Notes from Hampstead

Writing about Elias Canetti, Susan Sontag remarked that "the notebook is the perfect literary form for the eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is 'everything.'" Notes from Hampstead confirms this. It is a map of the late Nobel laureate's thinking, a triumphant compendium of aphoristic, enigmatic, and expository writings covering a characteristically diverse range of subjects: the significance of mythology and ethnicity, the nature of creativity, the extraordinary hold violence has on the twentieth century, literary history (we learn of his affection for Cervantes, Stendhal, and Gogol, and of his adoration of Kafka), and, always, there is a violent quarrel with death.Canetti draws on the troubled period following the death of his wife and the publication of his masterwork of social theory, Crowds and Power. An ambivalent interest in spiritualism also characterizes the collection: Canetti's conversations with Jesuits and Indian gurus and his readings of Greek, Hebrew, and primitive myths give a kaleidoscopic view of the uses and abuses of religions. Wide-ranging in form and content, the book is suffused with Canetti's uncommon intelligence, his rage at the defects of the spirit, and an unquenchable thirst for elusive truths.