Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #360631 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Back Cover
THE DEAN'S DECEMBER
by Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1976
The Vesuvian eloquence of Saul Bellow is one of the glories of modern literature.
-Jonathan Raban Sunday Times

A novel that will raise its readers to fever pitch of the kind of passionate excitement and involvement that only real art can inspire.
-Salman Rushdie New Statesman

A wittily meditative book, an intensely serious enterprise from a writer we can see we are right to acknowledge as of world class.
-Malcolm Bradbury Books and Bookmen

A brilliant piece of work...different in many ways from much of his earlier work, it is one of his best.
-David Holloway Sunday Telegraph

There is in The Dean's December enough thought and matter for ten other contemporary novels.
-Melvyn Bragg Punch

A serious, sane, thought-provoking novel of a kind rare these days, a worthy addition to the canon of a writer of genius.
-Paul Bailey Standard

In Saul Bellow the American novelist has come of age.
-Geoffrey Moore Financial Times

An overall mastery of form...and at times a sublime intensity.
-Lewis Jones Spectator

Bellow has at last created a plausible and likeable woman and has done so with wonderful economy.
-Gabriel Josipovici Times Literary Supplement

The shape of Saul Bellow's new novel is satisfyingly simple.
-Ian McEwan Observer

Near the end of Saul Bellow's admirable new novel, the dean is accused of "abyssifying and catastrophising".
-Thomas Hinde Sunday Telegraph

By any standards, a marvellous novel, rich, provocative, illuminating...buy it and read it: more than once.
-Alan Massie Scotsman

About the Author
Saul Bellow was born in Canada but brought to Chicago at the age of nine and educated there. He attended the Universities of Chicago, Northwestern and Wisconsin as well as fitting in a wartime stint in the Merchant Marine.
His first novel - Dangling Man - was published when he was in his twenties. Later novels, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December and Him With His Foot In His Mouth And Other Stories have brought him innumerable literary grants, awards, prizes, scholarships, fellowships and honours not only in his own country but internationally as well. He is probably the only man to have received an Honorary Degree from both Harvard and Yale in the same year. He has also written plays, short stories, articles for learned journals, been a war correspondent in Israel and held positions in a number of universities in the United States and elsewhere. He speaks four or five languages and has travelled extensively.
In 1976 Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1984 President Mitterand made him a commander of the Legion of Honour.

Customer Reviews

A cold December
The Dean's December revolves an architypal Bellow protagonist; a high-brow, an academic, whose philosphical preoccupations both blind him to the truth and form the observational perspective of the novel. Lambasted for a magazine article written on urban degradation and crime in his native Chicago, Albert Corde finds diversion but not solace in the old Soviet regime of Romania where he and his wife are attending to his dying mother-in-law. The book swings between grief and the austerity of communist Bucharest in the present, and the situation simmering back in Chicago, which finds the narrator having to justify a highly literary analysis of Chicago that attempts to 'recover the world that is buried under the debris of false decription or nonexperience'. A former journalist of repute who is accused of giving up his profession to accept a University tenure, he is also implicated in the trial and conviction of a young black criminal, in which his motives and values are put under scrutiny.

Bellow is a master of style, whether it is evoking the bleak tenements and cast-iron bureaucracy or Bucharest or the rotting slums of Chicago. However, The Dean's December typifies many of the author's often-criticised characteristics. Albert Corde is less of a tangible human being than a manifestation of the author's philosophical preoccupations. A kind of giant question mark mired in extensive self-evaluation. Arguably this is Bellow's intention: a man capable of enormous philosophical objectivity but at the same time unable to control events happening around him. But Corde is a hard man to empathise with; coldly analytical, an unsympathetic portrayal. Because we are so closely bound to his perspective, it is hard to feel moved by the death of Valeria, his mother-in-law, in the principal story. Especially since most of the female characters seem so remote, drawn up with cold artifice.

Bellow is more engaging when dealing with the subtle tensions and power play between men. Corde is a man of the mind and not confident physically. There are references to his awkward legs and the brutish presence of his nemesis, the University provost, whose body he compares to that of a linebacker. Corde rankles with indignation at the memory of his bawdy brother-in-law calling him the 'dud dean' and an accident when taking his nephew fishing in which he felt foolish and fragile. Fascinating too are the treachery and verbal sparring with his childhood friend Dewey Spangler and the argument with his nephew, now a student radical. It is the passages about Bucharest that dissapointed, with much devoted to the death of a woman who we have little knowledge of. And because the loss and grief are weighed up so analytically, it is hard to engage with it with real feeling. Nevertheless there is much to enjoy, especially for fans of Bellow.

For those lovers of Saul Bellow
Although Dean's December cannot compete with Bellow's masterpiece, Herzog, it will be appreciated by his fans nonetheless. Bellow's work is simply mezmerizing in its descriptions, despite a the characters tendency to lose himself in philosphical thought. What the fan will learn from this book is that excessive flight into philosophy can blind the deep thinker from the truths of reality.