Product Description

Harry Trellman has loved Amy Wustrin for 40 years. In Amy, Harry sees what he calls his "actual". Harry has had his opportunities with Amy, but it is not until he finds himself at the cemetery with her for the exhumation and reburial of her husband that he feels free to speak out.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #747170 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Bellow touches every intellectual theme of our time.
In The Actual, Bellow touches on the major intellectual themes of the late twentieth century: materialism, capitalism, existentialism, nihilism, and postmodernism. Bellow once again, consciously or unconsciously, tells a great story placed in the philosophic world of actuality, where the individual, the particular, the personal triumphs over modernism's desire to subsume the part into the whole. Bellow uses the romantic genre to discuss these themes while flashing the caution light of pragmatism. A pragmatism that says existentialism can be nihilism, materialism creates numbness, captialism demands consumption, and love becomes a carnival unless anchored in the heart and objectified in an "other".

Bellow: In it for the money?
Nothing much happens. As you'd expect from Bellow, this purposeless aimless meandering is well observed and well written...

If your friend has a copy, borrow it and while away (half) an afternoon. But save your money for Bellow's better works.

A novella that passed me by
The synopsis above says it all. Many people consider Bellow to be one of the world's greatest novellists, but this one passed me by. I think I must have missed something. It's readable enough, but the meaning and purpose eluded me.