“Заслепението” / The blinding
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Autor:
Elias Canetti
Country:
Bulgaria (BG)
Book Theme:
The books of the Nobel prizes
Publisher:
Folk culture
Publishing Year:
Elias Canetti was an Austrian fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Jewish origin, born in Ruse. His family moved to Manchester, England, where his father died the following year. The boy spent his school years in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Canetti became a chemistry student at the University of Vienna and completed his doctorate. He was also influenced by Franz Kafka and the psychoanalytic school of Sigmund Freud. Death and aggression became the main themes of his work. He embodied these ideas in his plays “The Wedding” and “The Comedy of Vanity”. His philosophical work Magnus opum is very significant. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was born from his book “The Saved Language”, in which he describes his memories of his earliest years.
National Award for Children’s and Young People’s
Abstract
The novel’s protagonist is Professor Peter Keene, a renowned sinologist who leads a grotesque and self-absorbed cave-like existence in his rich library of 25,000 volumes. His world is enclosed in his mind, but this mind of his has no sense of the world. With no life experience or practical knowledge of human relationships, Professor Keene is seduced into marriage by his housekeeper Teresa Krumbholz, and thus he is confronted with the conventions and circumstances of everyday life. He soon realizes that he has fallen into a trap, because Teresa has arranged everything for his money and has put him in a hopeless situation. Banished from his own home, cut off from his office, from his world, Professor Kin quickly becomes hardened by the brutality of life. He falls into the hands of low-life street urchins, including Fischerle, a hunchbacked dwarf beggar, who first notices that Kin’s wallet is stuffed with banknotes. Because the Sinologist has withdrawn all his savings at once. Money has never had any value for him, now he is simply happy that he has managed to outwit his evil wife. Only books exist in his head. In his new life the first results of his blindness and mental confusion are manifesting themselves. Kin’s spirit grows increasingly ill, although from time to time the professor has flashes of sober reason. Thus, in a series of grandiose and fantastic scenes, the rift between the hero and the world around him is reached, as a result of which he ultimately loses all connection not only with reality, but also with himself.
