The rediscovered writings of Veza Canetti: out of the shadows of a husband

Abstract

Preece, Julian. The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 148 pp. $75.00 hardcover. The title of Julian Preece's study refers to the discovery of Veza Canetti's literary works, most of which the Jewish author had published under pseudonyms in the 1930s, prior to Austria's Anschlus to Nazi Germany. Until her husband and Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti oversaw the republication of some of her works in the early 1990s, it had remained largely unknown that his wife of 29 years was an accomplished writer in her own right. In fact many of her stories that she later reworked into the novel Die Gelbe Strase were published in the renowned Arbeiter-Zeitung before Elias Canetti found a publisher for his first literary work (Die Blendung). While Preece, just like previous critics, is unable to determine how large Veza Canetti's unpublished oeuvre was, he provides the most comprehensive account to date of her surviving works: they include two novels (Die Gelbe Strase, Die Schildkreten), a number of short stories (the collection Geduld bringt Rosen, Fund, Schweigegeld, Geld-Geld-Geld, and two dramas (Der Oger, Der Tiger). In addition, he mentions the drama The Palanquin and the story Air Raid, two pieces she wrote during her exile in Britain. The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti is an insightful study of Veza Canetti's literary works and the ways in which they are in constant dialogue with that of her husband. Yet what at times distracted this reader from Preece's informed engagement with their work, is his defensive stance vis-a-vis feminist critics who, according to Preece, have done injustice to Elias Canetti. This stance dominates chapter I which focuses on the controversies caused by the delayed publication of Veza Canetti's works-almost 40 years after her death and during the last years of Elias Canetti's long life. But even beyond this initial chapter, the overall study is marked by an attempt to clear Elias Canetti's name of any suggestions of wrongdoing (e.g., that he deliberately suppressed information on her early success as a writer.) Ironically, the main sources for this defense are Elias Canetti's own accounts since hardly any of Veza Canetti's personal documents survive. Preece approaches Veza and Elias Canetti's works of the 1930s by tracing common themes, topics, and literary techniques and by exploring how they approached particular topics in different ways and with different emphases. While both worked with satire and grotesque, Veza Canetti's stories are more closely related to the social situation of her time and they are more openly critical of social injustices (cf. Die gelhe Strase which Preece calls a minor masterpiece of modernist urban literature). …