Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung)

Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, his only novel, tells the story of a reclusive sinologist whose obsessive devotion to his private library leads to his destruction at the hands of the irrational mob. Canetti, who later received the Nobel Prize in 1981 largely for his monumental study Crowds and Power, here dramatized the catastrophic collision between intellectual isolation and mass psychology.

Written in pre-Anschluss Austria under the intellectual influence of the satirist Karl Kraus, Auto-da-Fé reads as a dark prophecy of the book burnings and cultural annihilation that would soon engulf Europe. The novel's exploration of fanaticism, both scholarly and popular, anticipated the themes Canetti would pursue for decades in his investigations of crowd behavior and the nature of power.