SOURCE: Goodheart, Eugene. “The Power of Elias Canetti.” Partisan Review LXVII, no. 4 (fall 2000): 613-21.

In the following essay, Goodheart provides an overview of themes in Canetti's works and finds that Canetti was above all a great observer of the human condition.

I met Elias Canetti in a café in Hampstead in 1965 while on a fellowship in London. The photo on the book jacket of a recent edition of his memoirs brings him back to me with a fidelity you rarely expect from photographs. He was stocky with a round well-fed face, a full head of hair, and a mustache. In the photo he is dressed in a three-piece suit and is seated behind a desk upon which lies a manuscript. He stares at the reader with what seems an attentive skepticism, the very picture of a cultivated European. At some point during our acquaintance, he presented me with...