电子书下载格式:mobi+epub+pdf+txt
作者:SaulBellow
出版时间:2010-11-4
书籍简介:
The temptation here is simply to quote. "I am a poor lost woof from the kennel of Fate looking for a dog to belong to." "As my sixty-seventh birthday approaches (or I approach it in the sense that a fellow jumping from the top of the Empire State approaches the sixty-seventh floor)." "Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces." "I told an old friend in Rome that I'd never return. One can't even see the city for the cars, the Colosseum is fenced up because the tourists have been taking pieces of it as souvenirs, the Romans all look as though they had just gotten up after an adulterous siesta, first-class hotels stink of bad plumbing, everyone is on the make, the exhibitionists don't even zip up between exposures, they walk around on fashionable streets with their genitals in their hands."
Drollery, mordancy, tenderness, quick-draw portraiture, metaphysical vaudeville, soul talk, heart pains, the whole human mess—Saul Bellow's letters are a Saul Bellow novel, the author himself the protagonist. A Saul Bellow novel! A gift from the grave, like Humboldt's. The great voice again, the peerless voice: speaking of craft, the culture, intellectuals ("those dying beasts"), beach holidays, custody settlements, old times, summer mornings, Chicago, snubs, Jews, Tolstoy. Speaking to lovers, ex-wives, editors, fellow writers (John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, Karl Shapiro, Philip Roth, Martin Amis), sons, strangers, mentors, countless friends. Cooing, whispering, chuckling, chortling, lecturing, hectoring, denouncing, arguing, reminiscing. The whole life, as intimately as we're going to get it, from 17 to 88.
And thus a riposte to the previous life, James Atlas's openly hostile biography of ten years ago. "The towel with which the bartender cleans the bar," its subject called it. Atlas may have gotten the facts, but he spun them like a spitball pitcher. His Bellow is driven by his insecurities, compulsive in his need to make enemies, utterly selfish in his sexual and marital relationships and incapable of empathy or affection. Now we have raw data and can make some judgments for ourselves. On the letters in particular Atlas gets it precisely and characteristically wrong: "There was a certain impersonality in his boisterous epistolary style; no matter whom Bellow was writing to, his letters have a single tone. It was as if he was writing to just one person: himself."
