Very Good: Original dust jacket displays light wear at the extremities, with nicks and small tears to the edges, corners, and spine. No significant losses or major blemishes present. Jacket now protected in a plastic sleeve. Publisher’s original black binding with silver spine lettering remains in excellent condition, displaying only minor touches of shelf wear. Text block shows some age-related toning and light foxing, though page edges remain crisp and sharp. Internally, pages are tightly bound, clean, and tidy throughout.
Description
First English edition published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1946. The first novel by Elias Canetti and widely regarded as his literary masterpiece. Originally published in German in 1935 as Die Blendung, the novel predates Canetti's receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature by several decades and remains the work upon which much of his literary reputation rests. Early English editions are highly sought after by collectors of twentieth-century European literature.
Auto-da-Fé is a powerful and unsettling modernist novel centred on an isolated scholar whose ordered intellectual world gradually collapses into obsession, madness, and destruction. Combining psychological depth, social satire, and philosophical inquiry, it is considered one of the major achievements of twentieth-century European fiction.