Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971

Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti kept this writer's journal from 1954 to 1971 while he was living in London and writing, among other things, Crowds and Power. It's a deliberately unstructured list of ideas and possibilities from which his thematic obsessions emerge only gradually.

Most entries are just a sentence or two in length, varying in quality from the obvious to the profound. Many take the tantalizing form of a fictional premise not followed through ("A country where everyone walks backwards, to keep an eye on themselves. A country where all turn their backs on one another: fear of eyes.") But the overall tone, as with his other writings, is more gnomically philosophical. A typical stand-alone entry reads, "There is something sickening about all advocacy: only pure admiration is real." --Richard Farr