The Secret Heart Of The Clock: Notes, Aphorisms, Fragments 1973-1985 by Elias Canetti. New York. 1989. Farrar Straus Giroux. hardcover. 160 pages. Jacket design by Jacqueline Schuman. Translated from the German by Joel Agee. 0374256942.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Elias Canetti is one of the preeminent intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He is, as Iris Murdoch has put it, ‘one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius.’ Canetti’s gifts are too wide-ranging to be limited to one genre. He has written a novel, AUTO-DA-FÉ, which many consider on a par with Musil and Broch; his work of social theory, CROWDS AND POWER, is a revolutionary achievement, an entirely original way of rethinking history and mass psychology; the three volumes of his autobiography, THE TONGUE SET FREE, THE TORCH IN MY EAR, and THE PLAY OF THE EYES, are themselves both literary masterpieces and noble attempts to account for the character of our times. With THE SECRET HEART OF THE CLOCK, Canetti has created his own medium – a highly personal testimonial of what he himself chooses to term ‘notations,’ bits and pieces: notes, aphorisms, fragments. Written toward the end of his life, these ‘notations,’ taken together, present an awesomely tender, guiltily gloomy meditation on death and aging. As with all of Canetti’s work, THE SECRET HEART OF THE CLOCK is as much about language and literature as it is a record of intense self-analysis. There is no room for youth, health, hope, innocence, or humor in Canetti’s landscape, a landscape in which the threat of nuclear annihilation casts its shadow over the whole; but there is love in it - ’not for myself,’ he writes, ‘but for others.’ For all its bleakness, this is a moving, absorbing, and nourishing document, providing a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary writer, in his eighties more lucid than ever. 

Elias Canetti (1905-1994), Bulgarian-born author of the novel Auto-da-Fé, the sociological study Crowds and Power, and three previously published memoir volumes (The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in my Ear, and The Play of the Eyes), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.