Posts

Showing posts from April, 2012

The Dean's December by Saul Bellow

“The Dean's December” is an absolute dynamite of a book by Saul Bellow with incredibly powerful dialogues, self-introspection and analysis. The Dean here is Albert Corde who is with a university in Chicago. Though he is not a hard-core academic, his publication in a magazine ruffled the feathers of several powerful people in Chicago. The book is to a large extent a flashback of his life as he is cooped up in Bucharest with nothing to do. Corde, who led the life of an executive – wasn't a college dean a kind of executive? - found himself six or seven thousand miles from his base, in Bucharest, in winter, shut up in an old fashioned apartment. Here everyone was kind – family and friends, warmhearted people – he liked them very much, to him they were “old Europe.” But they had their own intense business. This was no ordinary visit. His wife's mother was dying. Corde had come to give support. But there was little he could do for Minna. Language was a problem.