I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole: An Elias Canetti Reader

I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is a collection of writings by Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Joshua Cohen. It spans his career and explores themes such as politics, identity, mortality, and more. The book includes Canetti's landmark texts, memoirs, and never-before-translated writings, providing a comprehensive portrait of his achievement. It highlights his fascination with the instability of identity and his relationships with other writers.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 416 pages
Publication date: 22 November 2022
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc

A comprehensive anthology of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, meticulously curated and introduced by the esteemed Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen. Throughout his life, he ventured on no grand expeditions, engaged in no battles, and never found himself behind bars. He never took a life, nor did he amass a fortune. Yet, his mere existence in the twentieth century bestowed upon his life a profound dimension, encompassing both emotional depth and intellectual rigor. Here, in his own words, is one of the foremost chroniclers of the twentieth century: a dazzlingly inventive, formally unidentifiable, relentlessly itinerant writer named Elias Canetti, who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981.

"I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole" serves as a comprehensive summation of Canetti's life and intellectual pursuits, offering a definitive entry point into the enigmatic world of a writer whose unparalleled ability to interpret world-historical transformations was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an unwavering skepticism towards the knowability of the self. Hailing from a Sephardi Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti subsequently resided in Austria, England, and Switzerland, traversing the vast thematic realms of his time, including politics, identity, mortality, and more, through his writing.

This collection, sourced from Canetti's landmark texts, including "Crowds and Power," an insightful analysis of authoritarianism and mobs; "Auto-da-Fe," a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel that explores the fate of European literature; the renowned sequence of sensory-titled memoirs, including "The Tongue Set Free" and "The Torch in My Ear"; and previously untranslated writings such as the posthumous "The Book Against Death," meticulously assembles its luminous shards into the most comprehensive portrait yet of Canetti's remarkable achievement.

Edited and introduced by Joshua Cohen (Book of Numbers, The Netanyahus), "I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole" takes us on a journey from Canetti's multilingual childhood to his mature period. Through his words, we gain a profound understanding of his experiences, observations, and profound insights into the human condition. This anthology is a testament to the enduring legacy of Elias Canetti, a writer whose brilliance and originality continue to inspire and captivate readers to this day.

Weight: 454g
Dimension: 210 x 137 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780374298425