Him With His Foot in his Mouth, and Other Stories

Thomas Victor (author's photograph) New York, N.Y. Harper & Row, Publishers, 1984. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [10], 294 pages. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Minor fep discoloration (bookplate removed?) Signed by the author, Saul Bellow, on the front free endpaper. The book includes five stories: Him with His Foot in His Mouth; What Kind of Day did You Have?; Zetland: By a Character Witness; A Silver Dish; and Cousins. Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Bellow was widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors. Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself. This book is a series of histories of personality, of self-awakening that the author means to apply to us all. It also represents an important departure from the way stories are being written today in America, and its publication was therefore a major event, not only in the bountiful career of its author but also in American letters. The author won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature. Derived from a Kirkus review: Here, in five short works from the past decade, those seemingly contradictory roles—the darkly comic memoirist, the thorny essayist—are on more rewarding display, occasionally even blending in a richly charming way. One story, "A Silver Dish," is the memoirist/family side of Bellow, virtually undiluted: a 60-year-old South Chicago businessman reacts exuberantly to the death of his old father—in a memory-montage that showcases Bellow's boisterous, visceral, ironic warmth. In other pieces, chunks of zesty family/friend reminiscence and personal psychology are shaded with cultural musings or implications. The brief, fragmentary "Zetland: By a Character Witness" recalls the early life of a Chicago intellectual/bohemian, rebelling against his old-fashioned Jewish family; the subtext is a gently mordant view of all intellectual idealism. In "Cousins," the narrator is a law-expert/celebrity who uses his influence to get a light sentence for his gangster-cousin Tanky; here, the inability to "extricate myself from the ties of Jewish cousinhood" leads to memories of other cousins, to anthropological puzzles, to the conflict (within a family or within a single personality) between the "brainy" and the gutsy. And most effective of all in the weaving of earthy tale-spinning with meditation is the title story: narrator Harry, a 65-ish musicologist who's hiding out in Vancouver, is writing an apology to the long-ago victim of one of his many cruel wisecracks; he recounts the Balzac-like money/family mistakes which got him into his present mess; and, without strain or contrivance, this confession/self-analysis winds through such oddly relevant matters as Allen Ginsberg, the breeding of pit bulldogs, music vs. materialism, and Jewish assimilationism. The longest piece here—the novella-length "What Kind of Day Did You Have?"—is about an affair between a youngish divorcee and a famous old art critic becomes a frame for wrestlings with Marxism, celebrity, and intellectual hucksterism. Much of this welcome gathering presents the restless Bellow voice in full cry—taut, colorful, Talmudic, and large-hearted. Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: Short Stories, Nobel Prize, Cousins, Character Witness, Zetland, Silver Dish, Foot, Mouth, Day, Jewish Themes, Chicago, Gangster, Father, Relationships, Businessman, Musicologist, Thomas Victor

ISBN: 006015179X

[Book #81137]

Price: $350.00

See all items by