A la fin d'une journée de travail comme les autres, Rogin, un Américain moyen qui se rend chez sa fiancée pour dîner, est soudain plongé dans un état étrange : il voit avec horreur dans son voisin de métro, bourgeois rose et suffisant, l'image du fils qu'il aura, s'il se marie. Oubliera-t-il, en retrouvant l'élue de son coeur, cette révélation cruelle ? Sous leur apparente banalité, les personnages de Saul Bellow sont des héros du quotidien profondément attachants.

Un futur père et autres nouvelles

"Était-il intelligent ou idiot ? En ce moment, il ne pouvait guère prétendre être intelligent. Il avait peut-être eu un jour les armes pour le devenir, mais il avait plutôt choisi d'être un rêveur et les requins l'avaient nettoyé. Quoi d'autre ? Il perdait ses cheveux. Il lisait les publicités de Thomas, le spécialiste du cuir chevelu, avec le scepticisme de celui dont le désir de croire est profond, désespéré. Spécialiste du cuir chevelu! Oui, il avait été beau autrefois. Son visage portait les marques des corrections qu'il avait reçues. Mais il l'avait cherché, encourageant ainsi ses assaillants. Ce qui l'amena à réfléchir sur son personnage. Comment le qualifier? Eh bien, selon le vocabulaire actuel, il était narcissique ; il était masochiste ; il était anachronique."

Herzog

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Saul Bellow confined himself to shorter fictions. Not that this old master ever dabbled in minimalism: novellas such as The Actual and The Bellarosa Connection are bursting at the seams with wit, plot, and the intellectual equivalent of high fiber. Still, Bellow's readers wondered if he would ever pull another full-sized novel from his hat. With Ravelstein, the author has done just that--and he proves that even in his ninth decade, he can pin a character to the page more vividly, and more permanently, than just about anybody on the planet. Character is very much the issue in Ravelstein, whose eponymous subject is a thinly disguised version of Bellow's boon companion, the late Allan Bloom. Like Bloom, Abe Ravelstein has spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, fighting a rearguard action against the creeping boobism and vulgarity of American life. What's more, he's written a surprise bestseller (a ringer, of course, for The Closing of the American Mind), which has made him into a millionaire. And finally, he's dying--has died of AIDS, in fact, six years before the opening of the novel. What we're reading, then, is a faux memoir by his best friend and anointed Boswell, a Bellovian body-double named Chick:  Ravelstein was willing to lay it all out for me. Now why did he bother to tell me such things, this large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio? Because it very urgently needed to be said. He was HIV-positive, he was dying of complications from it. Weakened, he became the host of an endless list of infections. Still, he insisted on telling me over and over again what love was--the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures.  Ravelstein is a little thin in the plot department--or more accurately, it has an anti-plot, which consists of Chick's inability to write his memoir. But seldom has a case of writer's block been so supremely productive. The narrator dredges up anecdote after anecdote about his subject, assembling a composite portrait: "In approaching a man like Ravelstein, a piecemeal method is perhaps best." We see this very worldly philosopher teaching, kvetching, eating, drinking, and dying, the last in melancholic increments. His death, and Chick's own brush with what Henry James called "the distinguished thing," give much of the novel a kind of black-crepe coloration. But fortunately, Bellow shares Ravelstein's "Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands," and there can't be many eulogies as funny as this one.  As always, the author is lavish with physical detail, bringing not only his star but a large gallery of minor players to rude and resounding life ("Rahkmiel was a non-benevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed"). His sympathies are also stretched in some interesting directions by his homosexual protagonist. Bellow hasn't, to be sure, transformed himself into an affirmative-action novelist. But his famously capacious view of human nature has been enriched by this additional wrinkle: "In art you become familiar with due process. You can't simply write people off or send them to hell." A world-class portrait, a piercing intimation of mortality, Ravelstein is truly that other distinguished thing: a great novel. --James Marcus

