num_pages: 101
description: Elias Canetti winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature is one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Earwitness is one of Canetti's most fascinating works. Instead of writing a novel about the modern world he chose to portray fifty exemplars of the human species--each a paradigm of a certain kind of behavior. The characters range from The Submitter society's victim through The Fun Runner a sort of empty jet-set figure to such persona as The Tablecloth Lunatic a woman who is always angry and is obsessed with cleanliness and order and The Beauty-Newt who believes only in aestheticism. Earwitness is wicked on-target satire and is also a very wise work of social portraiture.
language: English
title: Earwitness: Fifty Characters
publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux