A poetic, introspective view of a man who believes himself a failure, 10 Jun 2008
This astounding novella pounces on your attention from the first lines. It used a language of alienated introspection, with a self deluded failure of a man, bitter about everything and harbouring a particular grudge against his father.

As Tommy Wilheim's story unfolds, we begin to see the parts of him that put him in this position. He is a proud dreamer of a man, too fond of good intentions to get much done. The book follows his defeats and defiances, seeing him fall helpless from one mess to another. Its ending is a poignant comment on the man's state of mind, and had a lasting effect on me when I first read it. 12 years later I read it again, and even though I knew what was coming I felt the same thing.

An astounding book, please check it out.


A remarkable small novel, 28 Oct 2007
The main character in Saul Bellow's novel is Tommy Wilhelm. He now lives with his father at the Gloriana Hotel in New York. Everything he has ever undertaken has gone wrong. He never managed to complete his studies. He was dragged to Hollywood by an old friend, Maurice Venice, who promised him a career as a film star with Kaskia Films. But then it turned out that Venice was simply a pimp and Wilhelm ended up by working in a restaurant in California. Later he married Margaret, he had two sons Paulie and Tommy and found a job with a company called Rojax Corporation. When he was dismissed his marriage broke up and Wilhelm's father's wrath reached the point when he refused to give his son a single penny.
When Wilhelm meets psychologist Dr Tamkin, he is drawn into speculation in commodities at one of the branches of a good Wall Street house. Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - he has given the last of his money to Dr Tamkin. Is Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off or is he offering him one last chance to make it out of his mess?
A moving portrait of a man with sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature and a tendency to be confused under the many pressures of life.


A Jewish loser in a world of financial vultures, some cannibals, 20 Mar 2007
An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne


Seize this Book- my puns amuse me greatly., 25 Jul 2006
I read this one at about the same time as The Outsider, found many similarities and actually enjoyed this more. It's short, it's a shock, it's worth it for the ending.

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work, 23 Nov 2005
"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

A poetic, introspective view of a man who believes himself a failure, 10 Jun 2008
This astounding novella pounces on your attention from the first lines. It used a language of alienated introspection, with a self deluded failure of a man, bitter about everything and harbouring a particular grudge against his father.

As Tommy Wilheim's story unfolds, we begin to see the parts of him that put him in this position. He is a proud dreamer of a man, too fond of good intentions to get much done. The book follows his defeats and defiances, seeing him fall helpless from one mess to another. Its ending is a poignant comment on the man's state of mind, and had a lasting effect on me when I first read it. 12 years later I read it again, and even though I knew what was coming I felt the same thing.

An astounding book, please check it out.


A remarkable small novel, 28 Oct 2007
The main character in Saul Bellow's novel is Tommy Wilhelm. He now lives with his father at the Gloriana Hotel in New York. Everything he has ever undertaken has gone wrong. He never managed to complete his studies. He was dragged to Hollywood by an old friend, Maurice Venice, who promised him a career as a film star with Kaskia Films. But then it turned out that Venice was simply a pimp and Wilhelm ended up by working in a restaurant in California. Later he married Margaret, he had two sons Paulie and Tommy and found a job with a company called Rojax Corporation. When he was dismissed his marriage broke up and Wilhelm's father's wrath reached the point when he refused to give his son a single penny.
When Wilhelm meets psychologist Dr Tamkin, he is drawn into speculation in commodities at one of the branches of a good Wall Street house. Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - he has given the last of his money to Dr Tamkin. Is Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off or is he offering him one last chance to make it out of his mess?
A moving portrait of a man with sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature and a tendency to be confused under the many pressures of life.


A Jewish loser in a world of financial vultures, some cannibals, 20 Mar 2007
An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne


Seize this Book- my puns amuse me greatly., 25 Jul 2006
I read this one at about the same time as The Outsider, found many similarities and actually enjoyed this more. It's short, it's a shock, it's worth it for the ending.

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work, 23 Nov 2005
"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

A poetic, introspective view of a man who believes himself a failure, 10 Jun 2008
This astounding novella pounces on your attention from the first lines. It used a language of alienated introspection, with a self deluded failure of a man, bitter about everything and harbouring a particular grudge against his father.

