Word: bellower
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...gases, that Walter Pater said we should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum between the trendy and the arbitrary. Why, for example, is Sartre listed but not Camus? Why Norman Mailer but not Saul Bellow or John Updike? Leonardo but not Michelangelo? Venereal disease but not AIDS? Why Beverly Hills but not St. Louis? Cole Porter but not Leonard Bernstein? Muammar Gaddafi but not Francois Mitterrand? Bogart but not Olivier or even Cagney? Such questions guarantee that the book will indeed spur discussions all summer long...
Pivot is host of Apostrophes, an urbane 90-minute discussion of literature and ideas with some of the world's most famous authors. Henry Kissinger has appeared, as have French Presidents Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand. Most weeks, however, writers like Saul Bellow, Carlos Fuentes, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag and others of lesser renown are the stars...
Although he hardly wants for honors (three National Book Awards, the Nobel Prize for Literature), Saul Bellow has not always been appreciated for his comic gifts. That may be because his books and reputation can appear so intimidating. When a serious, renowned writer tosses out big ideas, the proper response seems to be a hushed, respectful concentration. But at least as far back as Herzog (1964), Bellow began putting the act of thinking through some antic paces. Moses Herzog was the first, but not the last, of the author's heroes to suffer the risible torments of the hypereducated...
Benn's story, that of a comfortably aging man pulled into the muck of life by an avid and avaricious young wife, was hilarious when Chaucer included it in The Canterbury Tales, and it still seems none the worse for wear. Bellow's contribution to this hoary tale lies in Kenneth's fumbling, long-winded ^ attempts to get it told. "I take very little pleasure in theories," he announces at the beginning, "and I'm not going to dump ideas on you." After incessant theorizing and idea dumping, he confesses toward the end, "As is evident by now, I have...
...attempting to make sense out of the overwhelming flood of data that most people dismiss as daily life. Despite, or perhaps because of, what the narrator calls "my divagations and aberrations, my absurdities," More Die of Heartbreak crackles with intelligence and wit. The novel is not only proof that Bellow, 72, can live up to his own standards; it is also a reminder of how diminished a thing postwar American fiction would have been without...