Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The third volume of his acclaimed autobiographical memoirs, The Play of the Eyes ambles along unpredictably, mingling character sketches, cafe conversations, dramatic readings of his plays, trips to Prague and Strasbourg, musings on the power of crowds and what makes the good man ... Canetti uses a dramatist's gifts here to achieve emotional depth; his mother's death, sketched simply against the backdrop of a crumbling Europe, takes on a tragic dignity. - Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
The Play of the Eyes is the third volume in Nobel Prize winning author Elias Canetti's trilogy of memoirs.
Here, Canetti describes his young adult life as he tries to make it as a writer in Vienna during the 1930s, and provides vivid accounts of the remarkable figures he meets along the way, usually in cafes, from Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, and Herman Broch, among others.
Canetti uses a dramatist's gifts here to achieve emotional depth; his mother's death, sketched simply against the backdrop of a crumbling Europe, takes on a tragic dignity. - Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Elias Canetti (1905-94) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. His writings include a monumental work of social theory, Crowds and Power, and three volumes of memoirs, The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes.