Word: bellowed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MOSBY'S MEMOIRS AND OTHER STORIES, by Saul Bellow. Six stories, balancing satire and compassion, are a reminder that Bellow is at the forefront of American writing today...
MOSBY'S MEMOIRS AND OTHER STORIES, by Saul Bellow. Six stories, balancing satire and compassion, are a reminder that Bellow is at the very forefront of American writing today...
Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories is not major Bellow. In one respect it is a package designed to keep the author's name before the public. Three of the six stories in the collection, Looking for Mr. Green, The Gonzaga Manuscripts and A Father-to-Be, first appeared between hard covers in the 1956 edition of Seize the Day. This fact Bellow's publisher has conspicuously avoided mentioning. But once the reader gets into the stories, annoyance gives way to grudging gratitude, for these are fine examples of the craft of short fiction...
...settles on his recollections of an old acquaintance, Hymen Lustgarten, a former Marxist from New Jersey who has passed through all the radical ideological incarnations of the '30s. Lustgarten loses at everything, including the postwar European black market and the Laundromat business in Algeria. But as Bellow reveals in a balance of satire and compassion, Lustgarten's failures brim with life juices while Mosby's successes are empty and dry. "Having disposed of all things human," Bellow concludes, "he should have encountered God . . . But having so disposed, what God was there to encounter...
Both The Old System and Mosby's Memoirs are soft Bellow, but even so, these stories lead the reader to the contemplation of man-the rational animal who too often finds it so easy to rationalize that other men's rationalizations are irrational...