Todo cuenta

by Saul Bellow

Una recopilación de ensayos, artículos, ponencias y apuntes de viaje de Saul Bellow que abarca, prácticamente, toda la vida del autor. Más de treinta textos publicados en revistas y periódicos en los que la astuta mirada de Bellow recoge desde un magnífico retrato de la ciudad de Chicago, la firma del tratado de paz entre Egipto e Israel, o impresiones sobre sus colegas, hasta una descripción de la sociedad española de posguerra. Pero es, sobre todo, su lamento por la pérdida de responsabilidad del novelista en la tarea de construir una literatura que sea vehículo de «impresiones verdaderas» lo que compone el corazón de este libro. Una crítica devastadora a sus contemporáneos que ejemplifica a la perfección el texto leído en la recepción del Nobel. Y como colofón, tres entrevistas en las que reflexiona sobre la lectura, la escritura, la enseñanza y la vida. Reseñ «Frasea frase, página a página, Bellow es, simplemente, el mejor escritor que tenemos.»The New York Times Book Review

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, 20th Century, Literature, American, Canada, Biography

409 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Novels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include Dangling Man in 1944 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.

People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.

Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.

Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.

Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.

People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.

People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.

Reviews

[Esteban Forero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leí “Todo cuenta” con la sensación de cercanía que rara vez un autor establece con sus lectores. Esta colección de ensayos, crónicas y artículos pareciera girar alrededor de la inquietud por ser norteamericano; una pregunta que para Bellow se plantea en términos de qué significa ser norteamericano, hijo de inmigrantes judíos de la Rusia zarista. Pero también es una reflexión acerca de la distracción, el entretenimiento, el juego del mercado por secuestrar la atención de los sujetos. No es azaroso que el primer texto sea un perfil biográfico de Mozart donde se acentúa su cualidad de individuo separándolo del majestuoso genio elevado a hito histórico por la academia; ni tampoco que termine con dos entrevistas signadas por un sentido particular de autocrítica sobre el propio quehacer de Bellow.

En las seis partes que se divide el libro, aparecen distintos dobleces de esa inquietud por el sentido de la vida humana amenazada durante el siglo XX por la sinrazón desquiciada de las ideologías. Así, Bellow arma una silueta de lo que fueron esos años a través de figurones como Roosevelt o Nikita Jruschov; describe el ambiente cultural y literario de mediados de siglo como una sucesión de publicidad y favores políticos que se valen del sentido de trascendencia de los lectores; realiza un recorrido por las ciudades que habitó, que lo sedujeron como artista y que se convirtieron en esos sitios donde la memoria devino en ficción, mientras su realidad empírica mutaba al tópico ritmo del progreso; entre tanto, llama especialmente la atención sus crónicas y análisis del conflicto palestino-israelí, enunciando personajes y decisiones que años de conflicto y desmesura informativa van sepultando en la ilusión de lo obvio.

Saul Bellow hace de “Todo cuenta” una experiencia de lectura personal muy semejante a lo que yo me imagino sería escuchar a un abuelo lúcido que nos hereda su testimonio con una mirada aguda que generó escozor entre intelectuales de su tiempo. Sin embargo, sentí distancia ante ciertos segmentos localistas norteamericanos que no habría salvado de no ser por la habilidad de Bellow por trascender sus inquietudes al plano humano de la experiencia compartida.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly all of the essays here are worth reading; some are less lively than others. I was pleasantly surprised to see Bellow had written something about Mozart, dating from 1992, but the essay is vaguely disappointing, borrowing heavily from Edward Holmes's 1845 biography, the pedestrian musings of a well-educated classical music dilettante more than anything else.

Where Bellow has everyone beat is in his descriptions of Chicago, whether they pop up in his fiction or nonfiction. "The sun shone as well as it could through a haze of prosperous gases, the river moved slowly under a chemical iridescence..."

"During the 1920s, the Kid belonged to a bohemian discussion group on the Near North Side called the Dill Pickle Club. Its brainy and colorful fleet of eccentrics - poets, painters, and cranks - have long been dispersed by vulgar winds. Once, Chicago promised to become a second London, but it was not to be; bowling alleys and bars increased, bookshops did not."

