Auto Da Fe is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive Sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti builds up the elements in Kien himself, and his personal relationships, which will lead to his destruction. Between his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis...