A masterful memoir about the author’s childhood and adolescence (1905–1921). Elias Canetti manages to capture the reader’s attention as if it were a novel.
Short episodes from his real life, narrated in an exquisite language with an Austrian tone. Canetti was born in Bulgaria, in Sephardic Spanish, surrounded by Bulgarian, German, Russian, and Turkish. In his early years, he lived in England, Austria, and Switzerland. This linguistic and cultural mosaic shaped in him a reflective, receptive, and simultaneously critical mindset.
The people who cross his path—his parents and other relatives, teachers, classmates—are vividly portrayed through their own actions and words, not through the author's commentary.
There are hardly any images or rhetorical figures in Canetti’s prose in this book. Nor are there historical or sociological digressions, etc.: Canetti focuses on the events of which he is a witness or protagonist; and with that alone, he simply builds a narrative, in the truest and best sense of the word. That this narrative hides great lessons is another matter.