As Tommy Wilheim's story unfolds, we begin to see the parts of him that put him in this position. He is a proud dreamer of a man, too fond of good intentions to get much done. The book follows his defeats and defiances, seeing him fall helpless from one mess to another. Its ending is a poignant comment on the man's state of mind, and had a lasting effect on me when I first read it. 12 years later I read it again, and even though I knew what was coming I felt the same thing.

An astounding book, please check it out.


A remarkable small novel, 28 Oct 2007
The main character in Saul Bellow's novel is Tommy Wilhelm. He now lives with his father at the Gloriana Hotel in New York. Everything he has ever undertaken has gone wrong. He never managed to complete his studies. He was dragged to Hollywood by an old friend, Maurice Venice, who promised him a career as a film star with Kaskia Films. But then it turned out that Venice was simply a pimp and Wilhelm ended up by working in a restaurant in California. Later he married Margaret, he had two sons Paulie and Tommy and found a job with a company called Rojax Corporation. When he was dismissed his marriage broke up and Wilhelm's father's wrath reached the point when he refused to give his son a single penny.
When Wilhelm meets psychologist Dr Tamkin, he is drawn into speculation in commodities at one of the branches of a good Wall Street house. Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - he has given the last of his money to Dr Tamkin. Is Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off or is he offering him one last chance to make it out of his mess?
A moving portrait of a man with sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature and a tendency to be confused under the many pressures of life.


A Jewish loser in a world of financial vultures, some cannibals, 20 Mar 2007
An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne


Seize this Book- my puns amuse me greatly., 25 Jul 2006
I read this one at about the same time as The Outsider, found many similarities and actually enjoyed this more. It's short, it's a shock, it's worth it for the ending.

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work, 23 Nov 2005
"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

A poetic, introspective view of a man who believes himself a failure, 10 Jun 2008
This astounding novella pounces on your attention from the first lines. It used a language of alienated introspection, with a self deluded failure of a man, bitter about everything and harbouring a particular grudge against his father.

As Tommy Wilheim's story unfolds, we begin to see the parts of him that put him in this position. He is a proud dreamer of a man, too fond of good intentions to get much done. The book follows his defeats and defiances, seeing him fall helpless from one mess to another. Its ending is a poignant comment on the man's state of mind, and had a lasting effect on me when I first read it. 12 years later I read it again, and even though I knew what was coming I felt the same thing.

An astounding book, please check it out.


A remarkable small novel, 28 Oct 2007
The main character in Saul Bellow's novel is Tommy Wilhelm. He now lives with his father at the Gloriana Hotel in New York. Everything he has ever undertaken has gone wrong. He never managed to complete his studies. He was dragged to Hollywood by an old friend, Maurice Venice, who promised him a career as a film star with Kaskia Films. But then it turned out that Venice was simply a pimp and Wilhelm ended up by working in a restaurant in California. Later he married Margaret, he had two sons Paulie and Tommy and found a job with a company called Rojax Corporation. When he was dismissed his marriage broke up and Wilhelm's father's wrath reached the point when he refused to give his son a single penny.
When Wilhelm meets psychologist Dr Tamkin, he is drawn into speculation in commodities at one of the branches of a good Wall Street house. Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - he has given the last of his money to Dr Tamkin. Is Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off or is he offering him one last chance to make it out of his mess?
A moving portrait of a man with sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature and a tendency to be confused under the many pressures of life.


A Jewish loser in a world of financial vultures, some cannibals, 20 Mar 2007
An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne


Seize this Book- my puns amuse me greatly., 25 Jul 2006
I read this one at about the same time as The Outsider, found many similarities and actually enjoyed this more. It's short, it's a shock, it's worth it for the ending.

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work, 23 Nov 2005
"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

From the back cover...., 02 Jul 2007
`May fairly be considered one of James's major achievements' -- F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition

Companion in theme, period, and setting to What Maisie Knew, THE AWKWARD AGE is another of Henry James's studies of innocence exposed to corrupting influences.

Nanda Brookenham is `coming out' in London society. Thrust suddenly into the vicious, immoral circle, which has gathered round her mother, she even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of a man she admires. The plot is almost entirely propelled by dialogue.

