Auto-da-Fe

📙 Winner of the Prix International, "Auto-da-Fe" is the story of a man to whom books mean more than anything else in the world, a distinguished scholar whose delicately balanced intellect dissolves into madness. With an arresting display of narrative techniques and psychological insight, Elias Canetti establishes the elements within Peter Kien's mind that cause his destruction. Kien is caught between his illiterate, grasping housekeeper and a brutish concierge. In desperation he abandons his precious library for an underworld at once nightmarish yet somehow supportive of his deepest impulses. Since its first publication over three decades ago, critics worldwide have recognized Auto-da-Fe as one of the major novels of our times whose theme - the nature of totalitarianism - is all too prophetically realized.