The Bellarosa Connection

by Saul Bellow

Harry Fonstein is an immigrant, rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe by an underground operation masterminded by the legendary Broadway producer Billy Rose. When he arrives in America, Harry wants nothing so much as to thank Billy Rose, to shake his hand, to take a few minutes of his time. But Rose refuses to see him and Harry is somehow denied final passage to his adopted homeland. That is, until his wife, Sorella - a shrewd woman, a tiger wife - undertakes the mission. When she confronts Billy Rose, she has with her the means of undermining the famous producer's reputation.

Genres: Fiction, American, Nobel Prize, Literature, Jewish, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America

102 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 1989

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

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The pages of calendars crumble away. They're like the dandruff of time.

I stumbled upon this novella at a book sale, thinking, "oh, I've been meaning to read Saul Bellow", so I picked it up. It's probably a bit of a random way to be introduced to this award winning, Montreal-born author, who is better known for Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March, among others. This is a lesser known novella (his 15th book) that swirls around the story of Harry Fonstein, a European Jew who is saved from being killed by the Nazis in a dramatic rescue which is masterminded by a man in New York, Billy Rose. Fonstein wants nothing more than to meet Billy Rose, to shake his hand, and thank him for saving his life. No matter what he does though, Rose (a famous Broadway producer) refuses to meet or acknowledge him. Why?

It's a fascinating mystery. The story is told from the point of view of their friend, who, many years later in old age, wants to get back in touch with the Fonsteins. As he remembers the story and makes efforts to get in contact, he waxes philosophical and ruminates on a deep intellectual level. The theme of memory comes up often ("What was there worth remembering?"). Jewish identity, particularly in America, is another ("you pay a price for being a child of the New World").

Despite being rife with thought provoking, philosophical ideas, this was only so-so for me. The mystery was ultimately unsatisfying, and the latter half of this novella was dense and surprisingly tough to plod through.

[Noel Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

If not for the many references to old age I would have thought this was one of Bellow’s first works rather than one of his latest. Like pizza there is no such thing as a bad Saul Bellow novel or novella but this isn’t the good stuff. The magic in most of his books is like the mesmerizing whorls and eddies in cigarette smoke climbing towards the ceiling; this book has the same smoke being sucked straight towards an exhaust fan. You can see the same material is there but it’s just passing by. It’s a good story and a quick read but not nearly up to the usual high standards from this master of words.

[Cathérine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2*

[massivetruckloadofglue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Saul Bellow is like a Level 1000 Word Wizard and I can’t not enjoy anything that he writes but The Bellarosa Connection had a few too many un-fleshed-out concepts that I think could have been either elaborated upon or completely omitted in some cases.

The narrator’s preoccupation with the apparent obesity of his friend’s wife, Sorella, is something that he tries twenty million times to spin as a profound observation of her personality’s influence on her appearance (rather than the narrator’s inability to discuss her behavior without first reminding readers in borderline fetishistic language that she is indeed fat). Maybe this was an intended character flaw or quirk that Bellow inserted to add a more realistic and human rhythm to the story, or even to imply some imperfections in the narrator’s memory, which he has made a career of through the establishment of a “memory institute.” Maybe it is supposed to be ironic that the man with the keen sense of recollection falls victim to his own obsession with visceral detail by repeatedly interrupting his own retelling of his friend’s escape from fascist Italy to marvel at a woman who dares to be over 200 pounds. And usually I wouldn’t mention something like this because usually instances of such language are few and far between and pretty unrelated to the plot. But in this case, the narrator’s ogling-poised-as-intellectual-analysis of this woman’s body fills multiple pages and becomes increasingly shocking as the story progresses. I was annoyed at first but the excessiveness of it became absurd and almost funny. You can’t make this sh** up or actually I guess you can if you’re Saul Bellow.

