The impression we get when, right at the beginning of this novel, we come across a spectacular scene in which the protagonist, Professor Peter Kien, is approached in the street while he is thinking, or rather, is insistently demanded by a stranger, until the latter, ignored, takes the liberty of pushing him because he thinks he has the right to claim attention for himself, the impression we get is that we are in the presence of a superior spirit. After all, how many would be able to conceive of a scene like this? to imagine that there could be a human being who thinks while being silent, and that silence itself is not, for some, the expectation of communication? Thus, we are already tempted to recognize Canetti as a legitimate dignitary of the Great Church. And we also create an exaggerated expectation of Professor Kien. Then the novel becomes a torturous sequence, a progressive and merciless annihilation, until there is not the slightest trace left of the personality that at first impressed us. It is a great novel, there is no doubt about that, and there are points where the sequence of absurdities curiously gives reality to the characters, whose obsessions seem to throw them all into a state of semi-consciousness, whose psychological tensions always seem to bring them within a hair’s breadth of collapse. What more can be said? The discursive technique does get tiresome at a certain point, but it is not fake and it is effective: the proof is that we feel tempted to shoot each of the characters, just as we often do with real human beings. The work, however, would be better suited to the theater… And all we can do is recognize in the author the quality that is so lacking in his characters: lucidity.