He received the Nobel Prize in literature for a single novel: Who is Elias Canetti?
If you wrote one of the most famous novels of modernist literature at the age of twenty-six, there is a high probability that your name is Elias Canetti. The novel Blinding is almost Cannetti's only literary text. Perhaps it will be an exception until the end of time that Canetti will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature for a single novel.
It's a tremendous joke. But Canetti doesn't care. Because, according to him, success is just the space a person covers on A4 paper.
He was born in 1905 and lived through almost the entire twentieth century. Bulgarian Jew. He was married twice. He escaped from Hitler. He lived in England for many years. He experienced all the tension in a writer's life. For example, he never went to the police station. He never had to pay a refrigerator installment. He never looked for revelation in any woman's eyes. A great text like Mass and Power came out of his hands. It is still one of the most cited books in all of the humanities. Apart from his two great books, Blinding and Mass and Power, the Canetti myth consists entirely of the diaries and notes he kept. Just like Pavese. The notes he kept made him a legend.
Elias Canetti (25 July 1905 – 14 August 1994) was a German-language writer, born in Ruse, Bulgaria to a Sephardic Jewish family. They moved to Manchester, England, but his father died in 1912, and his mother took her three sons back to continental Europe. They settled in Vienna.
Winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is an author who wrote works in German, whose origins are based on Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Spain in 1492.
(B. 25.07.1905 – D. 14.08.1994)
Elias Canetti was born in Ruse (Bulgaria), the eldest of three brothers. His family was from Spanish Jews who took refuge in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. He first learned old Spanish and Bulgarian. In those years, 7-8 different languages were spoken in Ruse, one of the important ports on the Danube River.
This is how Canetti's sensitivity to language began. Canetti started writing Mass and Power in 1949. The book was published in 1960. Although Blinding was met with interest in England, America, and France, the first editions did not attract much attention in Germany. When it was published for the third time in Germany in 1963, Canetti began to receive awards one after another.
He received Büchner in 1971, Franz Kafka, and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1981. Canetti, who spent the last years of his life in London and Zurich, died in Zurich in 1994 and was buried next to James Joyce, according to his will.