Saul Bellow slipped off my reading life some years ago, perhaps carried away by the same current that dulled my interest in Philip Roth. I thought it a passing disenchantment. It may have been something else.
Reading Gabriel Josipovici’s essay on Bellow in The Lessons of Modernism recalled what had first drawn me in: a voice that combined “the utmost formality with the utmost desperation.”
“Bellow,” Josipovici writes, “is too important a writer to have this done to him”, meaning the easy placement into literary categories, the smoothing-over of that desperate, exacting voice.
All Bellow’s novels, Josipovici suggests, could be called Dangling Man.
It is with Dangling Man that I will return to him. No project, no list. Only a way of listening again, without the noise of admiration or disenchantment.
>I look forward to your Bellow series; this will be exciting. I've never read him even though I'm almost sure to like him. Saving it, I guess.
>nicole – I read Herzog and the Adventures of Augie March several years ago. I seem to have a pattern of reading 2 or 3 works by a writer, then getting distracted, even if I have been moved by what I've read.Your reading of Melville is inspiring. I plan to structure my reading more along those lines, reading deeply rather than widely.