Ravelstein

Maestro del romanzo americano del secondo dopoguerra, Premio Nobel per la letteratura, modello di stile e di pensiero per generazioni di scrittori e per tanti eredi più o meno dichiarati, da Philip Roth a Jonathan Franzen, Saul Bellow è forse anche l'ultimo, grande autore per il quale la crea­zione letteraria e la dimensione pubblica hanno rappresentato due entità imprescindibili e complementari. Così, all'inesauribile vena di narratore e commediografo si è sempre accompagnata una intensa produzione saggistica, ospitata da grandi testate e prestigiose riviste. Nei ventuno saggi qui raccolti, scritti nell'arco di un cinquantennio, Saul Bellow prende di petto i grandi temi della modernità e ci racconta il Secolo Americano con una lucidità di sguardo, un rigore, un'ironia e una passione che hanno pochi eguali nella letteratura del suo tempo, e non solo. Che si tratti di recensioni, ritratti di artisti e colleghi - da Hemingway a Roth, da Ellison a Salinger -, riflessioni sul rapporto tra scrittore e società, conferenze sull'identità ebraica, autoritratti carichi di ironia, la puntualità dell'analisi e l'eleganza dello stile si ripropongono ogni volta inalterate, e offrono, a poco più di dieci anni dalla morte, un'occasione preziosa per ripercorrere un'attività fertile, intensa e contraddittoria, che continua ancora oggi a produrre grandi frutti.

Troppe cose a cui pensare - Saggio 1951-2000

Les héros de Saül Bellow sont des êtres vaincus par la vie, à la recherche d'une vérité et, sous leurs dehors médiocres, profondément attachants. Il y a du Roquentin, le héros de La Nausée, dans ces petits-bourgeois américains si peu conformes à l'idée que l'on se fait de leurs compatriotes, et si proches de leurs frères d'Europe. C'est ce que l'on découvre dans ces nouvelles.

Au jour le jour

Ces trois nouvelles de Saul Bellow suggèrent toute la pathétique absurdité de la condition humaine, en dépeignant des personnages excentriques et marginaux. C'est Hattie, dont les mésaventures tiennent à une combinaison exceptionnelle d'ivrognerie pleurnicharde, d'attachement à sa «maison jaune» et d'incapacité à prendre la moindre décision. C'est un savant juif, qui, dans Le vieux système, décrit les savoureuses querelles de sa famille et cherche à en expliquer les causes par de simples réactions biochimiques. Enfin, c'est l'ancien diplomate des Mémoires de Mosby qui, étourdi par le soleil mexicain, trace le bilan de sa vie à travers ses engagements politiques, et se montre plus attentif au tourbillon vertigineux de ses souvenirs qu'aux propos de ses compagnes d'excursion. En spectateur lucide et désenchanté, Saul Bellow, avec un humour caustique et incisif, met en relief les aspects burlesques de l'existence. Elle demeure, à ses yeux, «la fable à jouer par tous» de Shakespeare.

Memoires de Mosby et autres nouvelles

In six darkly comic tales, Saul Bellow presents the human experience in all its preposterousness, poignancy, and pathos. The stories, which include "Leaving the Yellow House," "The Old System," "Looking for Mr. Green," "The Gonzaga Manuscripts," and "A Father-to-Be," reflect Bellow s ability to depict men and women confronting, in highly idiosyncratic ways, the enigmas and oddities of existence.

Mémoires de Mosby et autres nouvelles

La virtuosité de l'écrivain Saul Bellow, Prix Nobel de littérature en 1976, éclate dans ce court roman que l'auteur a souhaité voir publié directement en édition de poche, sans doute parce qu'il tenait à lui donner la plus large audience possible. On y retrouve une thématique récurrente dans son œuvre : quels rapports les juifs des États-Unis peuvent-ils (doivent-ils) entretenir avec la Shoah ? Bellow aborde ce sujet délicat à travers l'odyssée d'Harry Fonstein, cousin du narrateur et réfugié d'Europe centrale. Fonstein est sauvé des griffes nazies grâce à Billy Rose, un personnage haut en couleur, imprésario du Tout-Hollywood, qui a mis sur pied un réseau quelque peu abracadabrant (la " connexion " du titre). Lorsque Fonstein a passé la sélection à Ellis Island, on lui fait comprendre que Rose souhaite qu'il n'entreprenne rien pour le voir ni même le remercier ! Fonstein partira pour Cuba où il épousera une femme obèse et aura un fils génie des mathématiques, sans jamais réussir à oublier l'homme qui lui a sauvé la vie... Sur un sujet tragique et comique à la fois, Bellow a écrit un chef-d’œuvre d'humour caustique et de lucidité désenchantée.Réédition de la version de 2013

La Bellarosa Connection

Biographical noteSaul Bellow's dazzling career as a novelist has been marked with numerous literary prizes, including the 1976 Nobel Prize, and the Gold Medal for the Novel. His other books include The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, More Die of Heartbreak, Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories, Mr Sammler's Planet, Seize The Day and The Victim. Saul Bellow died in 2005. Main descriptionExpecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets, his musings on the past, his psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him, and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

Un futur père et autres nouvelles

Résumé

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