"The Voices of Marrakesh" is a terse and sensitive record of a visit to Morocco. "Earwitness" is a set of fantastic character sketches, a human bestiary containing creatures like the Bittertangler, the Never-must, the Name-licker, the Corpse-skulker, the Long-changer, the Narrow-smeller, the God-swanker, the Moon Cousin, the Bequeathed Man and 40-odd more. Both books reveal Mr. Canetti's talent for what he calls precise exaggeration…. Of the two, "Earwitness" points us more clearly toward Mr. Canetti's other works. Its characters are weakest when they are closest to recognizable types and strongest when they gather scattered human traits into composite monsters….

This tells us something, I think, about the virtues and liabilities of Mr. Canetti's imagination, and it helps us bring the laborious "Auto-Da-Fe" into proper focus. The exaggerations of this schematic story of a man who loved books and hated women are not precise, they are simply methodical. The...