Earwitness: Fifty Characters

Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Earwitness is one of Canetti's most fascinating works. Instead of writing a novel about the modern world, he chose to portray fifty exemplars of the human species--each a paradigm of a certain kind of behavior. The characters range from "The Submitter," society's victim, through "The Fun Runner," a sort of empty jet-set figure, to such persona as "The Tablecloth Lunatic," a woman who is always angry and is obsessed with cleanliness and order, and "The Beauty-Newt," who believes only in aestheticism. Earwitness is wicked, on-target satire, and is also a very wise work of social portraiture.