Saul Bellow RIP

(I did a thread on ile abt a year ago, I have a copy of it but never got round to it)

During his service, he finished writing "Dangling Man," about the alienation of a young Chicagoan waiting to be drafted. It was published in 1944, before the author was 30, and was followed by "The Victim," a novel about anti-Semitism that was written, he said, under the influence of Dostoyevsky. Mr. Bellow later called these novels his "M.A. and Ph.D." They were apprentice work, he believed, finely written but weak in plot and too much in thrall to European models.

I'm not happy about a comparison between Bellow and Roth, since I'd regard Roth as certainly the inferior writer. How about Bellow and Updike?

Saul Bellow RIP

Sorting out Bellow

Also, Cynthia Ozick shares some significant aspects with Bellow.

"[Bellow's] pre-eminence rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see - sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches… Bellow will emerge as the supreme American novelist. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James."
Martin Amis

I'm sure there will be more to look forward to, but that's not a bad start, is it?

It is from the Daily Telegraph.

hahaha! I just flashed on an image of Henry James with Saul Bellow in a headlock.

Such buffoonery ill becomes me.

To hold = to claim.

Silly Stringbender!

http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/ctg/

I read the chapter on Bellow and Chicago from Brent Staples's memoir a while back, and I just found this on slate.com from 2000-- an exchange between him and A.O. Scott about the Bellow biography. Scott's part isn't so fascinating, but Staples has some personal experience with Bellow and the millieu surrounding him at U. Chicago. He also deals with Bellow's sometimes questionable racial depictions.

This is so opposite to my own experience (started with Herzog, liked it: read a couple of others (Dean's December, Ravelstein) liked them moderately (DD more than R); read Augie, loathed it.

I suspect this is a question of temperament as much as taste. Insofar as the two books are difficult they represent different kinds of difficulty. Herzog is set in a rarified world and presumes more knowledge on the part of the reader. That doesn't bother me too much: you can always look things up. Augie is set in an earthier, more everyday world but liberally spattered with tortuous, knotty sentences that reveal their meaning slowly if at all.

I once posted one particularly opaque paragraph from Augie to a literary forum and invited posters to explain what they thought it meant: no-one (and some posters were big fans of the novel) was prepared even to attempt it. I just think this bothers some readers more than others: for some it's a minor blemish that doesn't significantly detract from their experience of reading the book, for others it's just too damn frustrating reading a paragraph a dozen times only to realise the reason they haven't got the meaning is because there's probably no comprehensible meaning to be got.

Frankie -- do you still have the paragraph you posted?

Hurting my problem w/Staples is that he's not discussing the biography he's reviewing the life from a warped perspective, based on his casual observation of Bellow at graduate school. This entire exercise -- evaluating Bellows' fiction by comparing his characterizations to Staples' perceptions of their real-life counterparts -- strikes me as preposterous, and utterly self-serving. Aren't all ficition writers are "cannibals" who "use their lives as a literary chop shop" to some extent? If Staples had any cojones he would've confronted Bellow on the the race thing rather than stalk him -- but then some kind of discussion/debate would have ensued and Brent wouldn't have been able to project his own racial paranoia onto Saul.

And I'd say dropping "And oh, by the way, yes, I am black" into the second paragraph begins a lengthy and tedious race-harping recital.

http://www.slate.com/id/2116502/

http://citypages.com/databank/26/1271/article13191.asp