Far more notable than the fat on Sorella’s body is the fat that bloats this story and prevents the meaningful development of what I think could have been a really interesting set of characters. Toward the end of the novella it seems like Bellow gets his bearings again and reminds the reader of the salient questions that he probably had in mind when he started all of this, but which I think he neither answered nor tried to answer through earnest exploration. I’d give this a 2.5 not a 2. I still love Saul Bellow’s writing though, no hate. @saulbellow no hate let’s keep it respectful.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a mystery in the center of the book, not the traditional who-done-it, but a why-not-done-it. It is a mystery that concerns gratitude and omission, placed in Jewish history, and is never solved (like so many real-life mysteries) because those involved died. So the narrator, an old man who has outlived most people significant in his life, now near the end of his life, can ponder the mystery as a device to mull over people and history, that is to say, his memory of those characters and events.

Somewhere in the book I realized what a great writer the author was. He moves you, makes you feel and think, all without visible affectations that scream "writers' workshop". Reading this book is a pleasure.

The author won a Nobel Prize in Literature.

[Frabe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bellow deludente, questa volta: la storia, costruita sugli incroci, in momenti diversi, delle vite di due personaggi ebrei-americani, Harry Fonstein e quel Billy Rose da cui viene il titolo, è raccontata in modo tanto frammentario da risultare di per sé confusa, al di là della componente di mistero sulla figura di Billy Rose disegnata dall'autore. Così, tutto scorre via, temi di fondo compresi - l'ebraismo europeo e quello americano, figlio difforme, e la memoria, attributo assolutamente essenziale della vita: via, senza lasciare traccia degna di nota.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtext in this novella (signaled more than once in its telling) is that the loss of memory is death, an erasure of persons and events. However, the story’s apparent climax—Sorella Fonstein meeting with Billy Rose to persuade/blackmail him to meet with her husband, whom Billy Rose had rescued from the Nazis—ends up being a repudiation of the impresario's values, including any value that Harry Fonstein might derive from Billy Rose’s acknowledgment of gratitude.

The novella doesn’t cohere and it ends as a muddle of themes, but the multitudes it contains make it no less satisfying than some fully resolved drama. Overarching everything is the novella’s raison d’etre: ars longa, vita (and memory) brevis. Themes of memory, gratitude/acknowledgment, testament/forgetting, philanthropy/humanitarianism, money/class/fame, all swirl around the conundrum of Billy Rose’s real-life act of humanitarianism (see Mark Cohen’s Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose). It’s fascinating to contemplate what part memory plays in defining a person and her life, how the fullness of memory can keep the past near at hand, dilate events in the present, even supplant a need for further experience. The outstanding trait of the story’s narrator is his prodigious memory, and it’s his efforts to catch up with friends after a 30-year silence that prompts the story of Billy Rose and Harry Fonstein. The story’s second climax occurs in the final pages, when the narrator discovers in a phone conversation that Harry and Sorella Fonstein have died in a car crash just weeks before.

Other themes play throughout, bound up in a way to suggest there are natural connections. Billy Rose’s character as a popular entertainer/impresario with a crass and second-rate mind is contrasted with his high-mindedness in rescuing Harry. Rose is shown to have had other, more public philanthropic impulses in this life, notably a large, touring tribute to Jews under siege during WWII and his dedication to Israel of modern sculptures for an “art park” bearing his name. In seeming contradiction to his self-aggrandizing character, Rose is unwilling to make Fonstein’s rescue public knowledge or acknowledge Fonstein’s gratitude. The smaller gesture is no less worthy, but Rose tucks it away, hides it from the world, wants no responsibility for the subsequent life Harry Fonstein will lead.

What does it mean that goodness has been done in secret and is repudiated by its benefactor?

