Auto-da-Fé
Turkish title: Körleşme · Edition source
A novel about a closed world built around books encountering people and everyday life. It opens up the distance between knowing and being able to see the world.
Concepts in this work
Follow a concept to discover related writing and work.
In Körleşme, Elias Canetti places the rupture between thought and lived reality at the centre of the novel. Knowledge may bring a person closer to the world, yet it may also become a way of seeing that closes in on itself. This tension is one of the questions the text opens up.
One question raised by the novel concerns the relationship between knowledge and context. When does a representation constructed to explain the world begin to make it harder to understand the people and events it encounters?
Reading question
Does knowing something very well always help us understand the life surrounding it?