Word: fidelman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN by Bernard Malamud. 208 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Arthur Fidelman-half tragic hero, half Yiddish joke-has ranked among Malamud's finest double characters since he began to appear over a decade ago in assorted short stories. Now Malamud presents him in a brilliant full-length exercise in slapstick Angst...
...Fidelman is a failed painter who has bummed enough money from a married sister for a year in Italy. Intending to make a cosmopolite and a critic of himself in his middle age, the boy from The Bronx has bought a tweed suit and a pigskin briefcase and begun a book on Giotto...
...piece humiliation is Malamud's game. One by one, he cuts off Fidelman's options-his little escape clauses from destiny. First, the would-be citizen of the world is sardonically reminded of the Jewish past he cannot shake by an absurd incarnation of the Wandering Jew named Shimon Susskind, wearing knickers and peddling rosary beads to the tourists at St. Peter's. When Susskind steals Fidelman's briefcase and burns the Giotto manuscript, he forces the ex-painter to reclaim another part of his grubby old identity -the role of impoverished artist...
...Wandering Jew himself, Fidelman goes out to face the comic disasters that life has waiting for him. He falls in love with Annamaria, a female painter distinguished mostly for her distracted eyes and tense neck, who rewards him by alternately treating him as a chore boy and a father-confessor, but almost never...