Saul Bellow - high-minded joker?

[John Carvill]

Read a couple of Bellow's before he died, with mixed results.  All the
obits and articles published since his death have sparked my interest
again. What's the consensus on the p-list re. Bellow?

Has this been posted already?:


http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1455215,00.html

"And he was always concerned with the modern self, the American self. It
is usual to give writers like DeLillo and Pynchon credit for what seems
the essentially postmodern insight that we are colonised, mediated, and
finally oppressed by modern forms of knowledge - by television, film,
advertising, the newspapers - and that this mediation has the effect of
making our own mental activity somewhat self-conscious. But Bellow
believed that public life drives out private life, and that this
pressure on the private was a unique contemporary invention."

















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