Word: beche
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...BECH: A BOOK by John Updike. 206 pages. Knopf...
...that John Updike's Bech stories from The New Yorker have been federated between hard covers, it is easier to see them for what they are: the funniest, most elegantly written and intelligently sympathetic renditions available about what happens when a writer stops being a writer and becomes a culture object...
Updike has ingeniously and elaborately invented Bech and his entire literary career. Verisimilitude is heightened by various Nabokovian cartouches, including an appendix containing Henry Bech's "Russian journal" and an introductory letter to Updike from Bech that shrewdly stops short of being a seal of approval: "I don't suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm...
...voice of a man who has already suffered the worst that his abundant society and his own easily seducible character have to offer. It is not the natural voice of John Updike, of course, though Bech experienced early fame like Updike and some of their travels have been the same. The basic Bech is a gently satiric caricature of a Jewish literary heavyweight. His qualities are drawn from the congregation of Eastern Liberal intellectuals whose ranks, incidentally, have sheltered some of Updike's more ferocious critics...
...everyone among the Grand Duchy's 316,000 citizens shared Bech's territorial ambitions. Two years ago the Minister of Justice himself assured a group of foreign correspondents that if anyone tried to force as much as one foot of land upon it, Luxembourg would defend its territorial integrity to the last man. The government never did get around to passing a law making citizens of Luxembourg of the three German families who live in the Kammerwald. Thereupon, according to international agreement, Kammerwald had never officially been a part of Luxembourg at all. Last week, winding...