Word: bellowings
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...MIGHT HAVE expected it of Saul Bellow Perhaps it was the Nobel Prize. Or maybe it was the Pulitzer, which the cunning novelist deserved and derided for so long that they finally gave it to him for his last novel. Humboldt's Gift in 1976 More likely, it was simply has own realization that he, certainly as much as any other American now writing had the talent and breadth of vision to take stock, as he might say, in a big way. The creeps and crazies, the depressingly sane, the visionaries--Bellow has claimed them all as his province...
...Bellow's ambition is admirable. Many writers have carved wombish little niches for themselves as "chroniclers"--so the "blurbistes" and reviewers call them--of some class or set. Even such a fine writer as John Updike does not care too much about people who happen not to live in an Eastern seaboard suburb or a small part of Pennsylvania and who do not now make more than $40,000. Sure action is supposed to take a long look in all the corners. But someone also has to take all the snapshots and try to piece them together into the moral...
Explonation, though, is usually a young man's profession. For Bellow at 67 the proposition of extended travel in unknown realms is a questionable one. Indeed, judging by The Dean's December, one wonders just how for from part the good ship Bellow gets, or whether it ever leaves the harbor...
...EVERY BELLOW NOVEL has at its center some slightly modified version of the Bellow hero. A dreamy type, someone off in his own world--irretrievable so to the "commonsensical" folk surrounding him. The Bellow protagonist is a seer, a dealer in the currency of big ideas and grand historical visions. And yet, he has street smarts--savvy gleaned from a long well-spent education. But whether a garden-variety schlemiel like Tommy Wilhelm of Seize the Day, a disheveled and dislocated intellectual like Mosses Herzog of Herzog, or a questionably successful writer like Charlie Citrine of Humboldt's Gift. Homo...
...Corde far from home, stuck in a small apartment in Bucharest, waiting for his mother-in-law to die. Meditatively, he licks the wounds of recent Chicago battles--battles which rage unabated, awaiting his return. While ineptly ministering to the miseries of his emigre/astronomer ("Palomar calibre") wife. Minna (perhaps Bellow is losing his old feisttness: this protagonist is happily married, with no Renatas or Ramonas to scheme over him, no vicious wives trying to castrate him), and sucking down plum brandy. Corde explores the smoldering wreckage of life in Chicago, his and the city...