Auto-da-Fe - Elias Canetti

'You see, gentlemen,' he would say to them when they were alone together, 'what miserable single-track creatures, what pitiful and inarticulate bourgeois we are, compared with the genius of this paranoiac. We possess, but he is possessed; we take our experiences at second hand, he makes his own. He moves in total solitude, like the earth itself, through his own space. He has a right to be afraid. He applies more acumen to the explanation and defence of his way of life, than all of us together do to ours. He believes in the images his senses conjure up for him. We mistrust our own healthy senses. Those few among us who have faith still cling to experiences which were lived for them by others thousands of years ago. We need visions, revelations, voices--lightning proximities to things and men--and when we cannot find them in ourselves we fetch them out of tradition. We have to have faith because of our own poverty. Others, still poorer, renounce even that. But look at him! He is Allah, prophet, and Moslem in one. Is a miracle any the less a miracle because we have labelled it Paranoia chronica? We sit on our thick-headed sanity like a vulture on a pile of gold. Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding. If there is a life purely of the mind, it is this madman who is leading it!'

-pg 406

Auto-da-Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a philologist and sinologist and owner of the most important personal library in the whole of the great city in which lives, if not the world. He is the perfect scholar; at the beginning of the book his only concessions to the demands of living are unenjoyed meals, a small divan on which he sleeps for a scant six hours out of animal need, and a one-hour walk each morning for exercise. For the rest of the time he sits at the writing desk in his apartment, which he's had renovated in such a way so as to be a temple of texts; each of his four rooms are lined from wall to wall with books, all of them lit from above by skylights, with the doors between each room flung open to provide an unobstructed view of all his friends, as he calls his books. One day, in a fit of guilt, Kien marries his semi-literate maid Theresa, at which point the madness begins.

Or intensifies. Because the book, in the end, is all about madness. The insanity of all that follows--there's a scheming dwarf who's obsessed with chess, a fraud of a blind man plagued by dreams of buxom women and buttons, a former policeman enamored by violence, and Theresa the maid, whose greed manifests itself in pure delusion--is presaged by the strange insanity of Peter Kien. Although he's introduced as the greatest scholar in the world and his habits are pointed out as eccentric, the way in which he copes with the world is unhinged from reality (and, naturally, provide some of the best entertainment the novel has to offer).

It is, at times, an infuriating book, with the paths of madness branching off and trickling away from the main narrative stream. And sometimes the story veers off in a way that makes the reader feel as if they've gone crazy, that they've lost the point of the story, the path through this odd, bookish world. But in the end, it is a startlingly original and satisfying book, if only because it seems to confirm that madness isn't so odd in this world.