The fourth volume of Elias Canetti’s memoirs, Party in the Blitz: The English Years, represents a major departure from his first three books, which covered his intellectual development from an exotic background as a Sephardic Jew from Ruse, Bulgaria to his family’s numerous European wanderings and onto the cultural ferment of Vienna and Berlin in the twenties and thirties. The picture he painted of Central European cultural life is virtually unparalleled, with a parade of names including Broch, Musil, Brecht, Babel and the painter George Grosz among his many personal friendships and acquaintances.

At the outset of the Second World War, Canetti and his wife Veza went into exile, choosing England because of the fond memories he had of living in Manchester for a brief period as a child. From being at the center of a modernist renaissance he was thrust into obscurity in the entirely different universe of wartime and then postwar England. The transition must have been a struggle, and the ensuing bitterness shows.

Differences between this book and its predecessors are not only a question of subject. Whereas the earlier memoirs were organized chronologically in order to show the intertwining of personal, artistic and political changes taking place as Central Europe fell apart, Party in the Blitz is a series of portraits — about people Canetti encountered during his English years — interspersed with various observations on the English character and the modern day legacy of Thatcherite Britain.

Because Canetti died before the book saw its final form, the writing contains some “rough edges” and seemingly unavoidable repetition. Yet the decline from his other memoirs has more to do with world history than his own writing, for gray postwar England simply could not compete with the mayhem and color of the modernist explosion in Vienna. While Canetti was in contact with an impressive range of British cultural figures — from Dylan Thomas, Kathleen Raine and Iris Murdoch to Herbert Read, William Empson and Bertrand Russell — he very likely didn’t see them as being in the same league as the luminaries of Central Europe. Furthermore, when he recounted meetings or relationships with Babel or Brecht, he never failed to add what he learned from them, a feature distinctly absent in this book, possibly because he was simply an observer.