Customer Reviews

Mosby's Memoirs

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Of these six short stories - written between 1951 and 1968 - it is easy to find things to praise, difficult to find things to criticise. They are, all of them, dense, substantial, well-crafted, (highly?) intellectual, richly satisfying. Why should one want to say anything against them? Well: 'satisfying' - more, perhaps, in the manner of a cross-country run than a raspberry souffle. 'Intellectual': perhaps too intellectual to avoid the charge of monotonousness. All Bellow's characters are assiduously introspective and intensely aware. In consequence, Bellow has perfected a prose style based upon the agglomeration of clauses rather than the sequencing of fully-formed sentences; a type of stream-of-consciousness. This can be as tiring as it is effective. More than this, Bellow's characters are always radically isolated people. They think, think, think and hardly do any interacting with other people (although they often think about doing so). One never hesitates to say that Bellow, in these stories, is telling us the truth about man; one does hesitate to say that he entertains us with that truth.

Of the six stories in this collection only one moves deeply and is truly memorable, " The Old System". I consider this to be one of Bellow's finest works and a true masterpiece. It is also I think his most deeply Jewish work , and one which he shows an understanding of American worlds and times in his own powerful distinctive idiomatically rich and specially perceptive way. Above all he creates the picture of a family of its relations and life, tells the story of an estranged brother and sister and their death- bed reconciliation with deep deep feeling.

This is a thin book with six stories. If these stories can be said to have a common thread, it is the people who fail to ever make a real connection. The characters in the stories are aimless, seized by momentary ideas which fill the need for purpose and troubled by other people.

All of the stories were well written, but two for me really stood out. The first was "Leaving the Yellow House". This tells the story of a woman who has never succeeded at anything except that she managed to come to own this house. Faced with increasing infirmity, she can no longer care for herself but cannot bring herself to turn her back on her one success.

The second stand-out was "The Gonzaga Manuscripts", a story about a feckless young man (Feiler) who tries to recover a set of lost poems from 1950s Spain. He wants to find purpose in poetry, but his researches keep bringing him back to politics.

These stories are truthfully not among the best work of Bellow. However, you need to bear in mind that given how wonderful his writing generally is, they are still more than worth the time to read.