Elias Canetti
Autodafé

An afternoon with a clear and bright sky, he walks briskly to not miss an appointment, or perhaps his steps are slow as he goes on without knowing where, thoughtful. 

People walk past him and stop in front of the shop windows, yet he finds no interest in clothes or a multitude of accessories; his head is lowered as if he hoped to find some money on the ground.

A girl with a sinuous body passes by, he looks at her and already knows it won't make a difference whether she returns his gaze or not: in any case, the walk must continue nonetheless and the stranger lingers in his thoughts for only a few seconds.

Here's something that definitely interests him... A bookstore. 
He loves reading, and the smell of new books is a delightful call for him.

As soon as he's inside, he remembers how a bookstore is a more sacred place than any church, and the silent respect found there is the reconciliation he seeks with humankind, which too often becomes a crowd on the sidewalks. 
Now that he has reached this oasis, he looks around lost; there are so many books he hasn't read and would like to read; the awareness that many he will never read paralyzes him for a moment.

He's been inside for twenty minutes, the contemporary authors don't intrigue him too much except for a few exceptions. 
His almost blind and inattentive survey suddenly stops; there's a title that catches his eye: "Auto-da-Fé" by Elias Canetti.

He knows the author because he was one of Kafka's greatest critics, a writer he greatly admired.

He immediately seeks to grasp the book's secret by reading a brief synopsis: On one side, a great scholar, Kien, who finds contact with the world unpleasant and deep down loves only one thing: books. 
On the other, his housekeeper, Therese, who embodies the most vulgar essence of human pettiness. 
Canetti's first and only novel, a solitary and extreme work, marked by the uncompromising felicity of beginnings, "Auto-da-Fé" narrates the intersection of these two remote trajectories and what ensues, the meticulous, fierce revenge of life on Kien, who had sought to evade it with the same meticulousness with which he analyzed an ancient text.

These are the words he reads on the back of the book, and the fact that the work is defined as solitary and extreme leads him to purchase it.

He decides to postpone the appointment, which wasn’t important anyway; if he had nothing to do but stroll around, now he sits on a bench and reads.

He embarks on a journey, a dream, a wonder, reading becomes a world in his head, and he no longer knows who he is, where he is, or what he had to do.

He reads about the world’s greatest sinologist, Kien, a man with unparalleled knowledge in his field who lives confined in a house-library, only leaving to go to bookstores, and, averse to any human relationship, unable to understand his fellow humans.

He learns that nevertheless, Kien encounters a greedy and older woman simply because he believed she too loved books, while she is actually only capable of making senseless talk and dreaming of love affairs with young clerks, ending up infinitely hating her husband. 
The reading becomes increasingly intriguing and there is a humpbacked thief passionate about chess, married to a prostitute and crazily loved by a hunchback like him.

A brutal janitor also peeks through the pages, spying on people through a hole to prevent vagrants from sneaking into the building. 
The hole is at shoe level, as he has learned to recognize the shoes and clothes of the residents.

He hates women, and the only one he believed to have loved is his deceased daughter, whom he, however, had raped and beaten.

And there are books that animate themselves to go to war, bewildered monologues, a man accused of writing recipes with books as the main ingredients, another pretending to be blind to beg, another who loves only overweight women.

An extreme book, therefore, that can be placed among the peaks of nineteenth-century literature and was part of a broader project that was later abandoned, that is, the writing of a "Human Comedy of Fools" composed of eight novels.

A book in which there is encompassed all the world's madness and the man's solitude which is invigorated in his thoughts, in his obsessions, in his inability to communicate; in a dense, sarcastic, ironic style with interior monologues that, although often bordering on delirium, always maintain a rigor that Canetti never wanted to forsake.

And finally, there is someone who remained on that bench reading until dark fell, and once finished, he read it again and then reread it; with only one idea in mind, to forget it soon to be able to read it again, always experiencing the same unspeakable surprises, wonders, emotions.