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Elias Canetti ate and drank ideas like they were food and water. In Auto-da-Fa, the main character inserts a substantial library into his head before venturing out. The young boy who grows into a man in these three volumes has done the same. He is made of ideas more than blood and bones. But it's a an abstraction and a porous shield and the world has other plans and sadness and loss close in and permeate it. In truth, he and his ideas were inside the eye of a hurricane. Susan Sontag's essay on the author is the best place to begin (before reading his memoirs). There, you're left feeling Canetti may have have come closer to anyone in knowing everything past and present and knowing it well. These memoirs fill in the blanks.