the crowd, which can emerge from something more basic, like a pack, but evolves into a force with distinct, crowd-like characteristics. Depending on its type, a crowd develops an implicit "crowd-mind," a collective consciousness not unlike a beehive. Presenting page after page of remarkable observations and conclusions about what makes each type behave as it does.
"The very last book he reads: unimaginable." "I'm curious about the last conversation. With whom will it be?" pg. 384
Part V: Death & Transformation - With powerful, disarming, and often darkly comic observations, diatribes, and reflections, Canetti delivers a searing exploration of death. He evokes despair, melancholy, and fury as he confronts the inevitable demise of all living beings. At the same time, he vehemently protests the mass death wrought by war and the tyrannical use of death as a tool of power. Interwoven with quotes from philosophers and writers like Goethe, in the end it is a poignant affirmation of life's intrinsic value.
Ultimately, everything converges to illustrate the evolving nature of thought as one matures, ages, and is eventually confronted with the inevitability of their own mortality.
May 30, 2023
“Canetti, exile, cosmopole, polyglot, was among the fist modern voices who refused this - among the first modern voices who refused identity and politics and their conflation in what; now called "identity politics,
" which his Viennese experience told him was the primary sign, or symptom, of the individuals absorption by the crowd, or of the crowd's co-option of self-hood and independent conscience. Canetti's scorning of this crowd-consumed human was akin to his scorning of Freudian orthodoxy and of the fashionable Marxist, or Marxish, Frankfurt thought of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas: he abhorred the former's tendency to relate all behavior and ideation to trauma, just as he abhorred the latter's tendency to relate all behavior and ideation to capital. "I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole," this indefinable, unassimi-able Spanish-Jewish, Ottoman-Balkan, Viennese, British, Swis world-citizen wrote in one of his Aufzeichnungen from the start of the 1950s, when Europe had been smashed and wholeness was no longer the property of crowds, but the ambition of the information-crowded individual.”
Even back in the period when I was utterly her thrall (she opened all the doors of the intellect for me, and I followed her, blind and enthusiastic), I nevertheless noticed this contradiction, which tormented and bewildered me, and in countless conversations during that time of my adolescence I discussed the matter with her and reproached her, but it didn't make the slightest im-pression. Her pride had found its channels at an early point, moving through them steadfastly; but while I was still quite young, that narrowmindedness, which I never understood in her, biased me against any arrogance of background. I cannot take people seriously if they have any sort of caste pride, I regard them as exotic but rather ludicrous animals. I catch myself having reverse prejudices against people who plume themselves on their lofty origin. The few times that I was friendly with aristocrats, I had to overlook their talking about it, and had they sensed what efforts this cost me, they would have forgone my friendship. All prejudices are caused by other prejudices, and the most frequent are those deriving from their opposites.
Furthermore, the caste in which my mother ranked herself was a caste of Spanish descent and also of money. In my fam-ily, and especially in hers, I saw what money does to people. I felt that those who were most willingly devoted to money were the worst.
Good book that reveals the inner working of a great writer who is fascinated with the instability of one’s identity
" which his Viennese experience told him was the primary sign, or symptom, of the individuals absorption by the crowd, or of the crowd's co-option of self-hood and independent conscience. Canetti's scorning of this crowd-consumed human was akin to his scorning of Freudian orthodoxy and of the fashionable Marxist, or Marxish, Frankfurt thought of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas: he abhorred the former's tendency to relate all behavior and ideation to trauma, just as he abhorred the latter's tendency to relate all behavior and ideation to capital. "I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole," this indefinable, unassimi-able Spanish-Jewish, Ottoman-Balkan, Viennese, British, Swis world-citizen wrote in one of his Aufzeichnungen from the start of the 1950s, when Europe had been smashed and wholeness was no longer the property of crowds, but the ambition of the information-crowded individual.”
Even back in the period when I was utterly her thrall (she opened all the doors of the intellect for me, and I followed her, blind and enthusiastic), I nevertheless noticed this contradiction, which tormented and bewildered me, and in countless conversations during that time of my adolescence I discussed the matter with her and reproached her, but it didn't make the slightest im-pression. Her pride had found its channels at an early point, moving through them steadfastly; but while I was still quite young, that narrowmindedness, which I never understood in her, biased me against any arrogance of background. I cannot take people seriously if they have any sort of caste pride, I regard them as exotic but rather ludicrous animals. I catch myself having reverse prejudices against people who plume themselves on their lofty origin. The few times that I was friendly with aristocrats, I had to overlook their talking about it, and had they sensed what efforts this cost me, they would have forgone my friendship. All prejudices are caused by other prejudices, and the most frequent are those deriving from their opposites.
Furthermore, the caste in which my mother ranked herself was a caste of Spanish descent and also of money. In my fam-ily, and especially in hers, I saw what money does to people. I felt that those who were most willingly devoted to money were the worst.
Good book that reveals the inner working of a great writer who is fascinated with the instability of one’s identity
March 27, 2024
musings, theses, beliefs, thoughts on: metamorphosis, identity, poets, childhood, knowledge, death, and living for purpose. felt deeply connected to his voice and natural direction of his thoughts.
bright mind which splices our human nature into fully realized and illuminated truths of our selves. taught me more about responsibility to our words, to contribute to the essence of life where it stands and rejoice in it.
bright mind which splices our human nature into fully realized and illuminated truths of our selves. taught me more about responsibility to our words, to contribute to the essence of life where it stands and rejoice in it.
August 2, 2023
An interesting array of works by an under appreciated author. The excerpts from “Auto Da Fe” were bizarre and outrageously creative, and his philosophical essays on crowds and power were thought provoking (if not a little dense). An oddly assorted compilation.
February 13, 2023
A fantastic selection that makes me want to read more.
October 18, 2024
“becoming a pacifist in the war on death”
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews