[Canetti's] work consists—apart from a small number of plays—of two very large books: the novel Auto da Fé (first published … in 1935 as Die Blendung), and the treatise Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht,… 1960). They are "large" books not simply in length, but equally in scope and conception. The single novel is a most unusual novel and the single treatise a most unusual treatise. The dialogue in Auto da Fé, for instance, is hardly dialogue in the normal sense: rather, it alternates between vast diatribes reminiscent of the legalistic speeches in Kafka's Castle, and what can only be described as the cut-and-thrust of misunderstanding, anticipating Ionesco. Crowds and Power, while nominally a scientific study in social psychology, is shot through with all the imaginative panache and visionary mania of the novel, and might almost have been written by Dr. Peter Kien himself, midway as it were between...