ELIAS CANETTI's WORK IS TODAY part of the literary canon. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981 and the positive reception of his autobiography by critics and readers alike give the impression of a resounding success-story, yet this general recognition came very late in the day. Like the works of many Jewish emigrants, Canetti's texts remained in obscurity for a long time: the memory politics of both German states and of Austria were not conducive to their rediscovery until well into the 1960s at least. The fact that it was Canetti's autobiography that allowed him to break through so unexpectedly onto the literary scene raises the question of what is distinctive about it in the context of twentieth-century life writing. The literary critics were initially quite critical. Some argued that his autobiographical prose relied on outmoded writing techniques. He was making unquestioning use of the narrative “I,” despite its problematic status since the beginning of the century. This was in turn impacting his conception of memory, which Canetti appeared to be trusting in a naïve way. In every respect, they claimed, he was out of touch with decades of “innovation” in autobiography. How then is the sweeping success of his autobiography to be explained? Is it perhaps precisely to do with the “traditional” narrative perspective from which Canetti presents his life to his readers?

The three volumes that make up Canetti's autobiography stretch from his birth in 1905 to 1937. Thus, the final volume ends neither with the major political caesura of 1938, the annexation of Austria and the flight of the Canetti couple into exile in England, nor with the start of the war. As his attempt to expand the trilogy into a tetralogy was never carried through, apart from a few fragments that appeared posthumously under the title Party im Blitz. Die englischen Jahre (Party in the Blitz: The English Years), the reader is offered a work that appears to stop short of any portrayal of the Second World War and the Shoah. If one wanted to be a little unkind, one might suggest that this aspect of the text is an important reason for the success it enjoyed with a wide readership immediately after its publication.