Word: bellows
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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
...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...
...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...