Word: malamud
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...play's characters uniformly nice, but exorcism seems a convenient miracle drug, and the happily vanishing young couple suggests the schizophrenia of playwrights who would give meaning to their words and eat them too. In certain ways, The Tenth Man suggests the fine stories of Jewish Fantasist Bernard Malamud (TIME, May 12, 1958) but in the ways that count most, it falls far short of them...
...MAGIC BARREL, by Bernard Malamud. A fine collection of short stories of which only two or three fail to click. They are strung on the theme that the good one man does to another forever enslaves the donor to the fate of the receiver. Most of the characters are Jewish, some of the developments are fantastic, and even the most commonplace of Malamud's yarns has an air of accidental fantasy...
...legs were locked about his neck, Sindbad seemed doomed to carry his burden forever. This theme, that one good turn deserves another, and another and another, runs like a magic thread through nearly half the 13 short stories in this new book by Bernard Malamud, 44, an assistant professor of English at Oregon State College whose The Assistant (TIME, April 29, 1957) was one of the best of last year's U.S. novels...
...vastly comic story of a young American whose search for an inexpensive Roman apartment sends him ricocheting from one involved and Machiavellian Italian to another and leaves him on the last page dazed, dazzled and without an apartment but wholly in love with Italy. Author Malamud's deft hand slips occasionally, as in The Lady of the Lake, an oddly unconvincing tale about a Jew who denies his Jewishness, and in Angel Levine, a heavily symbolic account of a Negro angel that is not as rewarding as the old Jewish joke on which it is based...
Transfigured View. Malamud is primarily a fantasist who starts out with people as sweaty and real as subway rush-hour passengers, but soon has them clothed in white and silver and singing hosannahs. His characters have the compelling quality of doing astonishingly inappropriate things and then forcing others to recognize a Tightness in their appalling behavior. At his best, Malamud is often as funny and earthy as the great Jewish humorist, Shalom Aleichem. But in his transfigured view of the world he may lie even closer to Francois Mauriac, the Catholic moralist who also holds that "the marks left...