Bellow .:. Him with His Foot in His Mouth

Bellow, Saul.
Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. 294 Seiten. Leinen mit Schutzumschlag. Grossoktav. 630 g

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* Schutzumschlag ausgeleiert und mit Rissen.
Bestell-Nr.157108

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Bellow | Nordamerikanische Literatur

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Saul Bellow's most recent novel, The Dean's December; was described in the New York Times Book Review as the work of "simply the best writer we have." Another reviewer said: "At an age when most writers are hopelessly repeating themselves, Bellow is still finding good things to do." These words are equally, if not more, appropriate to this dazzlingly innovative and masterly new collection of shorter fiction.

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?," the longest of these stories—a novella, in fact—is a moving, richly textured, and exquisitely plotted love story, its action a frantic day in the lives of a divorced suburban matron and her lovers, wouldbe and actual, the latter an elderly, ailing lion of the art world. Their needs and passions, as well as their comic conflicts, are matters of life and death.

Also concerned with ultimate things is the musicologist narrator of "Him with His Foot in His Mouth," who for years has scattered wounding witticisms "from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations." He unfolds his life for us as he tries to discover what led him into a "deep legalfinancial hole" and to await extradition from his refuge in British Columbia.

In "Zetland: By a Character Witness" and in "A Silver Dish" (which won the O. Henry Prize several years ago), Saul Bellow returns, with his unequaled command of always eloquent recollected detail, to a bygone Chicago. "Zetland" is a brilliant portrait of an artist as a young boy and man, precocious and eccentric; "A Silver Dish," a memorable story of a raffish, willful father and his affectionate son.

"Cousins," too, deals with the mysteries of family feeling—a force that defies both logic and the worthiness of its objects. Here, it is Ijah Brodsky, successful in the larger world, who is drawn by this emotion into encounters with the criminal and the naively idealistic, and thereby into discovery of his own character.

This book, then, is a series of such histories of personality, of selfawakenings that the author means to apply to us all. It also represents an important departure from the way stories are being written today in this country, and its publication is therefore a major event, not only in the bountiful career of its author but also in American letters.

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SAUL BELLOW has won three National Book Awards (for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet) and a Pulitzer Prize (for Humboldt's Gift). For the body of his work (which now includes eleven works of fiction), he was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, Saul Bellow was raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago and received his bachelor's degree from Northwestern University with honors in sociology and anthropology. He has taught at New York University, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota and is currently a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

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