Word: sauls
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...according to the second book of Samuel did Israel's King David lament the deaths of Saul and Jonathan at the hands of the Philistines. Last week an Israeli announcer solemnly intoned those mournful lines before announcing that 1,854 of his countrymen had died in the Yom Kippur War. Although Israelis were prepared for high casualty figures, the magnitude of the toll compared with the 803 fatalities of the Six-Day War nonetheless stunned them. Nearly every household in the nation of 3,200,000 has suffered or knows a loss in the war. Said Yehezkel Shemesh...
...Condominium, necessity takes a sad and more familiar form. Phil Preminger is a 37-year-old unpromising academic and a heart patient. Like Saul Bellow's famous character, Preminger is a dangling man. But he also gets a chance to seize the day. When his father dies, he seems driven by some homing instinct to move into the dead man's condominium apartment in Chicago. It is a terrible mistake. The young man finds himself disastrously enmeshed in the crotchets and suffocating propriety of the older residents. The story proves that Elkin, one of America's most...
...this sense of the simple, Kelman at times is reminiscent of Saul Bellow. Like Bellow, his characters speak in complexities; also like Bellow, the best of them penetrate to the simple yet hard truths. At one point in Herzog, Moses Herzog, who traffics in complexities, recalls how his two older brothers pleaded with him not to cry at his father's funeral. And yet Herzog rejects these Reality Instructors, these practitioners of cool detachment, and sobs away unashamed, unabashedly uncertain of his role in a frightful world yet willing to come to some sort of terms with...
...Saul Bellow's introductory sketch of Berryman adds a great deal to the novel. It's a rare piece, full of quaint anecdotes of their shared careers at Princeton and the University of Minnesota. Bellow knew the writer as a man first--as the man whose gruff arrogance was only a cover up for the frail alcoholic who was unable to manage his life and finally had to take refuge in hospitals. Bellow's sensitivity reaches even deeper. For he knew John Berryman the poet as well: the "Huffy Henry...wicked and away" of the Dream Songs, the narcissistic writer...
Although such perceptions can dazzle, the poles of this novel are fuzzily drawn. Yet whatever Recovery is not, it remains a compelling, scarcely disguised self-portrait of a resplendent mind. It is worthwhile alone for its insights into the alcoholic and suicidal character. As Berryman's friend Saul Bellow observes in an astutely touching foreword to the book, what the poet "needed for his art ... he drew out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive." *Jane Howard