Word: bellowings
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...Dean's December, Bellow...
FICTION: The Age of Wonders, Aharon Appelfeld ∙ The Dean's December, Saul Bellow ∙ A Flag for Sunrise, Robert Stone ∙ The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll ∙ Memoirs of a Space Traveler, Stanislaw Lent ∙ The Villa Golitsyn, Piers Paul Read
...richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic...
...suggestion that the 1976 Nobel prizewinner was intimidated by his critics is dispelled in The Dean's December, a work that opens a second front in Bellow's war on cultural and intellectual nihilism. The scenes are set almost exclusively in Chicago and Bucharest, a disparity underscored by the line, "There was nothing too rum to be true." In fact, the book is largely based on a trip that the novelist and his wife made to Rumania a few years ago to visit her dying mother...
...literary result is Albert Corde, the latest and best of Bellow's old cogitators. Corde, a Chicago college dean, spends a great deal of time in an underheated Bucharest apartment waiting for his mother-in-law to die in a state hospital and mulling over the retreat of "personal humanity" before "the worldwide process of consolidation." The woman was an eminent psychiatrist and former Minister of Health whose humanism was incompatible with the Communist regime. Corde's wife Minna is an astrophysicist who defected to the U.S. and must now beg a vindictive bureaucracy for permission...