Describing the back stairs and porches of Chicago: "...blunt woodwork clapped together by literal-minded carpenters - the same rails, the same slats, treads, risers, floorboards, almost as familiar to a Chicagoan as his own body, seconding his physical existence. Beside all this lumber, a hibernating cottonwood, the big, sooty, soft, graceless tree in crocodile bark, just the sort of organism that would thrive in an environment like this. The cottonwood makes out, somehow, under the sidewalks and successfully transacts its botanical business with the summer murk. In April, it drops its slender sexual catkins, and the streets are fragrant for a day or two; in June, it releases its white fluff; by July, its broad spearhead leaves are as glossy as polished leather; by August, everything is fibrous and brown."

A common theme is the changing racial makeup of Chicago. In Bellow's youth it was white ethnics making up the neighborhoods, Poles, Irish, Jews. In the 60s through the 90s the blacks and Puerto Ricans are pushing out the earlier groups (although technically the earlier groups are not leaving, their numbers are just decreasing proportionately. There are still many of them). He doesn't mention the Mexicans (possibly he thought some of the Mexicans he was seeing were Puerto Rican?). (Chicago has the largest Mexican population in the U.S. outside of the Southwest.) He does have an overfondness for the word slum, though.

A 1960 essay on the state of Illinois contains the hilariously deadpan paragraph: "Some important ingredients of life were conspicuously absent." (These ingredients turn out to be the life of the mind.) Perhaps when America is finally entombed in the graveyard of civilizations this can be its epitaph?

The same Illinois essay contains Bellow's opinion that "the novelists who take the bitterest view of our modern condition make the most of the art of the novel. "Do you think," Flaubert replies to a correspondent who has complained of Madame Bovary, "that this ignoble reality, so disgusting to you in reproduction, does not oppress my heart as it does yours? If you knew me better you would know that I abhor ordinary existence. Personally, I have always held myself as aloof from it as I could. But aesthetically I desired this once - and only once - to plumb its very depths.""

Of the Kennedy years, he writes in 1962: "The American presidency, for so many years sewed up in long johns,...was at last becoming modern."

A common complaint of Bellow is that the educated are our philistines. He sees more hope for the life of the mind in the common person, the factory worker or drudge. A college education drains out the passion for learning.

Nor is too much information good for you. "We have no use for most of the information given by the New York Times. It simply poisons us. ....I shun the Sunday papers; the very look of them deadens my mind. Newspapers must be read cautiously, cannily, defensively. You know very well that journalists cannot afford to tell you plainly what is going on."

On central European literature, his "favorites were Kafka and Rilke. In Rilke, the poetry meant less to me than the Brigge book, which I loved. It had a great effect on me. Thomas Mann I always viewed with some mistrust." (Why??)

"...in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance. What you find in the best English writing of the twentieth century - in Joyce or E.E. Cummings. Street language combined with a high style. I don't today take rhetorical effects so seriously, but at the time I was driven by a passion to invent."

I had never heard his Trotsky story before. In 1940 Bellow happened to be in Mexico. An acquaintance of Trotsky whom he met there arranged a meeting between Trotsky, Bellow, and a friend Bellow was traveling with. On the morning they were to meet, Trotsky was assassinated. Bellow and his friend arrived in Mexico City at Trotsky's villa and were sent to the hospital, where they asked to see him. A doctor led them into a small room where "He had just died. A cone of bloody bandages was on his head. His cheeks, his nose, his beard, his throat, were streaked with blood and with dried iridescent trickles of iodine."

Sprinkles of tiny, priceless anecdotes: "Once, I ran into Arthur Koestler on the boulevard Saint-Germain. I was leading my small son by the hand - Koestler and I had met briefly in Chicago. He said, "Is this your child?" I said, "Yes." I was then reprimanded: a writer had no business to beget children. Hostages to fortune....the whole bit. I said, "Well, he's here." It wasn't that I didn't admire Koestler. I did. But he was as well furnished with platitudes as the next man, evidently."

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the cover image--what a natty dude! Bellow's non-fictional ruminations are as rich as his novels and stories. He's really a novelist through and through--he can blend warmly specific personal recollection with abstract speculation like no one else. And that Bellow tone: wisdom and beauty that flows free and easy, a jaunty, slangy, conversational high style. This bundle of lectures and magazine pieces reads like a testament. A giant!

