[Elias Canetti] is a profoundly and fruitfully introspective writer…. This quality is witnessed by the hundreds of aphoristic and diary-like "jottings" from the years 1942 to 1972 that constitute The Human Province…. At the same time, he is a writer whose sensibilities are keenly attuned to the most critical problems of the modern epoch. Crowds and Power, with all its indebtedness to cultural anthropology and the literature of myth, was intended at bottom to be a sociopsychological investigation of fascism in its deepest origins and broadest ramifications. The Voices of Marrakesh offers yet another view of this versatile writer. It is a travel book, but such as only Canetti could write. It reveals his intense inquisitiveness in productive alliance with an equally individual respect for the uniqueness of individual fate. Through poetically heightened observation he illuminates and yet preserves the secrets of his exotic encounters in Morocco….

Canetti translates into...