A poetic, introspective view of a man who believes himself a failure, 10 Jun 2008
This astounding novella pounces on your attention from the first lines. It used a language of alienated introspection, with a self deluded failure of a man, bitter about everything and harbouring a particular grudge against his father.

As Tommy Wilheim's story unfolds, we begin to see the parts of him that put him in this position. He is a proud dreamer of a man, too fond of good intentions to get much done. The book follows his defeats and defiances, seeing him fall helpless from one mess to another. Its ending is a poignant comment on the man's state of mind, and had a lasting effect on me when I first read it. 12 years later I read it again, and even though I knew what was coming I felt the same thing.

An astounding book, please check it out.


A remarkable small novel, 28 Oct 2007
The main character in Saul Bellow's novel is Tommy Wilhelm. He now lives with his father at the Gloriana Hotel in New York. Everything he has ever undertaken has gone wrong. He never managed to complete his studies. He was dragged to Hollywood by an old friend, Maurice Venice, who promised him a career as a film star with Kaskia Films. But then it turned out that Venice was simply a pimp and Wilhelm ended up by working in a restaurant in California. Later he married Margaret, he had two sons Paulie and Tommy and found a job with a company called Rojax Corporation. When he was dismissed his marriage broke up and Wilhelm's father's wrath reached the point when he refused to give his son a single penny.
When Wilhelm meets psychologist Dr Tamkin, he is drawn into speculation in commodities at one of the branches of a good Wall Street house. Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - he has given the last of his money to Dr Tamkin. Is Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off or is he offering him one last chance to make it out of his mess?
A moving portrait of a man with sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature and a tendency to be confused under the many pressures of life.


A Jewish loser in a world of financial vultures, some cannibals, 20 Mar 2007
An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne


Seize this Book- my puns amuse me greatly., 25 Jul 2006
I read this one at about the same time as The Outsider, found many similarities and actually enjoyed this more. It's short, it's a shock, it's worth it for the ending.

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work, 23 Nov 2005
"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

From the back cover...., 02 Jul 2007
`May fairly be considered one of James's major achievements' -- F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition

Companion in theme, period, and setting to What Maisie Knew, THE AWKWARD AGE is another of Henry James's studies of innocence exposed to corrupting influences.

Nanda Brookenham is `coming out' in London society. Thrust suddenly into the vicious, immoral circle, which has gathered round her mother, she even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of a man she admires. The plot is almost entirely propelled by dialogue.


The Din in the Head, 22 Oct 2007
Cynthia Ozick has long held her reputation as one of the most acclaimed critics working in America. Her essays are, without fail, uncompromisingly optimistic about what literature can do, what literature has done, and the hopes of literature for the future. Unlike other academics or critics, Ozick does not bemoan the novel's current lack of favour when compared to movies or the internet - her approach is positive, reasoned, passionate and compelling. The essays contained in The Din in the Head, while not explicitly thematically linked, share a common bond in exploring either less well-known but still luminous authors of the twentieth century, or the minor works of acknowledged and remembered masters.

A Jew, Ozick directly addresses the question of what it means to be a 'Jewish writer' in her essay, Tradition and (Or Versus) the Jewish Writer. She believes that if a Jewish author is not tackling such massive problems as the Holocaust or the creation and stability of Israel, then 'All other subject matter in the so-called Jewish-American novel is, well, American, written in the American language, telling American stories.' She rejects the concept of a Jewish novel unless, as stated, it is forcibly and solely Jewish in origin and intent. Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, etc novels are not usually branded with their religion before being read, and nor should they be - it seems only the Jews and minorities such as colonial literature suffer from this problem. A novel is what it is, the aim of an author is not 'community service or communal expectation.' She finishes by saying that writers 'are responsible only to the comely shape of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination'.