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Con tutta probabilità non ho raggiunto gli scopi che mi ero prefisso, ma la soddisfazione più grande è quella di essermi liberato dei tenaci errori del passato. Di entrare in un'epoca di errori migliori." (p. 11)

"Il modo in cui si sfidano le proprie convinzioni esponendole al rischio della distruzione è la prova ultima del valore di un romanziere." (p. 58)

"Il modo migliore per trattare l'inevitabile è considerarlo una cosa buona." (p. 334)

[Illiterate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bellow fumes at contemporary culture (mass society, scientism, anti-intellectualism) while mythologizing his cultures (immigrant Chicago, interwar left, literati).

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection spans several decades and ranges from very engaging to banal. His autobiographical essay "In the days of Roosevelt" was wonderful. A travelogue describing a trip around downstate Illinois reveals his limited understanding of rural America. Some of the pieces are just dated, but his observations on Khrushchev are still fresh, insightful and entertaining. His Nobel lecture is required reading for anyone interested in Bellow's approach to fiction. In short, a volume worth skimming for the good stuff.

[Mauro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not exactly a book: a materialized soul. You read it, and it is as if Saul Bellow was there, right beside you, guiding you through Mozart's geniality, taking you to Spain, Tuscany and - of course - Chicago; introducing you to his frieds and finally opening up his heart.
While reading this one and for a while after you're done, you will not only be hearing Bellow's voice when thinking about certain matters, but also seeing things, in this world, through his large, oblong, ancient eyes.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some homages to people and cities, some interviews, some essays. It's got the same complex and beautiful Bellow language as the fiction that I've read, but isn't as compelling as his fiction.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used to like reading Bellow's fiction because it was more hardscrabble than the patrician authors of his day (Updike, Cheever, etc.). This book of assembled essays and speeches is a grab bag that showcases aspects of his life and writing.

He was always a good observer, one of the things that I liked about his fiction, and the most enjoyable things in here are probably the stories of his travels (Franco's Spain, Israel after the Six-Day War). Less enjoyable are the philosophical and intellectual musings and abstractions (including his Nobel Prize speech – I couldn't really understand what he was getting at, other than Things Were Better Before). In fact, the whole tone is more than a bit curmudgeonly and doesn't wear well with passing time. Apparently the best time in his life when he was a single young man, broke in the Depression, but he could feed and house himself cheaply and didn't have anyone depending on him, so it was perfect for a wannabe writer.

I can't recommend this for a contemporary audience. Does anyone read Bellow anymore? Or for that matter, Updike and Cheever (not to mention Mailer and Roth)? Should they, and if so, why? Discuss among yourselves.

[Torrey Paquette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outwardly, Saul Bellow had little reason for bitterness—he won every literary award under the sun, including the Nobel. But he seems to have spent the last decades of his life under a perceived siege. The tradition of which he saw himself as beneficiary and steward was under threat.

“It isn’t contemporary literature alone that is threatened,” Bellow told an interviewer in 1991. “The classics themselves are shooting, not drifting, Letheward. We may lose everything at this rate…[I feel] anger, contempt, and rage, by this latest betrayal by putty-headed academics and intellectuals.”

Bellow spent much of his life among these putty-headed academics and intellectuals. Like many writers who came up in the first half of the last century, he started off a Marxist. Bellow’s parents immigrated from Russia to Montreal in the early 1910s, and Lenin and Trotsky were nightly discussed at the Bellow dinner table. We learn in the essay "Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence" that Bellow was scheduled to meet Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940, on the day that Trotsky was assassinated. The Russian Revolution hangs heavy over these pages

“There was the revolutionary myth that the masses had taken things into their own hands in 1917, and destroyed the power of capitalist imperialism,” Bellow writes. “It took me a long time to get over that.”

The Soviet Union’s failure to live up to its promises seems to have permanently disillusioned Bellow on any movement that took as its aim the realization of a better world; he famously drifted rightward in later years, and took umbrage with those who, unlike himself, were unable to divest themselves of leftist political orthodoxies.

It is not surprising, then, that Bellow sounded so often like a reactionary (a charge he rejected). He dismissed those he saw caught up in the daily political squabbles (politicians, the media, polemicists, activists, and, again, intellectuals and academics) as contributing to the “crisis chatter,” the “moronic inferno” (a term he borrowed from acolyte Martin Amis) of the age.

