Photograph of Elias Canetti, 1983, by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust. Courtesy Tate Archive

In 1980, the year before Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Susan Sontag described him as a writer whose work is “confidently rooted in a certain rich Central European culture” yet “hard to place, even willfully placeless.” Canetti’s effort, she continued, “has been to stand apart from other writers. . . . Canetti is, both literally and by his own ambitions, a writer in exile.”

Even today his work is not widely known, and the idea persists that Canetti is…