The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971 by Elias Canetti
Allen Hibbard

Elias Canetti. Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes: 1954-1971. Trans. John Hargraves. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 218 pp. $23.00.

Anything by Canetti—the Nobel-prize-winning author of Auto-Da-Fé, Crowds and Power and (my favorite) The Voices of Marrakesh—is worth reading. One of Canetti’s own phrases serves as an apt description of this book of notebook entries dated from 1954-71: “Mosaic lyrics, made from hot pebbles.” How does one review a book of short, detached sentences, phrases and passages—deposits of a deep, reflective mind? Indeed, how does one read such a book, with no continuous narrative or theme? Bit by bit, incrementally, as one eats fine chocolates or reads a holy text. The effect is cumulative and lasting. Some of Canetti’s concerns: myth, religion, knowledge, time, China, names, invention, fame, death, praise, religion, relations between self and other, the habit and practice of writing. Authors he admires and muses upon: Pavese, Stendhal, Kafka, Joubert, Euripides, Cervantes, Herzen, Tolstoy. In speaking of things, he moves fluidly between “I,” “you,” “he,” and “we,” making it difficult to situate him. He looks at things intently, slightly aslant. He submits unusual premises and leaves them hanging: “A country where you never see people eating”; “He has withdrawn from everything new and now lives off his own saliva”; “A man who remembers only words in new languages, and in the process, the old ones gradually crumble away”; “He only hears you when he has smelled you”; “A man arrives who has counted his hair. He counts it daily.” Entries of the last year covered, 1971, contain seeds for Canetti’s subsequent work in autobiography: “I sense a great desire to write my life down. . . . I am very much afraid that I will not get to it and that it will all be lost, which would be a great pity.” Before his death in 1994, he completed three autobiographical volumes: The Tongue Set Free (1977), The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985). All thus was not lost. [Allen Hibbard]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971 by Elias Canetti Allen Hibbard Elias Canetti. Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes: 1954-1971. Trans. John Hargraves. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 218 pp. $23.00. Anything by Canetti—the Nobel-prize-winning author of Auto-Da-Fé, Crowds and Power and (my favorite) The Voices of Marrakesh—is worth reading. One of Canetti’s own phrases serves as an apt description of this book of notebook entries dated from 1954-71: “Mosaic lyrics, made from hot pebbles.” How does one review a book of short, detached sentences, phrases and passages—deposits of a deep, reflective mind? Indeed, how does one read such a book, with no continuous narrative or theme? Bit by bit, incrementally, as one eats fine chocolates or reads a holy text. The effect is cumulative and lasting. Some of Canetti’s concerns: myth, religion, knowledge, time, China, names, invention, fame, death, praise, religion, relations between self and other, the habit and practice of writing. Authors he admires and muses upon: Pavese, Stendhal, Kafka, Joubert, Euripides, Cervantes, Herzen, Tolstoy. In speaking of things, he moves fluidly between “I,” “you,” “he,” and “we,” making it difficult to situate him. He looks at things intently, slightly aslant. He submits unusual premises and leaves them hanging: “A country where you never see people eating”; “He has withdrawn from everything new and now lives off his own saliva”; “A man who remembers only words in new languages, and in the process, the old ones gradually crumble away”; “He only hears you when he has smelled you”; “A man arrives who has counted his hair. He counts it daily.” Entries of the last year covered, 1971, contain seeds for Canetti’s subsequent work in autobiography: “I sense a great desire to write my life down. . . . I am very much afraid that I will not get to it and that it will all be lost, which would be a great pity.” Before his death in 1994, he completed three autobiographical volumes: The Tongue Set Free (1977), The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985). All thus was not lost. [Allen Hibbard]

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