That being said, a number of her essays do directly deal with leading Jewish authors such as Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Gershom Scholem. Other authors include Updike, Tolstoy, Kipling, Plath and Henry James. Roughly half of the book deals with Jewish authors or themes, the other half with novels in general. While the book cannot honestly be claimed as Jewish - witness Ozick's own attack on the concept, but also consider the inappropriateness of a book on literary criticism not analysing the works of such masters as Saul Bellow - Ozick's pride in her heritage is plain. But it is not the pride that comes from grandstanding or self-propelling ambition, rather, Ozick discusses these things because they have merit to herself, and by extension, to others.

Her essay, John Updike: Eros and God, is a remarkable piece of sustained admiration for an author who, sad as it is to say, seems to be less appreciated than in his due by today's younger authors, who value the flash and fire of literary psuedo-pyrotechnics, all the while ignoring Updike's supreme command of the English language, his ease and skill and, dare it be said, grace in composing sentences that show us the ordinary in a way we couldn't - wouldn't? - have looked at it ourselves. 'Language in all its fecundity is Updike's native country, and he is its patriot.' Fecundity is right, Updike language grows and stagnates, flourishes and falls, but it is always abundant and verdant, ripe to read and delicious to see.

One of the primary questions Ozick is attempting to answer throughout this book is the deceptively simple: What is a novel? She baldly states it only once, but every essay dances around the topic before culminating in yet another insightful, illuminating aspect of an answer. Granted, there may never be a complete, coherent response to the question, but beautiful, intelligent and important attempts may be given. The novel is, she writes, 'A persuasion towards dramatic interiority. A word-hoard that permits its inventor to stand undefined, unprescribed, liberated from direction or coercion.'

Lionel Trilling, a once-famous critic whose star has long since dimmed, is given a twenty-page examination, and is the saddest essay in the novel. Trilling, though respected, even revered in his own time, always chafed against the mantle of 'critic'. He wanted to be a novelist, and envied Hemingway beyond all others. His own novel, The Middle of the Journey, which is by Ozick's account a certainly capable novel, was not received well. Trilling, writing in his diary, noted, 'The attack on my novel, that it is gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion, is always made with great personal feeling, with anger. -How dared I presume?' The weight of a man's sadness, heavy to behold and difficult to read.

There are small pieces scattered throughout the novel. Kipling's essay is very short, a mere two pages, Plath receives five, miscellaneous topics stay under ten. But even these remain worthwhile and interesting. I am lucky in that I am familiar with most, though not all of the authors, but even those about whom I know little, the encouragement to explore their works is vast. A difficulty in any collected work of criticism is the reader's potential unfamiliarity with the subject matter - the question of, 'If I have not read the author, why would I read criticism of them?' - is firmly answered by the exuberance and enthusiasm of Ozick's prose. She captures not the essence of the writer, necessarily, but the essence of what it meant to them to write, how important it was to be writing, and how important is it to read their work.

Ozick shows a clear preference for literature above all other forms of entertainment and communication. 'The din in our heads, that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread - where, in an age of machine addressing crowds, and crowds mad for machines, can it be found? In the art of the novel...And nowhere else.' And she's right. Literature speaks to the interiority of ourselves, that endless, limitless space in which we define who we are, what we are about, why we are here and what it is that we hold closest to ourselves. Literature, more than any other medium, directly address this interior, it furnishes it with rooms and chairs, carpets and chandeliers, mountains, lakes, rivers and cities. It makes of the blankness of our births a glorious empire, but an empire that we create. Literature is our friend and our confidante, it is our enemy and our attackers. It challenges, harmonizes, repudiates and chastises. It is capable of all this and more - endless reams of purple prose, all for the sake of novels and reading. Ozick may be preaching to the converted with her book of essays, but the enjoyment, exuberance and passion she receives from reading is so beautifully conveyed that I cannot help but suggest it to people who are non-readers, as a way of allowing them into the realm of the written word. Ozick kindles - or rekindles - the love of literature until it is a raging fire alongside which we could warm ourselves forever.

A poetic, introspective view of a man who believes himself a failure, 10 Jun 2008
This astounding novella pounces on your attention from the first lines. It used a language of alienated introspection, with a self deluded failure of a man, bitter about everything and harbouring a particular grudge against his father.

