The Tortoises

Ten days after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Veza and Elias Canetti left Vienna. The Tortoises was written, in the short span of three months, immediately upon their arrival in London. The Tortoises, Veza Canetti's spare, cinematic, and devastating novel, describes the expatriation of a couple much like the Canettis: Andreas Kain, a writer, and Eva, his devoted wife, live in a quiet, secluded villa outside Vienna. Their lives, however, are gradually destroyed by rising Nazism, as more and more people from the new Third Reich appropriate rooms in their home -- most especially their enemy, the high party official Mr. Pilz (meaning "mushroom" or "fungus"). And like a fungus, Nazism's daily cruelties intrude on their life and eat it up. Veza Canetti selected as a main motif the tortoise: a peaceful animal, symbolic of long life, wisdom and seclusion. Andreas Kain, at the novel's start, rescues some tortoises who are about to be branded with swastikas and sold as souvenirs of the Anschluss. But when the Kains discover with horror that one already bears, naturally in the pattern of its shell, a swastika, it portends no happy ending.