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The Actual

by Saul Bellow

ISBN: 0670860751
ISBN-13: 9780670860753
Format: Hardcover

Summary

In this first major work in 10 years from Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, Harry Trellman, the narrator, is an elderly Chicagoan who becomes the uneasy friend of Sigmund Adletsky, an even older millionaire. Adletsky shows Trellman how he must pick up his life with Amy Wustrin, a high school sweetheart he has never forgotten. As the story reaches its intensely poignant climax, we find Trellman in a cemetery in the middle of a Chicago snowstorm, helping Amy to re-bury her ex-husband, and finding a little self-redemption in the bargain. THE ACTUAL (1997), at 112 pages, is actually a novella. And, as in so many of Bellow's later novels, it includes an intense awareness of the approach of death.

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Media Reviews

"Bellow is a conservative in the best sense: he calls his readers constantly back to what they can't help but believe, at the same time insisting, as Trellman puts it, on a common recognition 'that the powers of our human genius are present where one least expects them.'"

   -- Publishers Weekly

"There is an elegaic tone to his tale that continually reminds the reader that this is a late work, completed deep into the author's career. The language, while still distinctively Bellovian, is somewhat more subdued than in the past, though Harry's own awareness of mortality, his awareness that the clock is ticking, lends his story an urgency all its own. He seems aware, as Amy says of another character, that he is entering his 'final years,' as biographers call it-'a period of "mature" acceptance, reconciliation, openhandedness, general amnesty'."    -- Michiko Kakutani

   -- New York Times

"[A] witty portrayal of late-life intrigue, politicking, and passion....The writing is sharp, and we're absorbed by the personalities of several vividly sketched characters, especially Harry, one of Bellow's most engaging everymen."

   -- Kirkus

"A disconcertingly debonair look at some deeply shallow people."    -- Merle Rubin

   -- Wall Street Journal

"'The Actual' is not a young man's piece of fiction, and our expectations for it must be adjusted accordingly. It is instead something far more rare: the work of a great master still locked in unequal combat with Eros and Time."    -- Louis Begley

   -- New York Times Book Review

"There are brilliant visual effects in 'The Actual', but not much of a plot."    -- Alfred Kazin

   -- New York Review of Books

"A complex tale, ranging emotional urgencies against material powers in present-day Chicago, 'The Actual' is even more scrupulously written than its immediate predecessors."    -- Martin Amis

   -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published date: 1997
Size: 5.5 x 8.75 inches
Weight: 0.55 pounds
Pages: 103

Publisher's Notes

Harry Trellman doesn't belong. Not in the Chicago orphanage where he is sent by his mother, not in high school (too brainy), not even on the streets. Human attachments? Yes, he has them, but they are like everything else in his life, singular and irregular. People who know him say that he "drowns his feelings in his face", and that he has a Mongolian "masked look". But though Harry stands apart, he has always been a most keen observer, listener, recorder and interpreter, and none of this is lost on the Chicago billionaire, Sigmund Adletsky, who takes Harry into his "brain trust". He retains Harry to advise him. They discuss ordinary things - they gossip together. Old Adletsky has set feelings aside while he amassed his vast fortune. The old man is so apt that he divines the secrets behind Harry's mask, and brings him together with the one person Harry has loved dumbly for forty years. Amy Wustrin has not exactly stood apart from the sexual revolution while waiting for Harry to come wooing. Far from remaining the static object of his fantasy, she has moved about in the real world, from one marriage to another, from rich to broke, from hot high-school girl to correct matron. Still, 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.

Other Editions

Hardcover - Penguin USA (1997) - from $1.00
Paperback - Penguin USA (1998) - from $1.00

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The Actual (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

Saul Bellow

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