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Showing posts from March, 2013

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

What a masterpiece by Saul Bellow. Reminds me of the profound impact Dean's December had on me. This book examines many of the aspects of modern life - relationships, identity. And brought out by narrating the life of a man dying of a terminal illness by one of his closest friends. But luckily - or perhaps not too luckily - this is cornucopia-time, an era of abundance in all civilized nations. Never, on the material side, have huge populations been better protected from hunger and sickness. And this partial release from the struggle for survival makes people naive. By this I mean their wishful fantasies are unchecked. You begin, in accordance with an unformulated agreement, to accept the terms invariably falsified, on which others present themselves. There is a parallel between inner-city phenomena and the mental disarray of the U.S., the winner of the Cold War, the only superpower remaining. That's one way of boiling it down. He took you from an antiquity to the Enlightenment,