“Atomic energy, environmentalism, women’s rights, capital punishment...such are the daily grist of newspapers and networks,” he writes. “And this, let’s face it, is the action; this is where masses of Americans find substance, importance, find definition, through a combination of passion and ineffectuality.”

He is, by turns, tone-deaf, out-of-step, a defender of the status quo, a person whose views often run (in my judgment) in the wrong direction. But his larger, more important point is that the ideas of the day—the prevailing ideologies and dominant systems of thought—distract and disorient us, disfigure our “first soul” (as Bellow called it), obscure from us what Tolstoy and Proust called our “true impressions”; together with the “crisis chatter” with which we’re daily confronted, the modern individual is placed under tremendous pressure. Academics, polemicists, intellectuals, the bien pensant liberals—all these elements contribute to these conditions.

“This society...but cannot absolutely denature us,” Bellow writes. “It forces certain elements of the genius of our species to go into hiding.”

He elaborates elsewhere:

“My case against the intellectuals can be easily summarized: Science has postulated a nature with no soul in it; commerce does not deal in souls and higher aspirations—matters like love and beauty are none of its business...Intellectuals seem to me to have turned away from those elements in life unaccounted for in modern science and that in modern experience have come to seem devoid of substance.”

Bellow inhabits and observes the world as a writer, not just chiefly but solely, and, though he addresses a reader who is general, his admonitions are meant primarily for fellow writers and artists, whose job it is (per Bellow) to stand athwart the chaos.

And, even if engaging with politics is, for an artist, in Bellow’s view, a mostly dead-end proposition, that's not to say he feels writers shouldn’t be passionately moral. (He references Tolstoy, who said a writer must take a moral view—this meant, above all, giving intense attention to one’s subject and characters; or, per Henry James, being “one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”)

"If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss,” Bellow writes. “I use these terms loosely for I am not making an argument but rather attempting to describe the pleasure that comes from recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life. These essences are restored to our consciousness by persons who are described as 'artists.’"

For Bellow, literature is not an agent of change (as W.H. Auden famously said, “Poetry makes nothing happen”); nor is it meant to explain “the roots of this, the causes of the other, the history, the structure, the reasons why." Rather, it’s autotelic; it represents the living moment and, in so doing, temporarily releases us from the object world of ideas in whose grip we’re caught; it restores our natural knowledge; it “raises the soul through the serenity of form above any painful involvement in the limitations of reality.”

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote of Bellow, in 2015 (upon publication of another collection of essays, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, of which there is significant overlap with this collection): “[His] most enduring conflict is the one at the very heart of modernity—between the visionary vortex of the inner voice and the turbulent volume of worldly experience, between the freely unhinged life of the mind and the irrefutable life of the times.”

“Can so much excitement, so much disorder, be brought under control?” Bellow asks in his 1990 essay ‘The Distracted Public.’ “Such questions must be addressed to analysts and experts in a variety of fields—prediction is their business. The concern of tale-tellers and novelists is with the human essences neglected and forgotten by a distracted world.”

[Maria Azpiroz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Algunos ensayos son muy buenos y entretenidos pero en general, no me ha gustado Las reseñas de sus viajes me resultaron aburridas y el mejor ensayo es el de Mozart, una obertura y también Los franceses vistos por Dostoievski. Ambos despliegan humor. El discurso del Nobel y las entrevistas finales son buenas también. Creo que el resto de los ensayos no han envejecido bien. Me quedo con sus novelas que me han fascinado.

[Dat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of Saul Bellow, whose stylistic blend of the intellectual and the comic (the intellectually comic and the comically intellectual) is, quite simply, a sheer joy to read, it was apparently said that he had loved two things: philosophy and fucking. This book is mostly a collection of attempts to find the middle ground.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I started as an audiobook and quickly ordered knowing there were lots of passages I would want to dogear and underline and revisit. There’s a lot of “you ain’t seen nothing yet” when he bemoans the distracted public of 1980 with newspapers and network TV.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 2 out of 5]

In spite of his undeniable merits and gifts as an outstanding writer and Nobel Prize winner, I find Saul Bellow's work uneven – I am fascinated by many of his novels (Dangling Man, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December, More Died of Heartbreak, The Actual) and cannot abide others (The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King. Perhaps I am drawn to the novels whose protagonists are introverted and reserved, and in which the changing nature of their attempts to come to terms with, to them, a somewhat alien external reality which forces them to explore and understand their inner personality and world, and cannot stand the novels whose protagonist is a larger than life extrovert with manic tendencies. I mistakenly expected the essays in this book to be the reflection of the writer in his more introverted vein. I found the collection disappointing in general and many of the essays, especially the earlier ones frustratingly banal, shallow or dated.

