Rating: 
Summary: v. good, yet...
Review: A frightening and fascinating novel symbolic of the mad forces that gripped Europe during the first half of the century, yet not as powerful as Musil nor Broch.
Rating: 
Summary: Arguably the worst book ever written
Review: As far as I can tell, the only reason anyone has ever bought this is because it's cheap in the used book stores and sez "Nobel Prize Winner" on the outside. (At least (blush) that's why I did).People, stay away. This may be the worst book ever published. I say that after careful thought; this cannot be dismissed as shallow dark-and-stormy-night-ery, formulaic flatulence, or pathetic poetastery - it is bad on a much larger scale. It is a truly monumental combination of mean-spirited misogyny, flimsy characterization, dumb Dumb DUMB dialogue, and story line stolen from a whiny junior high school diary. To this day I cannot imagine why I stayed with it to the end, and regret having done so. If you are currently in the middle of this book, STOP NOW - don't throw good brain cells after bad. It has occurred to me that Auto-da-fe is perhaps a bold experiment aimed at exploring the boundaries of literature - can one write a good novel without believable plot, engaging characters, human sympathy, or readable language? The answer is "no". Perhaps the translation is at fault - perhaps the original is merely a badly written, pretentious, over-wrought mistake with maybe even a redeeming feature or two. In this case, the translation ought to be an object of careful study in the world's academies of translation technique (do such exist?) as an example of How Not To Do It. Another thing I regret is that when I purged this malignant tumour of a novel from my shelves, I took the cowardly and unprincipled action of donating it to a charity book bazaar rather than consigning it to a dumpster; I expect St. Pete to have a few words for me on this subject when I show up at the pearly gates...
Rating: 
Summary: An original study of an intellectual's downfall.
Review: Auto-da-fe is a piercing dissection of an intellectual obsessed with his library and his own "brilliant" thoughts. The author examines his characters as one would examine insects. Kien scurries around in the city, paying no heed to his surroundings, just focused on his own brilliant ideas. Aut-da-fe is a profound lesson to those who consider themselves "intellectuals" as it shows their downfall. One of the most original books in modern literature.
Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: Blindness, old libraries, bookburnings, it's all here. This is another great book about Western Culture and its decline. It is a burlesque, symbolic, and tragic book. Very 1930's Europe. The characters seem to be taken out of Peter Brueghel the older's paintings; very human and very ugly, each ugly and tragic in his/her own unique way. And it is so insanely funny. It's sort of a 1930's Central European aristocratic version of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult
Review: Canetti's prose is difficult to read in English. The translation is a little wooden, and you have to devote your concentration to the structure of the sentences more than you would, have you been reading a native Anglo-Saxon author. Snip: (...)
Rating:
Summary: Horror
Review: Compared to Canetti's novel, Kafka's works seem to present a an almost cozy vision of humanity. "Auto-Da-Fe" made on of the most horrible reads of my life: There is not a single character in it for which one can feel any sympathy. The specialist in Chinese literature who marries his servant and their cruel caretaker are about the only characters in this chamber play of people tormenting each other. - I know people who think this is brilliant comedy, but to me it seems you must be about as sarcastic as the North Pole to find this icy view of humanity funny.
Rating:
Summary: Cautionary tale for Bibliophiles
Review: Heir to Kafka, and seeming precursor to Gunter Grass and Jose Saramago (at least Blindness), Canetti's book is less interesting than any of the above. The main thread (Kien and his books, the Punch and Judy relationship with his housekeeper) is buried with endless not very interesting digressions. I thought the shell game involving the reselling of books would never end. Canetti goes out of his way to make the characters repugnant and includes one of the worst depictions of incest that I've read. What is worst about the book is its total predictability. He has little to say that is new and he keeps repeating the same ideas over and over again. I also thought the book humorless. A former officemate rated this his favorite book ever. Now I suspect he was having me on. My time would have been better spent rereading The Tin Drum.
Rating:
Summary: Cautionary tale for Bibliophiles
Review: Heir to Kafka, and seeming precursor to Gunter Grass and Jose Saramago (at least Blindness), Canetti's book is less interesting than any of the above. The main thread (Kien and his books, the Punch and Judy relationship with his housekeeper) is buried with endless not very interesting digressions. I thought the shell game involving the reselling of books would never end. Canetti goes out of his way to make the characters repugnant and includes one of the worst depictions of incest that I've read. What is worst about the book is its total predictability. He has little to say that is new and he keeps repeating the same ideas over and over again. I also thought the book humorless. A former officemate rated this his favorite book ever. Now I suspect he was having me on. My time would have been better spent rereading The Tin Drum.
Rating:
Summary: "I ask you, he's not even a man!"
Review: I finished Auto Da Fe last night, and still can't decide whether it's the most nihilistic book I've ever read or one of the most humanistic. On one hand, Canetti treats his characters with unflinching (and, at times, comic, due to its extremity) brutality; they're all repugnant at best (lecherous murderers at worst), their desires are pitifully shallow, and, on the whole, they're painfully unintelligent. One might say that Canetti is the anti-Sherwood Anderson in this regard. Whereas the latter author strives to make the lives of his characters more significant through their "grotesqueness", the former uses said grotesqueness to render them less than human. Despite all this, Canetti's humanism shines through due to the fact that Auto Da Fe is, ostensibly, a modern morality play. Human virtue would be rewarded, were there any to be found in the novel; as it stands, vice is clearly spelled out and its practitioners are punished. For instance, Canetti is obviously not suggesting that the reader should relate to or sympathize with the character of Peter Kein; he exists merely as an unfortunate example of intellectualism (and egoism) gone awry. At the same time, we shouldn't relish his downfall, but learn from it and apply its lesson (and the lessons of other characters) to our own lives. This is why it's hard for me to call Auto Da Fe nihilistic. While Canetti doesn't have much sympathy for fictional people, he seems to have boundless sympathy for the real ones which comprise his audience. Also of note: earlier reviews have cited problems with the translation. This is absolutely not the case. Aside from a few errors here and there in grammar and tense, the novel reads very lucidly in English.
Rating:
Summary: Tour de force
Review: I knew next to nothing about Canetti's fiction when I decided to sink deep in this surprising, extraordinary well developed story about a man who is ruined by his illiterate wife. In the first chapter you are afraid of meeting another Mann's dead whales such as Dr. Faustus and Tod in Venedig, un so on. But nothing of the sort. Canetti's sense of humour denotes that aloofness of the real great writer, not the bogus intellectual. Think, for example, in Faulkner, that Tolkien of the Mississipi.
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