A dazzling collection from the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, chronicling the twentieth century with keen insight and wonder.
"A brilliant selection . . . Canetti's range astonishes." —Claire Messud, Harper's
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.
I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is a summa of Elias 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 time: 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; the famous sensory-titled memoirs, including The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear; and never-before-translated writings such as The Book Against Death, this collection assembles its luminous shards into a revealing portrait 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 spans Canetti's polyglot childhood, mature preoccupations, and friendships with literary giants like James Joyce and Thomas Mann. Interspersed with aphorisms and diary entries, it showcases Canetti's formal range and erudite yet introspective voice. Throughout, his restless fascination with the instability of identity emerges as a key to his thought—as he reminds us, It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.