Customer Reviews

The Bellarosa Connection

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For most of this novella, Bellow tells a story that appears to be going nowhere. The narrator, the child of Jewish immigrants who has become ionospherically wealthy selling memory-enhancement techniques, recalls two friends he last saw thirty years ago.

The narrator begins to tell the tale of Harry Fonstein, a Jew smuggled out of Fascist Italy by an underground organization financed by the Broadway producer Billy Rose. Rose refuses to hear Fonstein's thanks, and so his life is overshadowed by a cloud of gratitude he is not allowed to express. Until his wife Sorella decides to avenge Rose's treatment of her husband...

and then the narrator stops telling his story, because he hadn't seen the Fonsteins since. The final third of the novella raises difficult questions about memory and the duty to remember. Has the narrator's eidetic memory replaced actual relationship with the people he remembers? Is that memory even accurate? Has he in fact, failed to fulfill the whole point of memory, despite near-perfect recall of the actual facts?

This story lulls you in with an almost colloquial style and simple plot, and then ends that plot to force you to confront how easy it is to fail duties to friends and cultural identity. After its unsophisticated beginning, the final revelation is very disconcerting.