As Tommy Wilheim's story unfolds, we begin to see the parts of him that put him in this position. He is a proud dreamer of a man, too fond of good intentions to get much done. The book follows his defeats and defiances, seeing him fall helpless from one mess to another. Its ending is a poignant comment on the man's state of mind, and had a lasting effect on me when I first read it. 12 years later I read it again, and even though I knew what was coming I felt the same thing.

An astounding book, please check it out.


A remarkable small novel, 28 Oct 2007
The main character in Saul Bellow's novel is Tommy Wilhelm. He now lives with his father at the Gloriana Hotel in New York. Everything he has ever undertaken has gone wrong. He never managed to complete his studies. He was dragged to Hollywood by an old friend, Maurice Venice, who promised him a career as a film star with Kaskia Films. But then it turned out that Venice was simply a pimp and Wilhelm ended up by working in a restaurant in California. Later he married Margaret, he had two sons Paulie and Tommy and found a job with a company called Rojax Corporation. When he was dismissed his marriage broke up and Wilhelm's father's wrath reached the point when he refused to give his son a single penny.
When Wilhelm meets psychologist Dr Tamkin, he is drawn into speculation in commodities at one of the branches of a good Wall Street house. Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - he has given the last of his money to Dr Tamkin. Is Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off or is he offering him one last chance to make it out of his mess?
A moving portrait of a man with sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature and a tendency to be confused under the many pressures of life.


A Jewish loser in a world of financial vultures, some cannibals, 20 Mar 2007
An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne


Seize this Book- my puns amuse me greatly., 25 Jul 2006
I read this one at about the same time as The Outsider, found many similarities and actually enjoyed this more. It's short, it's a shock, it's worth it for the ending.

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work, 23 Nov 2005
"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

From the back cover...., 02 Jul 2007
`May fairly be considered one of James's major achievements' -- F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition

Companion in theme, period, and setting to What Maisie Knew, THE AWKWARD AGE is another of Henry James's studies of innocence exposed to corrupting influences.

Nanda Brookenham is `coming out' in London society. Thrust suddenly into the vicious, immoral circle, which has gathered round her mother, she even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of a man she admires. The plot is almost entirely propelled by dialogue.


The Din in the Head, 22 Oct 2007
Cynthia Ozick has long held her reputation as one of the most acclaimed critics working in America. Her essays are, without fail, uncompromisingly optimistic about what literature can do, what literature has done, and the hopes of literature for the future. Unlike other academics or critics, Ozick does not bemoan the novel's current lack of favour when compared to movies or the internet - her approach is positive, reasoned, passionate and compelling. The essays contained in The Din in the Head, while not explicitly thematically linked, share a common bond in exploring either less well-known but still luminous authors of the twentieth century, or the minor works of acknowledged and remembered masters.

A Jew, Ozick directly addresses the question of what it means to be a 'Jewish writer' in her essay, Tradition and (Or Versus) the Jewish Writer. She believes that if a Jewish author is not tackling such massive problems as the Holocaust or the creation and stability of Israel, then 'All other subject matter in the so-called Jewish-American novel is, well, American, written in the American language, telling American stories.' She rejects the concept of a Jewish novel unless, as stated, it is forcibly and solely Jewish in origin and intent. Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, etc novels are not usually branded with their religion before being read, and nor should they be - it seems only the Jews and minorities such as colonial literature suffer from this problem. A novel is what it is, the aim of an author is not 'community service or communal expectation.' She finishes by saying that writers 'are responsible only to the comely shape of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination'.

That being said, a number of her essays do directly deal with leading Jewish authors such as Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Gershom Scholem. Other authors include Updike, Tolstoy, Kipling, Plath and Henry James. Roughly half of the book deals with Jewish authors or themes, the other half with novels in general. While the book cannot honestly be claimed as Jewish - witness Ozick's own attack on the concept, but also consider the inappropriateness of a book on literary criticism not analysing the works of such masters as Saul Bellow - Ozick's pride in her heritage is plain. But it is not the pride that comes from grandstanding or self-propelling ambition, rather, Ozick discusses these things because they have merit to herself, and by extension, to others.

