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Article: 'Iris undressed without me laying a finger on her'; In an autobiography published 11 years after his death, Nobel prize-winner Elias Canetti unleashes a venomous attack on his former lover, Iris Murdoch.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Evening Standard (London, England)
- Article date:
- July 25, 2005
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Solo Syndication Limited. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: NORMAN LEBRECHT
JUST before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, Elias Canetti banned his works from being published in Britain, where he had lived since arriving as a Hitler refugee in 1939.
He could not prevent his two masterpieces, Auto-da-Fe and Crowds And Power, being reissued in paperback, but he was determined to withhold his wonderfully crafted autobiographies.
It was an act of spite and rage, triggered by Penguin's 1977 deletion of Auto-da-Fe but expressing a complex, passionate ambivalence towards his adoptive country.
I got his American publisher, Roger Straus (of Farrar, Straus, Giroux), to smuggle me a ...