Elias Canetti
Bulgarian-born Swiss and British Jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer (1905-1994) · United Kingdom · Writers · Died at 89
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Something wrong?A modernist who spent decades mapping the physics of mobs - how they form, when they break, what they want from the bodies inside them. The Nobel came in 1981 for a career built in the margins: novels, memoirs, and one strange treatise on mass behavior that no discipline could quite claim.
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, I was never drawn to experiment with language; I take note of such experiments, but avoid them in my own writing. The reason is that the substance of life claims me completely.
Is there still a possibility of public truth? The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them.
I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.
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Born in 1905 in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family, Canetti wrote in German across a life scattered through England, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. He worked as a novelist, playwright, and memoirist, but his signature effort was the nonfiction book "Crowds and Power," a study of collective behavior that defied easy categorization. The Nobel committee cited "writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power" when they gave him the literature prize in 1981. He died in 1994, thirteen years after the recognition arrived.
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