Her essay, John Updike: Eros and God, is a remarkable piece of sustained admiration for an author who, sad as it is to say, seems to be less appreciated than in his due by today's younger authors, who value the flash and fire of literary psuedo-pyrotechnics, all the while ignoring Updike's supreme command of the English language, his ease and skill and, dare it be said, grace in composing sentences that show us the ordinary in a way we couldn't - wouldn't? - have looked at it ourselves. 'Language in all its fecundity is Updike's native country, and he is its patriot.' Fecundity is right, Updike language grows and stagnates, flourishes and falls, but it is always abundant and verdant, ripe to read and delicious to see.

One of the primary questions Ozick is attempting to answer throughout this book is the deceptively simple: What is a novel? She baldly states it only once, but every essay dances around the topic before culminating in yet another insightful, illuminating aspect of an answer. Granted, there may never be a complete, coherent response to the question, but beautiful, intelligent and important attempts may be given. The novel is, she writes, 'A persuasion towards dramatic interiority. A word-hoard that permits its inventor to stand undefined, unprescribed, liberated from direction or coercion.'

Lionel Trilling, a once-famous critic whose star has long since dimmed, is given a twenty-page examination, and is the saddest essay in the novel. Trilling, though respected, even revered in his own time, always chafed against the mantle of 'critic'. He wanted to be a novelist, and envied Hemingway beyond all others. His own novel, The Middle of the Journey, which is by Ozick's account a certainly capable novel, was not received well. Trilling, writing in his diary, noted, 'The attack on my novel, that it is gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion, is always made with great personal feeling, with anger. -How dared I presume?' The weight of a man's sadness, heavy to behold and difficult to read.

There are small pieces scattered throughout the novel. Kipling's essay is very short, a mere two pages, Plath receives five, miscellaneous topics stay under ten. But even these remain worthwhile and interesting. I am lucky in that I am familiar with most, though not all of the authors, but even those about whom I know little, the encouragement to explore their works is vast. A difficulty in any collected work of criticism is the reader's potential unfamiliarity with the subject matter - the question of, 'If I have not read the author, why would I read criticism of them?' - is firmly answered by the exuberance and enthusiasm of Ozick's prose. She captures not the essence of the writer, necessarily, but the essence of what it meant to them to write, how important it was to be writing, and how important is it to read their work.

Ozick shows a clear preference for literature above all other forms of entertainment and communication. 'The din in our heads, that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread - where, in an age of machine addressing crowds, and crowds mad for machines, can it be found? In the art of the novel...And nowhere else.' And she's right. Literature speaks to the interiority of ourselves, that endless, limitless space in which we define who we are, what we are about, why we are here and what it is that we hold closest to ourselves. Literature, more than any other medium, directly address this interior, it furnishes it with rooms and chairs, carpets and chandeliers, mountains, lakes, rivers and cities. It makes of the blankness of our births a glorious empire, but an empire that we create. Literature is our friend and our confidante, it is our enemy and our attackers. It challenges, harmonizes, repudiates and chastises. It is capable of all this and more - endless reams of purple prose, all for the sake of novels and reading. Ozick may be preaching to the converted with her book of essays, but the enjoyment, exuberance and passion she receives from reading is so beautifully conveyed that I cannot help but suggest it to people who are non-readers, as a way of allowing them into the realm of the written word. Ozick kindles - or rekindles - the love of literature until it is a raging fire alongside which we could warm ourselves forever.

"What was once valued there is not valued here.", 04 Nov 2004
Rose Meadows, an orphan needing a place to live and work, answers a vaguely worded newspaper advertisement in 1935 and is hired for unspecified household work by the Mitwissers, for whom "disorder was...a rule of life." Jews who escaped Germany in 1933, they now live in Albany, New York, a place they find vastly different from the intellectual milieu of Europe. Rudolf Mitwisser, the patriarch, spends his days closeted in his study, researching an obscure group of ninth century Jewish scholars, the Karaites, who reject Talmudic interpretations of traditional Judaism in favor of direct and literal interpretation of the Old Testament.

Elsa Mitwisser, formerly a physicist and colleague of Erwin Schrodinger, is distraught that her family is now dependent upon others and regarded as "parasites." Unbalanced and confined to her room, she, like her husband, ignores the responsibilities of the family and their five children. The Mitwissers have been "adopted" by James A'Bair, a young man with an independent income. As the inspiration and model for the Bear Books, a children's series written by his father, James collects substantial royalties. Believing himself to be a Karaite, James supports Mitwisser's research, provides funds for the family, and occasionally participates in their domestic life.