I am quite willing to concede that the essays which focus on Chicago may be fascinating to readers acquainted with Chicago; for me though, the Chicago of his novels is far more vivid and spellbinding.

This collection of essays is organized into six parts.

The first part, Riding off in all directions, is a ratbag of essays. Literary notes on Khrushsev is a fascinating, and still very pertinent, analysis of Khrushev, his cynical and boisterious manipulation of the US media of the time, which cannily foreshadows other flamboyant, grandstanding despots such as Saddam Hussein or Hugo Chávez. The French as Dostoyevsky saw them is another effective and surprising essay. In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt is longwinded piece of writing on what appears nowadays to refer to a very remote, far more naive USA. The essay describe a USA built on a strange mixture of nostalgia, naivety, corruption, admiration, and political manipulation with, I think, little appeal to non-US readers. A Talk with the Yellow Kid is another, to me, unsatisfying, journalistic period piece on a retired Chicagoan con-man - more successful if you read it as a sketch for a possible Bellow character.

In the second part, Writers, Intellectuals, Politics, Bellow rather tiresomely flogs the US cultural milieu for its philistinism. Many of the essays read like uninspired newspaper hacks with very little depth to them. Saul Bellow's Nobel Lecture rises like a shining beacon over the dismal mists of the rest of the essays in this section and is certainly worth close reading.

The Distracted Public, which forms the third part of the book is really a continuation of the second part and criticizes, what Bellow sees as the inability of the US public to focus on issues rather than zapping, pretty much aimlessly, through them.

The fourth part of the book, Thoughts in Transition, contains an uneven bunch of travel essays. The first of these essays, Spanish Letter, makes for fascinating reading, if you have any idea of the contrast twenty-first century Spain presents with the 1948 Spain visited by Bellow. The author writes his impressions of travelling through a dusty, poverty-stricken, backward 1948 Spain controlled by Franco's dictatorial police state. In Israel: The Six-Day War, Bellow has a shot at writing as a very self-conscious eye-witness war correspondent -actually the war was over by the time Bellow arrived but the destroyed tanks were still smoking, the battlefields were strewn with corpses, and prisoners of war were being marched away to refugee camps. It is an uncomfortable read, in many ways -Bellow tries hard to be come to grips with the subject matter but its deeper sense appears to elude him, or rather he slips into the role of a reporter straining towards objectivity splintered with rather rote shards of human interest. There are other, unsuccesful essays on New York, Tuscany, Vermont, Paris, Chicago, and the official 1979 act of signing the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

The fifth part of the book, A Few Farewells contains short eulogies on Isaac Rosenfeld, John Berryman, John Cheever, Allan Bloom, and William Arrowsmith. I particularly liked the the excellent and very personal eulogies on John Berryman and Allan Bloom.

The sixth, and last part of the book, Impressions and Notions contains the two parts of an outstanding interview of Saul Bellow. I was particularly struck by his not very flattering opinion of the Great Books program established in the 1930s and 1940s at the University of Chicago by Robert Maynard Hutchin; it is important to note that Bellow studied under the program until he abandoned it and transferred to anthropology and sociology at Northwestern University.

This is a book which will elicit very different appraisals from its readers, according to their backgrounds and interests, for example whether you or your family lived in Chicago at some time between 1930 and 1980, what you have read by Bellow, your politics, your stance on the quality of American undergraduate education, and the role of intellectuals in society.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Sartre's "Between Existentialism and Marxism" just recently so it was interesting to encounter Bellows' often angry resistance to what he sees as the cheapening of literature by intellectual or political posturing.

