Word: malamud
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...