Additional subplots serve to give further accommodation to variety and complexity. Rose’s long-time secretary becomes friends with Sorella Fonstein and bequeaths her documents to prove Rose’s show-biz indiscretions. Sorella’s character is given ample description, how an uncle saved her from spinsterhood by hitching her to Fonstein who’d been ensconced in Cuba, her high-class pretensions, her immense size, her outrage in her husband’s behalf. Then Fonstein himself is described, how he fled Galicia in 1940 with his mother, his rescue, his limbo in Cuba, his marriage to Sorella, his money-making invention/patent of a better thermostat. And the couple have a son, a mathematical prodigy whose forte is the stochastic, which dovetails with the randomness of the Fonstein’s highway accident and the narrator’s one-week phone call to restore a friendship languishing in his iron-clad memory for 30 years…

The breadth and scope of Bellow’s expression—sumptuous and muscular sentences in bulging paragraphs—engender the illusion of a fully-formed world, abounding with variety and contradiction. Bellow has performed some sort of magic, compressing a 400-page novel into a novella no less voluminous.

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a lot of Saul Bellow’s novels in my twenties. I can’t remember how I realised that he was not only a good writer but a literary one, an intellectual. I read Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March, The Dean’s December, Mr Sammler’s Planet and Seize the Day (of which last, see below). I seem to have retained only fragments of those books, like the memory of the character in Mr Sammler’s Planet who smells all the time of excrement because of - typical Bellow phrase - “faecal carelessness”. While I knew I liked them, I never built up an idea of Bellow as a writer and, to tell the truth, I don’t think I appreciated them.

So I decided to go back to Bellow for a bit and read two of his novellas: The Bellarosa Connection, which is the subject of this post, and Seize the Day, for a second time, of which more in the one that follows.

The Bellarosa Connection is about one of Bellow’s recurrent themes, Jewishness and how Jews fit into America. It is a first person narrative about a man in later life who tries to make contact with an older couple whom he feels he wronged in some theoretical way that only makes sense if you think very deeply about events and how and why they matter. Which is really what the book is about. Not much happens, but much is analysed and considered.

The intense consideration of detail is occasionally slightly frustrating and a dullard reader like me can get impatient. But the book is very short and one is left with the recognition that this is a delicately crafted book, where drama is hinted at, not described. The language is fine and the style of the narrator is brilliantly sustained. A typical comment:

"When she crossed her legs and he noted the volume of her underthighs, an American observer like me could, and would, picture the entire woman unclothed, and depending on his experience of life and his acquaintance with art, he might attribute her type to an appropriate painter. In my mental picture of Sorella I chose Rembrandt’s Saskia over the nudes of Rubens."


This educated yet slightly coarse mentality is a feature of the narrator’s personality, which is very subtly presented through the story.

This is an understated book but very well written indeed.

[Banbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ultimately, this book is a bit of a letdown; there is no real growth in the narrator. He remains merely a spouter of wry observational comments of the world around him. Perhaps his failure is the point. Despite his prodigious memory, he is the superficial character that his own father perceived him to be. He can recall facts, but does not understand their import. Because he does not have any internalized identity, once his memory starts to go, his very existence has started to go. This is also reflected in the wider society. The mere memory of the facts of the Holocaust, and its paltry memorials (like the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden), are superficial, and miss the deeper connections that should exist--between Jews certainly, but not only Jews, as the missed connection the narrator had with his non-Jewish wife.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite, but some solid quotes:

"Again I was impressed with the importance of keeping your mouth shut, the kind of fertility it can induce, the hidden advantages of a buttoned lip."

"Maybe the power of memory was to blame. Remembering them so well, did I need actually to see them? To keep them in a mental suspension was enough. They were a part of the permanent cast of characters, in absentia permanently."

"potato-patch mind"

"At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth."

"People withdraw into themselves, and then they work up imaginary affections. It's a common American condition."

"What I felt most sharply and immediately was that I had abandoned two extraordinary people whom I had always said I valued and held dear." [this one-- wow really got me]

[Marc-Antoine · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those stories that you just know you will have to visit again.

