"Auto Da Fe" by Elias Canetti

Name: Elias Canetti

Year Won: 1981

Read: Auto Da Fe

Original Language: German

Reason: "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power"

About: Auto Da Fe supposedly follows a number of people obsessed to the death with something. Depending on the character, they are crazy, wildly, madly obsessed. Which sounds *amazing*.

As it turns out, the writing felt so random and haphazard that I had a hard time figuring out what the plot was, if anything. A boy goes into a bookstore. He talks to a man. There are long descriptive passages, yet nothing seems to happen. It all seems incredibly random.

What I liked: The premise seems really cool. I was never able to grasp it, small minded that I am. But reading the notes made me think, "wow, this seems super cool!"

What I Disliked: I literally had no idea what was going on. Ever. I gave this about 50 pages before being like, "WTF is this?" and returning it to my library. The premise might seem cool, but the story itself was almost impossible to parse, IMO. (And the writing itself struck me as very meh. The first chapter was just a bunch of dialogue with nothing else going on. Like, "hey". "I'm here" "That's good to hear" "I'm glad to hear that" etc. going on seemingly endlessly. I may just not be literary enough for this kind of BS)

Should it have won a Nobel: No. At least not for this. I am done with "let's just do something weird, but talk about it to make it seem special" being seen as special. Like, give the prize to something that's good. There are a LOT of good novels out there. This is...just not one of them.

Next Up: "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez (yes!!!!!)