In 1943 Canetti received an offer to publish the book in English with Jonathan Cape, but it was decided to delay publication until after the war.

Jonathan Spence observes that "there is nothing discreet, chaste, or high minded about the finest and wildest of all fictions that centre on a student of China, Canetti's Auto-da-fe.

On 24 May 1946, Kate O'Brien for The Spectator described it as "Appalling, magnificent.... [It] screams and bellows of evil, out of which a supremely mad, unfaceable book is orchestrated ... of which we dare not deny the genius.

"[3] The protagonist is Herr Doktor Peter Kien, a famed and famously reclusive forty-year-old philologist and Sinologist who is uninterested in human interaction or sex, content with his monkish, highly disciplined life in his book-lined apartment in Vienna.

He is constantly prevailed upon to accept various academic posts, but is absorbed in his studies and shuns social and physical contacts.

He is obsessive-compulsive in his efforts to avoid contamination, and much of the book is a tortured comedy of his descent into madness and being thrown into close contact with a world that he doesn't understand: "You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind" (Canetti, 15).

She shows interest in learning, and he begrudgingly lends her the most beat up book in his collection, believing she would defile the nicer editions.

On the way home from the marriage ceremony, Kien, a virgin, has brief but intense fantasies about consummating the marriage, revealing his ignorance of sex as well as disturbing ideas about women (misogyny is one of the most pervasive themes in the book, usually to the degradation and downfall of the characters, though not explicitly condemned by the narrative): But Kien was surreptitiously contemplating the skirt ...

Within days of marriage, the two enter a violent and divided existence, and Kien becomes deeply agitated when cut off from three-quarters of his library to accommodate a separate living space for his bride.

Each character is driven entirely by a desperate need for one thing (being chess champion, having a library, being rich, etc), to the point of entering into a state of war against anything that might remotely stand in the way of its realization.

It is this very man who appears to be coming to save his brother and sort out the mess of Therese and Pfaff, but arrogantly underestimates the depth of Peter's disease, and so fails to prevent the ultimate catastrophe.