Word: fidelman
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Next, a gang of thieves try to bully Fidelman into art forgery. He proves to be possibly the first copyist in the world with painter's block. But when he finally does manage to complete a counterfeit of Titian's Venus of Urbino, he likes the fake so much that he steals it back from the thieves in preference to the real thing. Skillfully Malamud somehow turns this gesture into a superbly comic act of integrity...
Sculpture-Hole Grave. Fidelman's predicaments get more desperate, his humiliations more painful. He travels about Italy digging holes in public parks and passing them off to the public as a kind of underground sculpture-reminiscent of the sculpture-by-excavation once committed by another playful artist, Claes Oldenburg, in the soil of New York's Central Park. One outraged member of the public hits Fidelman over the head with his own artistic shovel, and he topples into a sculpture-hole grave. He-and the novel-emerges entirely changed, if not quite resurrected...
...kind of surrealistic daze, Fidelman moves on to Venice, letting himself in for another of those tormenting Malamud women whose specialty is interrupted coition. The woman's homosexual husband, Beppo, interrupts this time to seduce Fidelman from his wife -and from art. Beppo is a truly queer dens ex machina; yet Malamud clearly intends him for the role. It is Beppo, in fact, who finally gives Fidelman the word on his "painter's progress": "After twenty years if the rooster hasn't crowed she should know she's a hen." And it is Beppo who points...
Thus the artist "Fiddleman" (Malamud's pun) is officially pronounced dead. But out of his almost interminable death agonies, Fidelman (a faithful human being) has been born...
Malamud, as usual, is clear about his conclusion-and as usual uneasy with it. The reader turns each page of this little fable with a premonitory wince. Malamud has put Fidelman not so much through a pilgrimage as a forced migration. One senses that he may be all too aware that resurrections are always problematical. There is an uneasy shrillness, after all, to the notion of using a homosexual to demonstrate the complete way to fall in love with life...