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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, until the last line,
By sertsa@msn.com (Omaha, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Actual (Hardcover)
While there is little disputing Saul Bellow's remarkable gifts at capturing reality and creating amazingly dense and believable characters, I find it a bit disheartening to believe that this truly gifted writer has grown trite in his old age. Without giving it away, the ending to this novella is simply devastating. All of the depth and beauty of this story is lost, for me, in one line. I find it equally dissappointing to discover the Saul Bellow suffers from, what I like to refer to as, the Fitzgerald syndrome. That is to say that the main characters in all his stories seem to be, roughly, the same person. Harry Tellman, in this story, seems to be Eugene Henderson (the Rain King) and Tommy Wilhelm ("Seize the Day") revisited. My recommendation, read the story, because it is quite good, just skip the last line.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An engaging book for the modern old-folk in us,
By
This review is from: The Actual (Hardcover)
A man moves back home to Chicago and into semi-retirement. We all have ghosts from our past, but Harry's ghosts, we come to understand, revolve around a lady he has known since junior high. As he reconciles himself to his past, and to these ghosts, Harry arrives gracefully, bravely, at the only logical conclusion there is for him. The journey there is pure poetry, and Bellow's work in the smaller novella form is a gift to us all. We need to cherish this book and learn its quiet, solid lessons. I read it twice straight through so I could savor its opening pages all the more.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Actually...not very good,
By JustinWrites "book-y" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Actual : A Novella (Paperback)
In this novella by Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, obsession and denial are key ideas that inhabit a story without much forward momentum or plot. Harry Trellman, the first-person narrator, is Jewish but looks Chinese - a detail of his appearance that is revisited again and again for no truly discernable reason other than to illustrate how much of an outsider Harry is to everyone around him, including himself. In fact, physical appearance takes up much of the non-dialogue description, with every one of the sparse number of characters identified repititiously by similar, if not exactly replicated, specifics of physiognomy. It happens so frequently, in a barely-hundred-page book, that it seems Bellow must be after some deeper meaning, must have some compelling reason to continuously describe his spare cast. Whatever the reason, I think I missed it, so instead of striking my reader's eye as profound, the technique became distracting, and finally irritating at a certain point.The book starts out strongly, introducing a fairly enigmatic character in Harry, and even pretends for a moment to have an intriguing story at the point the narrator meets billionaire Sigmund Adletsky for a wary, suspicion-bent tete-a-tete. But by page seventeen, Harry's association with the old moneybags is done and the focus shifts to Amy Wustrin, whose story carries practically the next third of the novel. She is an old flame of Harry's, a woman he has never forgotten and who he continues to pine over, to the point of creating daily conversations with her in his much-too-sharp, currently-unchallenged mind. The obsession slant is nice, but it never really develops further than fantasy and backstory, with a scene of confession that comes late and fails to deliver anything dramatic or climactic. In all, there is nothing very exciting or tantalizing in the book, despite attempts to delve into Philip Roth-style, s#xually-graphic-prose territory that ultimately comes off as feeble and unimaginative. This is the first book of Bellow's that I have read -- and I do plan to read more, despite my extremely lukewarm reaction to this short work -- and far be it from me to slam a multiple-award winner, but the book as a whole struck me as a dud. The shift from Harry's p.o.v. to a sloppily constructed, and ill-advised narrative avenue into Amy's mind was Bellow's first misstep, followed by his abandonment of Harry's direct relationship with Adletsky's "brain trust" and finally, the excessive, mind-numbing attention paid to Amy's ex-husband's burial arrangements. The book takes off like a well-crafted and perfectly aimed bullet, careens into blunt storytelling practices, then ricochets irresponsibly off poorly constructed firmaments, managing to completely shred the narrative terrain. The bullet does its damage, then loses momentum and wedges into an endless scene between Amy and Harry that curtails its projected force prematurely, all without ever managing to hit its intended target.
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