Word: malamud
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...Aristotle, tragedy's effect was tripartite; it moved from pity to terror to catharsis. By those tenets, as valid as they are venerable, Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize novel The Fixer misses greatness by a third. It has the first two requisites, but it omits any purge of the emotions. Malamud brings his hero, Yakov Bok, to the brink of destruction-or salvation-and freezes the action. There, in Auden's phrase, "the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye." By definition, the film of The Fixer can aspire to be only two-thirds...
Shining Interior. Astonishingly, he will not disintegrate, All the degradations, all the tortures will not make him confess to his "crimes." As the universal sufferer, Bates wears the exhausted eyes, the depleted physique, the rime of salt about the parched lips like indestructible medals. In Malamud's view and in Bates' playing, Bok becomes a second Job who grows from suffering to manhood. The fixer finally fixes himself, and, symbolically, all sufferers. Like the book, the film has no end, only a conclusion: there is no such thing as indifference; an abstention from humanity is a vote...
...same time, They can accept feminine ideals--gentleness, passivity, endurance--if actual femininity is rejected. In Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, the hero partakes of the heroic aspects of femininity but is revolted by actual femininity to the point of refusing sexual intercourse. Conversely, They revile women for manifesting masculine qualities, aggression in particular. Women's books are reviewed as if they were women--criticized for being "shrill," praised for being "not shrill." Critics call Marianne Moore "the best women poet in America." Why not the best blue-eyed poet? In the Nov. 1 issue of Time Magazine...
Doom. And what is it? Among other things, it is a humorous evocation of the characters and the ambiance that have given baseball its mythic quality. Bernard Malamud's The Natural was a strikingly effective allegory of the baseball hero as a contemporary Sir Percival who in the end is destroyed by the myth-hungerers. Coover is less morally emphatic. He does suggest that God cannot forestall man's doom, and that man can destroy himself when he relinquishes reality for illusion...
...Americans, meanwhile, have adopted comedy as their tool and social alienation and absurdity as their twin themes. Nearly every important American writer-Nabokov, Mailer Barm, Bellow, Malamud, Donleavy, Roth, Friedman, Burroughs, Heller, Pynchon, Willingham-works from an assumption that society is at best malevolent and stupid, at worst wholly lunatic. The gods are dead and their graves untended, morality is a matter of picking one's way between competing absurdities, and the only sane reaction to society-to its alleged truths and virtues, its would-be terrors and taboos-is a cackle or a scream of possibly cathartic laughter...