[dammydoc · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Durante la traversata, Fonstein pensò sovente alla persona che lo aveva fatto uscire clandestinamente dall’Italia, immaginando filantropi e idealisti di varia specie, ebrei pronti a spendere fino all’ultimo dollaro per salvare la loro gente da Treblinka. «Come potevo indovinare chi era stato a salvarmi? Che razza di uomo... o magari era un comitato, la Bellarosa Society...» No, era Billy che agiva da solo, mosso da compassione per gli ebrei suoi correligionari e deciso a battere in astuzia Hitler e Himmler e strappargli dalle grinfie qualche vita. Un’altra volta, allo stesso modo, poteva prendere e incapricciarsi, che so, di una patata al forno, di un hot dog, di un giro intorno a Manhattan sulla Circle Line. C’erano tuttavia delle zone di sentimenti profondi, nell’incostante Billy Rose. Il Dio dei suoi padri contava ancora, per lui”. Billy Rose, nome d’arte di William Samuel Rosemberg, figlio di immigrati ebrei, è stato artista, produttore di successo attivo a Broadway, proprietario del nightclub newyorchese “Casa Mañana”. A lui si ispirarono gli sceneggiatori Murray Burnett e Joan Alison per il personaggio di Rick Blaine, il proprietario del “Cafè Americain” a cui diede il volto Humphrey Bogart nella celebre pellicola Casablanca, e si ritrovò a sua volta impersonato da James Caan nel musical Funny Lady, in cui Barbara Streisand interpretava la moglie, l’attrice e cantante Fanny Brice.

Ne scrivo su

https://www.mangialibri.com/il-circol...

[Txe Polon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Com sempre em passa, no acabo de connectar amb Bellow i les seves menjades d'olla intel·lectuals, així que n'acabo la lectura amb sentiments contradictoris.

[David Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Talk about 'small but perfectly formed'! This is an impressive short novel (100 pages) that shows a short piece of literature can be as valid and have as much to say as a far longer one. That it's hard to summarise despite its brief length says a lot about its quality - but basically it's some recollections of a successful elderly Jewish-American man. It brilliantly deals with themes of being Jewish in America and more sinisterly, the Holocaust - a relative who survived it is a major character. The treatment of the Holocaust is a very important part of the book; we are at a time when survivors of it and World War II are in their 90s or centenarians and won't be with us much longer. And with the focus today on slavery's legacy, police brutality etc (totally valid concerns) and the hundred year anniversary of World War I just passed (a totally valid re-focusing) the Holocaust and Word War II had faded in my mind somewhat. So it was timely for me to be reminded of the sheer evil of the Holocaust. But there is also humor in The Bellarosa Connection, of the Jewish kind but which non-Jewish readers can relate to. Most characters are fictional but one - millionaire American-Jewish entertainment impresario Billy Rose - was very real. Looking him up online after I finished The Bellarosa Connection showed him to be a complex character and his role in helping European Jews to escape from Italy, detailed in the book, was true. The only flaw I found was near the end when a phone conversation slightly stretches credulity (would two strangers have such a detailed chat?) but it somehow works in the context of the storyline and so doesn't much weaken the book overall.

[Vincent Lawler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've enjoyed most of the Bellow that I've read (though I'm not a fan of two of his most famous, "Augie March", and "Henderson the rain king"). This also was a disappointment. It also ended on a frustrating note for me - it begins to talk in some depth about a potentially interesting character, a mathematics prodigy gone sadly adrift in the world of gambling, but then finishes. I wanted to know more about this guy and his relationships with others.

[Fergus Cullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel has some of the virtues of Bellow's other short novels (e.g. Seize the Day, A Theft): Bellow follows basically one narrative line, but manages -- through asides, the recollections, dialogue -- to paint a big, detailed, convincing world in the background. Very impressive. Also impressive is that most of the book, perhaps two thirds, runs without interruption, darting between the 1940s, 50s and the present, and between Europe, the USA and Israel; and it all flows very naturally.