Moving elliptically through past and present, the narrative explores the backgrounds of all the main characters, traveling forward and backward simultaneously. Focusing on character and theme, rather than plot, Ozick creates an intense world in which each person seeks the fulfillment of personal dreams, which glimmer on the horizon like fireflies, fragile hopes that may die before they come to fruition. Mitwisser, regarded as a great scholar in Europe, finds his research of little interest to Jewish scholars here. Elsa Mitwisser, envious because her colleague, Schrodinger, ended up winning the Nobel Prize, believes history has wronged her. Rose tries to give "symmetry, routine, propriety" to her life, but her past keeps intruding. James does not know who he is, apart from his identity as the "Bear Boy." It is sixteen-year-old Anneliese who seems to have the best chance of capturing the "glimmers."

Ozick's smooth narrative and rich imagery bring the story to life and show the characters developing. Anneliese is "an infant bird tapping with her little beak against the shell." Rose's father "robbed dailiness of predictability, so that [her] childhood's every breath hung on a contingency." Such strange characters, presented without sentimentality, may not fully capture the reader's heart or inspire a great deal of empathy, but Ozick's quiet humor and her sense of irony make their stories important to the reader. Mary Whipple

A poetic, introspective view of a man who believes himself a failure, 10 Jun 2008
This astounding novella pounces on your attention from the first lines. It used a language of alienated introspection, with a self deluded failure of a man, bitter about everything and harbouring a particular grudge against his father.

As Tommy Wilheim's story unfolds, we begin to see the parts of him that put him in this position. He is a proud dreamer of a man, too fond of good intentions to get much done. The book follows his defeats and defiances, seeing him fall helpless from one mess to another. Its ending is a poignant comment on the man's state of mind, and had a lasting effect on me when I first read it. 12 years later I read it again, and even though I knew what was coming I felt the same thing.

An astounding book, please check it out.


A remarkable small novel, 28 Oct 2007
The main character in Saul Bellow's novel is Tommy Wilhelm. He now lives with his father at the Gloriana Hotel in New York. Everything he has ever undertaken has gone wrong. He never managed to complete his studies. He was dragged to Hollywood by an old friend, Maurice Venice, who promised him a career as a film star with Kaskia Films. But then it turned out that Venice was simply a pimp and Wilhelm ended up by working in a restaurant in California. Later he married Margaret, he had two sons Paulie and Tommy and found a job with a company called Rojax Corporation. When he was dismissed his marriage broke up and Wilhelm's father's wrath reached the point when he refused to give his son a single penny.
When Wilhelm meets psychologist Dr Tamkin, he is drawn into speculation in commodities at one of the branches of a good Wall Street house. Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - he has given the last of his money to Dr Tamkin. Is Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off or is he offering him one last chance to make it out of his mess?
A moving portrait of a man with sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature and a tendency to be confused under the many pressures of life.


A Jewish loser in a world of financial vultures, some cannibals, 20 Mar 2007
An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne


Seize this Book- my puns amuse me greatly., 25 Jul 2006
I read this one at about the same time as The Outsider, found many similarities and actually enjoyed this more. It's short, it's a shock, it's worth it for the ending.

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work, 23 Nov 2005
"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

The best collection yet.., 28 Apr 2008
If you are already a reader of Ozick, you will have developed a thirst. This collection will (temporarily) quench it. It contains all her best stories with the exception of 'The Shawl'. There are several collections of Ozick's stories available at fancier prices with fewer stories in them. What she writes will whirl you around - usually with one foot tied to New York, but at higher altitudes and across different time zones. How can anyone read Ozick and not be changed? The world, particularly the world (is there another?) of women and men, will look utterly different after reading each of these.. well what are they? Not fables, not allegories.. tales from the multiple universes just askew of the one we think we know.

From the back cover...., 02 Jul 2007
`May fairly be considered one of James's major achievements' -- F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition

Companion in theme, period, and setting to What Maisie Knew, THE AWKWARD AGE is another of Henry James's studies of innocence exposed to corrupting influences.