I love Bellows' fiction so I was a little unsettled by evidence suggesting that he was often a cranky man who went in for dimestore psychoanalysis of his contemporaries - yet the eulogies for his friends are filled with genuine love.

Zionism, American exceptionalism, and a love for Chicago are combined with the depth of the man who wrote Mr. Sammler. What a dude.

[Joel Cigan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had read this book quite a bit ago and found myself requesting it again from my local library branch. Saul Bellow is a Russian Jew who grew up in “the sticks” of Chicago and here he muses about a variety of things mostly in what appeared to me to be a “stream-of-consciousness” writing style.

The prose is difficult to put together for most of the collection of essays. There’s only a few that were notable...for example, his essay on his time at a Tuscan winery in the heart of winter when sniffing dogs are hunting for prized truffles or his story on “The Yellow Kid” which was probably my favorite of the bunch.

There is heavy emphasis on concepts of nihilism and philistinism as it relates to Marxist, Fascist and Communist ideologies which mostly escaped me. I do think this work is worthwhile to read nonetheless and I’m glad I read it.

[Richard Block · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miscalculation

The late Saul Bellow has long been regarded as one of the best writers of the late 20th Century. His pugnascious prose, erudite observations and command of ideas made him a Nobel Prize winner, an accolade not awarded to either Updike or Roth, despite their great work. I loved some of his novels (Herzog, Henderson, Augie March, Humboldt's Gift, etc) and still revere his fiction.

But unlike, say Updike, I did not know Bellow as an essayist. Compared to Updike, he did not seem all that interested, or so I thought, until I read this relatively disappointing collection. Despite some brilliant observations (like his essay on Mozart), this collection contains his core critique of modern culture - that it is so dumbed down, it is rubbish. He longs for the late 19th and Early 20th Century, full of literary and artistic giants, he lectures the reader (literally, there are long lectures included here) which make the same point over and over again. He asserts a lot of things here, some very hard to follow especially if you disagree, and comes over as a bit of a bore.

Maybe he really should have stuck to including these in his fiction ( Planet, Dean's December, etc) and not gone into other forms. He becomes a less lovable writer. Yet sometimes, his ideas really fly, and his writing is well.... pure Bellow (hard to beat). So this is a hard collection to love, but one that a Bellow fan must read, if only for those flashes of Bellow brilliance.

[Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was my first Bellow and a great disappointment. His essay writing here, sampled from the 50’s to the 90’s, is aristocratic, despite his apparent interest in being perceived as a salty Chicagoan like Terkel or Algren. He manages to write incredibly boring accounts of his travels to what should be incredibly interesting places. His account of a train ride in Spain consists of what he believes to be tiring conversations with the strangers he encounters. This is the raw material that writers like Orwell or Terkel could do wonders with. After making this complaint, Bellow proceeds to remark on how shabby the campesinos look. This kind of looking down is the norm, not the exception. Later, during the so-called “culture wars” of the 90s, Bellows attempts at political relevance are entirely unsuccessful, as he makes vague pronouncements without any compelling discussion. His thoughts on racial identity sparked by Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” hit single do not survive the test of time. Nonetheless, my disappointment with his nonfiction will not prevent me from trying out his fiction, beginning with The Adventures of Augie March.

[Alan Gerstle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like what Bellow has to say in these essays, and he basically says the same thing: that "serious fiction writing" has deteriorated. However, for whatever reason, although providing lists of shortcomings regarding contemporary fiction, he never mentions a particular author or book as an example. And he's from Chicago! Perhaps also, one could not write an anonymous book review prior to the internet, and especially prior to Amazon, where anyone can deride, heckle, denigrate, etc., any book by any author, and remain anonymous. A further advantage contemporary "book reviewers" have is that they don't even have to read the book.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to see Bellow more unbuttoned and casual in his non-fiction assessment of people, books, and politics. Wide ranging, touched with a knowing irony, and all presented from a fundamentally moral and humane perspective.

[Jp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though his fiction his calling card, Bellow's essays are equally crafted with language, insight and erudition that is masterful

[Kiof · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sheer pleasure

[Peter Melancon]

I've never read anything by Saul Bellow and I feel now that I should. I wanted to read this book in order to write better essays. I've always have written papers for college and grad school but I'd wanted to write essays that may seem accessible to everyone and, well boring.