After The Martyrium, the best book I read this year, I was eager to read more by this wonderful writer. The most obvious choice was his next masterpiece, Mass and Power, but I didn't feel ready for this impressive study that took 20 years to com ...
After The Martyrium, the best book I read this year, I was eager to read more by this wonderful writer. The most obvious choice was his next masterpiece, Mass and Power, but I didn't feel ready for this impressive study that took 20 years to complete and largely earned the Nobel Prize for Literature. That's why I ended up with his highly regarded biography since Elias Canetti didn't write any more novels after his first. This is the first part of that autobiography: The Preserved Tongue.
The only biography I've ever read before is by Carl Lewis, the athletics legend who was my great hero in primary school. I was 11 at the time, which means that I wasn't entirely sure whether this genre would be something for me. As it turns out, this autobiography is almost magical. Whether it is due to Elias Canetti's writing style and how he brings only the most important moments of his life to life, or something to autobiographies in general, I cannot say now, but my personality-defining memories returned one after the other in my thoughts. How beautiful I found that. It was just like with the Martyrium, where even after reading I often found myself daydreaming away in the past with the material in my head.
This first part of the autobiography tells about the first 16 years of the writer's life. While for me a move within my village would have been an apocalyptic disaster in my youth, he grew up in Bulgaria, England, Austria, and Switzerland. Surrounded by many cultures and languages, little Elias quickly develops a love for words and sentences. He is encouraged in this by his father, who brings him many books from an early age and further stimulates him by asking him every evening what he has read. After the sudden death of his father, his mother takes over this role from him, and under her influence,e he grows into a well-read young man who is interested in everything. During these years, the relationship with his mother plays a major role in his life, but the influence that family members, schoolmates, teachers, write,rs and stories have had on him are also discussed extensively. The most fascinating moments for me, however, were the experiences with individuals or groups who exercised their power and thus served as a starting inspiration for his aforementioned masterpieces. It made sure that I was immediately grabbed by Chapter 1.
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