I FIRST CAME ACROSS Elias Canetti's autobiography fifteen years ago when working on a paper about German writers whose lives were turned upside down by the events of the last century. I still find The Tongue set Free and the two volumes that followed to be the most exciting of his big books. His account of a childhood among Spanish-speaking Jews in pre-1914 Bulgaria, of his family's moves, first to Manchester in defiance of his paternal grandfather, to Vienna after the sudden death of his young father, from there to the haven of Switzerland, and then to Frankfurt during the great inflation add powerful historical details to this essentially lyrical book. Canetti's early life is his legend and it belongs to a world that has been obliterated by the wars and exterminations of the twentieth century. He practiced telling it long before he wrote it down. But the real focus of this strangely secretive confession is his battle with a very powerful woman — his mother — who, despite her love of literature, set her heart on thwarting his ambition to become a writer, that is a Dichter, who would take his own place in the European tradition that she had taught him to love. After her literary romance with his father ended with Jacques Canetti's unexpected death, she made their eldest son into her precociously bookish confidante and he decided to become a writer just to please her.