The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction

by Bernard Malamud, Robert Giroux (Introduction)

Includes Malamud's novel, The People , which was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1986, with the text presented as the author left it, as well as fourteen previously uncollected stories. Set in the nineteenth century, The People has as its hero a Jewish peddler who is adopted as chief by an Indian tribe in the Pacific Northwest.

Genres: Short Stories

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 11, 1989

About the author

Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer (also filmed), about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Reviews

[Matteo C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Consigliato ai fan di questo autore troppo poco letto. I racconti seguono un ordine temporale che permette d'intuire l'evoluzione dell'autore. Il popolo che chiude il libro è una novella incompiuta per la morte dell'autore, una specie di Balla con i lupi in salsa yiddish.

[Come Musica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Malamud prende la vita di persone considerate ultime e dà loro spessore.
Una storia ricca di sconfitte per portare avanti l'idea pacifista.

[Susan Chow-Dukhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book contains the first draft of Malamud's incomplete last book, as well as a collection of short stories (10 stories previously published, 6 stories never published).
The People is the first draft of 16 chapters of an unfinished book that was to have had 20 or more chapters. The quality of writing for a first draft was good enough for the reader to appreciate the incomplete story, and regret that we were not able to read the entire novel.
The collection of stories were a bit weak, not because of the quality of the writing, but due to the selection of stories chosen for the collection.
Most of the stories had the same effect on the reader, as the main characters appeared to be beaten down by life and resigned to their fate. The past relationship between a father and son is repeated in different stories, as though Malamud was using the short stories as material for his novels. The fictive biographies of Virginia Woolf and Alma Mahler which were meant to show their lives as a short story made the reader feels that they were reading point form notes about a person's life. The reader doesn't feel any empathy for the main character, and there is no anticipation on how the story will develop.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had been sitting on my TBR shelf for a number years. I put off reading it because I knew there was no ending. It’s the book Malamud was working on when he died of a heart attack in 1986. I found the book at a library book sale and, being a great admirer of his work, I grabbed it. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized it was an unfinished novel. Would I have bought it if I had known that? Probably. As I said, I’m a great admirer of his writing. In THE PEOPLE, as in most of his books, Malamud tackles the important issue of what it means to be human. As such, he’s often dealing with tragedy, but somehow manages to infuse his writing with humor and, for me at least, to show his fellow humans as flawed, but not beyond hope. This novel is set in the nineteenth century and The People referred to in the title are Native Americans. The hero, wise, but not always smart, is a Jewish peddler whom the people adopt as their leader and, as such, he takes on the suffering of the tribe and has to deal with the brutalities and lies of the government.

A number of short stories round out the volume. I haven’t read all of them yet, but the ones I have read confirm my belief in the genius and humanity of Bernard Malamud.

[Yupa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tre stelline ai sedici racconti, due stelline al romanzo incompiuto che chiude il libro.

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing like MALAMUD! Stunning

[Vel Veeter]

Most uncollected stories or worse unpublished stories collections tend to be curious and interesting, but often not very good. From my work in college and grad school reading what’s assigned to me and seeing the different ways that professor chose readings and my own choosing. So here I am looking at this giant book of Bernard Malamud short stories and it’s carefully labeled in terms of which stories go with which collection that he published in his lifetime. This is perfect for me so I can jump around and read them carefully. I read his award winning collection last year, The Magic Barrel, which I thought was excellent. I chose the uncollected stories next only because that’s where the whole collected works starts.

So we begin with Bernard Malamud right at the beginning of his career in the early 1940s. I normally start the reviews this year with the first sentence of the book, but I had to pick a different one because the first story involves a scene of anti-semitic violence told in a fairly stark manner, and I didn’t want that to be my review title. But this story is one of the best of the stories. In it, a middle aged shop-owner in US who witnessed anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia is living a paranoid and terrified life in the rise of Nazis and fascism and it’s affecting his life and health. I hate to say this feels a little familiar right now. The stories show the growth of Malamud as he gets older and you can see big jumps in form and style (and confidence of the writing). By the end, he’s well-established and a very well-regarded writer. The success of the collection overall stems from the quality of writing, but also from the fact that he never stopped writing stories even as he began writing novels.

[Dominique · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading every Bernard Malamud book that was published before the death of this brilliant writer, I was very curious about the unfinished novel "The People". This book was hard to find in my country, but I'm glad I got a copy. It's sad that he didn't finish it, because it would have been as good as all his other novels (in my opinion, Malamud never wrote a less than excellent book - or story, for that matter).

There are many brilliant moments in "The People", which in some ways reminded me of Saul Bellow's "Henderson The Rain King" (1959) and Malamud's own "God's Grace" (1982), which was his last complete novel and my favorite book of all time. Because Malamud only left a first draft of "The People", it surprised me that it's so brilliantly written with all the usual Malamud wisdom and humour.

Besides that incomplete novel, "The People And Uncollected Stories" also includes sixteen short stories. Most of them are as good as the writings published in the previous short stories collections "Idiots First", "Rembrandt's Hat", even "The Magic Barrel".

If you're familiar with Malamud's work, I highly recommend this book.