ELIAS AND VEZA CANETTI began to write at the same time; he started with his only novel, while she wrote short stories for the workers' newspaper in Vienna. After graduating in chemistry in the summer of 1929, he initially began to work on an even more ambitious eight-volume project he had called (after Balzac) the Comédie Humaine of Madmen. In the end he wrote only one volume, initially called Kant catches Fire, which he completed between 1930 and 1931. It is about an eccentric academic whose mind is so warped by reading and his sequestered intellectual life that he marries his ignorant housekeeper and consequently brings about his personal, professional, and financial downfall. Veza enthused, the year before she died, that

For a novel of such overweening proportions to be its author's first piece of literary writing is all but unprecedented. That Canetti wrote no more fiction makes its status more unusual still.

Veza was not always so sanguine on the subject, not least because she bore the brunt of the mental collapse Canetti almost endured as he narrated Peter Kien's disintegration. She responded by publishing prose fiction, short stories, and novellas, in the Arbeiter-Zeitung from June 1932, which she continued to do until November 1933, three months before the paper was closed.