Reviews for The Dean's December

The average rating for The Dean's December based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-01 00:00:00 Karen Burns Do you remember the nightmares that poured out of the hearts of the people of Rumania after the brief glory of glasnost? We shouldn't soon forget them! And Saul Bellow here just gives us the barest, but scariest, outline of it, long before the Eastern Bloc had crumbled to dust... Albert Corde, university dean, is being dragged frustratingly through the penetrating deep-freeze of Communist Rumanian bureaucracy. Its unearthly silences, half-glimpsed sense of dread, and interminable red tape will only end - by sending him smack dab back into a sizzling American academic frying pan, spitting racial hatred and angst. There's no rest for the truly Human being! And Albert and his wife Minna get no relief in this very warm and longing human heart of a book, beating in strong protest against all the violent inhumanity of this world. Rumania is a wasteland of suppressed despair for the couple. A despair that, following the downfall of its atrociously malevolent dictator would erupt in a screaming worldwide cry of "J'accuse!" The faceless face of deceit is all the old steel-toed, hurry-up-and-wait communist watchdogs show of themselves. They're like a sinister glacial iceberg of which the Worst part by far was suppressed from public view, glowering radioactively far beneath the placid, impassive surface. And the Cordes wander, dazed, from waiting in grotesque and idle angst in the Balkans to nurturing their humane and helpless liberalism back in an in-your-face and grotesquely polarized America. So which is worse, Bellow seems to ask? The mutually infuriated polar alienation of democracy, or the velvet glove on an iron communist fist, ready to smash the unwary into dust motes? Violence, in either case, breeds violence. There is no alternative, Bellow says, but a consciously compassionate and caring sense of crucified humanity. For Saul Bellow wore his heart on his sleeve throughout a long and honoured career! And it's hard to believe a picaresque rogue like Augie March could have sprung full-grown from the side of this Olympian writer, like Hera from Zeus, only to be followed by the likes of mad, mad Moses Herzog, coolly rational but maladjusted old Artur Sammler and the ruminative but forever-checkmated Albert Corde! Where on earth did Bellow FIND all these people? My guess is that his sparkling human imagination pieced them together - bit by bit - from memories of faces gleaned in the emotional and character-breeding hothouses of Chicago, and earlier, the Lachine, Québec of his boyhood. A Coleridgean type of recollection in solitude must have done the rest of the stitching that produced his endless tapestries of stereotype-bursting, endlessly variegated personality! You know, growing up back in the early part of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow didn't think displaying his warm humanity was a crime. And by the END of that bloody century - the bloodiest since the horrible 16th century - he believed that it was our ONLY hope as a species. And you know, he was right... For the day we give up being human we will surely reap the Whirlwind!

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-08 00:00:00 Sarah Maxwell Astonishing... by FAR Bellow's most accomplished book. Tender, intelligent, passionate, death-haunted...of course, it is Bellow! -- perfectly constructed, far richer in both plot and character than one usually expects from Bellow... coherent...even the intellectual moments are so much more throughly digested... and the poetics of the final movement.... just a masterpiece.