Word: malamud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
IDIOTS FIRST by Bernard Malamud. 212 pages. Farrar, Straus...
...Bernard Malamud is a poet of the victim. Not the tragic or the hopeless victim, but the absurd victim. In his stories, fate is clearly placable, but his heroes never get the hang of it. They make fools of themselves instead, and, by robbing themselves of dignity, they become somehow more poignantly human...
...last paragraph. Kampf claims that the solution to the dilemma of the Jewish writer, who either had to assimilate and lose his Jewishness, or get stuck in the dead-end of "ghetto literature," is "the novel of manners." But he never does explain what he means. He says Bernard Malamud's writing, for instance, is "claustrophobic" and smacks too much of the ghetto. But is anyone's writing more claustrophobic than Jane Austen's? Is The Magic Barrel, a story of a Jewish matchmaker and his young client, more parochial in its problems and milieu than Emma...
...paused, and asked him what he thought it was. "There is a vigor of thought at the highest levels in this country," he began. "Intellectually, at your best, you're thriving, you're much more alive than England. Your writers--men like Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Kazin, Saul Bellow, Malamud--are terribly exciting. Even the non-professional people: look at how trenchant and vigorous a book a woman like Jane Jacobs can produce...
...fiction, short though it is, cannot be slighted. Mark Mirsky seems to be much more at home writing Singer than ever he was last year when writing Malamud; his "Muzzel, the Drunk of Hoamer Street" is a smooth and quite evocative little sketch and stands on its own very well, even though it is but an excerpt from his "novel in progress," The Tales of Blue Hill Avenue...