Nanda Brookenham is `coming out' in London society. Thrust suddenly into the vicious, immoral circle, which has gathered round her mother, she even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of a man she admires. The plot is almost entirely propelled by dialogue.


The Din in the Head, 22 Oct 2007
Cynthia Ozick has long held her reputation as one of the most acclaimed critics working in America. Her essays are, without fail, uncompromisingly optimistic about what literature can do, what literature has done, and the hopes of literature for the future. Unlike other academics or critics, Ozick does not bemoan the novel's current lack of favour when compared to movies or the internet - her approach is positive, reasoned, passionate and compelling. The essays contained in The Din in the Head, while not explicitly thematically linked, share a common bond in exploring either less well-known but still luminous authors of the twentieth century, or the minor works of acknowledged and remembered masters.

A Jew, Ozick directly addresses the question of what it means to be a 'Jewish writer' in her essay, Tradition and (Or Versus) the Jewish Writer. She believes that if a Jewish author is not tackling such massive problems as the Holocaust or the creation and stability of Israel, then 'All other subject matter in the so-called Jewish-American novel is, well, American, written in the American language, telling American stories.' She rejects the concept of a Jewish novel unless, as stated, it is forcibly and solely Jewish in origin and intent. Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, etc novels are not usually branded with their religion before being read, and nor should they be - it seems only the Jews and minorities such as colonial literature suffer from this problem. A novel is what it is, the aim of an author is not 'community service or communal expectation.' She finishes by saying that writers 'are responsible only to the comely shape of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination'.

That being said, a number of her essays do directly deal with leading Jewish authors such as Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Gershom Scholem. Other authors include Updike, Tolstoy, Kipling, Plath and Henry James. Roughly half of the book deals with Jewish authors or themes, the other half with novels in general. While the book cannot honestly be claimed as Jewish - witness Ozick's own attack on the concept, but also consider the inappropriateness of a book on literary criticism not analysing the works of such masters as Saul Bellow - Ozick's pride in her heritage is plain. But it is not the pride that comes from grandstanding or self-propelling ambition, rather, Ozick discusses these things because they have merit to herself, and by extension, to others.

Her essay, John Updike: Eros and God, is a remarkable piece of sustained admiration for an author who, sad as it is to say, seems to be less appreciated than in his due by today's younger authors, who value the flash and fire of literary psuedo-pyrotechnics, all the while ignoring Updike's supreme command of the English language, his ease and skill and, dare it be said, grace in composing sentences that show us the ordinary in a way we couldn't - wouldn't? - have looked at it ourselves. 'Language in all its fecundity is Updike's native country, and he is its patriot.' Fecundity is right, Updike language grows and stagnates, flourishes and falls, but it is always abundant and verdant, ripe to read and delicious to see.

One of the primary questions Ozick is attempting to answer throughout this book is the deceptively simple: What is a novel? She baldly states it only once, but every essay dances around the topic before culminating in yet another insightful, illuminating aspect of an answer. Granted, there may never be a complete, coherent response to the question, but beautiful, intelligent and important attempts may be given. The novel is, she writes, 'A persuasion towards dramatic interiority. A word-hoard that permits its inventor to stand undefined, unprescribed, liberated from direction or coercion.'

Lionel Trilling, a once-famous critic whose star has long since dimmed, is given a twenty-page examination, and is the saddest essay in the novel. Trilling, though respected, even revered in his own time, always chafed against the mantle of 'critic'. He wanted to be a novelist, and envied Hemingway beyond all others. His own novel, The Middle of the Journey, which is by Ozick's account a certainly capable novel, was not received well. Trilling, writing in his diary, noted, 'The attack on my novel, that it is gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion, is always made with great personal feeling, with anger. -How dared I presume?' The weight of a man's sadness, heavy to behold and difficult to read.

There are small pieces scattered throughout the novel. Kipling's essay is very short, a mere two pages, Plath receives five, miscellaneous topics stay under ten. But even these remain worthwhile and interesting. I am lucky in that I am familiar with most, though not all of the authors, but even those about whom I know little, the encour