I do have a few complaints. The writing sometimes feels perfunctory. Bellow even lapses occasionally into cliché. There are a few strange and irrelevant obsessions, like, as other reviewers have noted, the obesity of one of the main characters. I like a fat joke as much as the next man, but not on every page. All of this could be chalked up not to Bellow but to the narrative voice (this is a first-person narration); but these quirks are not integrated into a convincing portrait from within. Relatedly, there are many interesting and moving reflections on memory, tradition in the modern world, Europe and the New World; but these are offhand and not developed. The narrator-character is some sort of memory-expert, founder of a 'Mnemosyne Institute,' developer of mnemonic techniques. Fascinating; but this aspect of his psyche is merely mentioned; we get no flavour of it in the matter or texture of his narration. Another missed opportunity.

All in all, a very nice book but a touch below Bellow's standards.

[Yossi Khebzou · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bellarosa Connection se centra principalmente en la memoria. Las comparaciones entre el olvido y la muerte están presentes de manera explícita e implícita a lo largo de todo el texto. No sé si un escritor menos habilidoso podría haber logrado mantener el sutil drama a lo largo de cien páginas, en las cuales, francamente, no ocurre mucho. Sin embargo, al tomar la asimilación de los judíos en Estados Unidos como la temática medular del libro, Bellow permite explorar las diferencias en el acercamiento al judaísmo de los diversos personajes, a los cuales, por cierto, solo llegamos a conocer a través de la memoria del narrador. La identidad de alguien recién llegado a Ellis Island después del Holocausto no es la misma que la de un judío que llegó antes, o la de alguien de dos o tres generaciones atrás. En tan solo cien páginas, con el sencillo argumento de un narrador que recuerda a un hombre que nunca quiso responder a la llamada de otro al que salvó de la guerra, Bellow explora las sutilezas de la memoria y la identidad.

[Printable Tire]

I asked Saul Bellow where the bathroom was at Boston University one time, and I've read Seize the Day and The Adventures of Auggie March before this one. Just can't seem to warm up to the guy. Auggie Marsh was 536 pages so don't say I haven't tried. This one is really readable for awhile (though so many comments about a woman's fatness, not negatively but just circling the drain) but there's just great moments of implausibility-for-the-sake-of-point: the conversation at the end, for example. As a sort of fictional essay on a question it sort of works, though.

Maybe the power of memory was to blame. Remembering them so well, did I need actually to see them? To keep them in a mental suspension was enough. They were a part of the permanent cast of characters, in absentia permanently. There wasn't a thing for them to do.

[Riley Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

"As my Village pals liked to say, it cost no more than twelve hundred dollars a year to be poor--or to play at poverty, yet another American game."

"New York is a collective fantasy of millions. There's just so much a single mind can do with it."

"It's always the falsest formulation that you're proudest of."

"Fools ought to come in smaller sizes."

"Revelations in old age can shatter everything you've put in place from the beginning--all the wiliness of a lifetime of expertise and labor, interpreting and reinterpreting in patching your fortified delusions, the work of the swarm of your defensive shock troops, which will go on throwing up more perverse (or insane) barriers."

An amazing novella: brutal, human, adult.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Bellarosa Connection" by Saul Bellow is a compelling novella that delves into themes of memory, identity, and the intersection of personal and collective history. It confidently earns a four-star rating.

The novella centers around the character of Harry Fonstein, a Jewish man who was rescued from Fascist Italy during World War II by a Broadway showman named Billy Rose, the 'Bellarosa' of the title. Bellow tells the story through the perspective of Harry's wealthy and snobbish in-law, the retired memory-training businessman Sigmund Adletsky, adding a nuanced layer to the narrative.

Bellow, as always, showcases his storytelling prowess, offering the reader a distinct and memorable cast of characters. Their personalities are unflinchingly displayed, from the ungrateful Harry to the contemptuous Sigmund, and even the enigmatic Bellarosa, who remains a potent yet largely off-stage presence throughout the story.

The narrative is imbued with Bellow's sharp wit and insightful reflections on the human condition, especially concerning the unpredictability of gratitude and the enduring impact of history on individual lives. His exploration of memory - its reliability, its tricks, and its importance in constructing our identity - is particularly poignant.

