Life Urge in Extremis
In [Die Stimmen von Marrakesch (The Voices of Marrakesh)] Mr. Canetti appears as a traveller, and one would expect this traveller to combine the anthropological preoccupations of the author of Masse und Macht with the literary sophistication of Die Blendung. Yet he has written the straightest of travelogues, whose very virtue lies in the absence of theoretical disquisition, stylistic bravado or any other accretion that might have made this book a contribution either to science or to fiction.
Each of the short sections that make up the book concentrates on a particular aspect or experience of the Moroccan city which the author visited in 1954; each makes its impact by the vivid and direct rendering of things observed and heard—of camels and donkeys, streets and houses, men, women and children, beggars, merchants and artisans, Arabs, Berbers and Jews. The observer's and narrator's responses are part of the account, so that the book also complements Mr. Canetti's diaries as a biographical record; but whereas the diaries revealed his intellectual interests and speculations, the new book reveals emotional involvements and sympathies. The persona of the travelogue is not a fort espirit but almost a coeur simple, with an extraordinarily warm and spontaneous response to the most basic phenomena of human life and animal life.
Basic is the word, since Marrakesh provided abundant instances of animals and human beings reduced to little more than hunger, endurance and lust. It is the celebrations of the life urge in those conditions—often with a dignity in extremis not to be found in more advanced societies—that animates and unifies all the sections that constitute this book. Although Mr. Canetti does not leave out his personal reactions to the cruelty, piety, greed and stoicism that he found in Marrakesh, a true gift of empathy has enabled him to enter deeply into a primitive order alien to his assumptions, and to affirm it simply by letting its phenomena speak for themselves. What he gives us is something quite different from the long awaited second novel; but it is a fascinating and moving book.
"Life Urge in Extremis," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1968; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 3479, October 31, 1968, p. 1219.
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