However, "The Bellarosa Connection" might not resonate as profoundly with all readers, contributing to its four-star rating. Some might find the narrator, Sigmund, too distasteful or the narrative too reflective and lacking in action. Moreover, given its brevity, the novella may not offer the immersive, expansive narrative that fans of Bellow's longer works might expect.

Despite these minor caveats, "The Bellarosa Connection" remains a powerful and thought-provoking work, exhibiting Bellow's talent for infusing complex ideas into compact narratives. Its exploration of the ways in which we remember, reinterpret, and respond to our pasts makes it a compelling read, deserving of its four-star rating.

[Steve Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book by Saul Bellow I’ve ever read, I’m embarrassed to say. It probably isn’t the one I should’ve started with.

It’s a long winding first person narrative that I found a bit tedious at times. I had a difficult time wrapping my head around where he was going with it. After reading reviews and analyses of the book, I suspect I am a little too thick to grasp what he was trying to get across. Not being Jewish might’ve been a handicap as well, given he writes about the differences between European Jews and American Jews, and how the assimilation of the latter into American culture distances them from the historical suffering of the former.

At least I think that’s where he was going with it.

[Glenn Richard]

"Sorella Fonstein sometimes sat on the sofa, which had a transparent zippered plastic cover. Sorella was a New Jersey girl - correction: lady. She was very heavy and she wore makeup. Her cheeks were downy. Her hair was done up in a beehive. A pince-nez, highly unusual, a deliberate disguise, gave her a theatrical air. She was still a novice then, trying on these props. Her aim was to achieve an authoritative, declarative manner. However, she was no fool."

[Meri McCoy-Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably the fact that the edition I read had a forward that went on and on about the importance of writing short, and then it seemed like the book itself had a lot of detours didn't help. Seems overrated. Maybe the focus on the post-World War II experience and memory and what it means to be Jewish in America just didn't capture me.

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forget that the title reads like something from Robert Ludlum. This book is masterful; compact yet packing a punch. The theme, as is for nearly all of Bellow's work, is the question of "The (male) Jewish condition", so to speak, in post-war America. Here - as in Ravelstein and Henderson the Rain King - Bellow manages to show that books can be both high brow and wickedly funny. Fonstein, Sorella, Billy Rose, and the narrator are all weaved together in a tale whose essential thread runs throughout the entire text, but whose importance is only appreciated at the end, in the reflection the narrator undertakes once he learns of the death of the Fonsteins: memory is everything. I insist, once again, that Bellow was (and probably remains) the finest post-war American writer.

[Luisa Longobucco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un romanzo che ho trovato onestamente poco interessante. In effetti, nell'edizione originale è un racconto all'interno di una raccolta di tre racconti lunghi, e, se posso dire, mi sembra abbia molto più senso che come romanzo. Le scelte editoriali a volte mi perplimono. Comunque rimango curiosa di leggere altro di Bellow, ad esempio Herzog.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

An old man, an immigrant was rescued by Billy Rose from Nazi Germany and brought to America.
His only wish is to shake Rose's hand, but Rose refuses to meet him. After many years, his tiger wife undertakes ths mission. And therein lies the tale.

[Don Mario · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non sono riuscito ad entrare nello spirito di questo romanzo. Ma la figura di Sorella Fonstein, una donna dalla personalità gigantesca come il suo corpo di obesa, penso rimarrà a lungo nei miei ricordi.

[Claus Willumsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

En dejlig lille skælmsk sag, der ender med, at jeg sidder med højt løftet øjenbryn og et smørret grin på læben ... hvad skete der lige dér?
Bellow er bare god! De fire store (Roth, Singer, Malamud og Bellow) er gode, selv når de er mindre gode...

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inherited a few Bellow books from my dad (who is very much alive, just downsizing). Have avoided them for several years. Not sure why. This one seemed the most approachable, at only 100 pages.

I liked it!

[abi!!]

picked this up because it seemed vonnegut-esque and it felt ... more mean spirited than that. probably at least two thirds of the words are about how obese sorella is lol. some lines that stuck w me but not a favorite.