Saul Bellow´s Heart: A Son´s Memoir
Greg Bellow
'The greatest American author ever, in my view ... His sentences seem to weigh more than anyone else's. He is like a force of nature ... He breaks all the rules ... The people in Bellow's fiction are real people, yet the intensity of the gaze that he bathes them in, somehow through the particular, opens up into the universal' Martin Amis
'What Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive' Linda Grant
'The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists - William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne and Twain of the twentieth century' Philip Roth
'If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest, then Bellow's charge has been to restore the soul to American literature' Cynthia Ozick
Greg Bellow's bond with his famous-writer father was grounded in a tenderness, social optimism, and light-hearted humour rarely attributed to a man more often remembered for being quick to anger and schooled in rational argument. This intimate memoir gives voice both to the 'Young Saul' - the rebellious, irreverent and ambitious young writer, and dedicated father - and to the 'Old Saul', the writer known to the wider world, whose edges hardened as his social views turned pessimistic. The change taxed the relationship between Bellow and his son so sorely that Greg feared it might not survive. Saul Bellow's Heart is an affectionate, revealing portrait of a fiercely private man, a picture of a moving father-son relationship and a unique insight into one of America's greatest twentieth-century writers.
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About Greg Bellow
Reviews for Saul Bellow´s Heart: A Son´s Memoir
Joyce Carol Oates
A very personal, affectionate account of a giant of modern literature
Sunday Herald
Its family history can illuminate novels
Evening Standard
[A] restrained and moving memoir
David Baddiel, The Times
What distinguishes this ... is the ability to express both admiration and disapproval without becoming fully possessed by either ... The result, free from illusions and full of sweet writing, does greater justice to what his father left behind than any number of eulogies from his better-known literary sons
New Statesman
Saul Bellow was an incandescent being, and also incandescently difficult. Greg Bellow has written a wrenchingly candid account of being his son - a real son, not a literary son: there is no self-invention here, there is only self-discovery. I was deeply moved by Greg Bellow's memoir of his passage from pain to acceptance. Amid the brutalities of love he has found its blessing
Leon Wieseltier
Thoughtful and considered and fuelled by Greg Bellow’s hurt as much as his memories opens with a telling anecdote. It is discreetly operatic, an overture that helps makes sense of all that is to follow ... Perceptive, honest ... Impressively intelligent ... It is true to Bellow the writer and the man
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
His memoir contains some interesting nuggets
Sunday Times
Bellow’s characterisation of his father’s background is one of the most enjoyable strands of the book
Guardian
A better book than might have been expected. The eldest son of the Nobel Prize-winning Canadian-born US novelist, a retired psychiatrist, reveals some of the pride and all of the hurt that went with belonging to the first of his self-absorbed father’s several families
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Non-fiction Books of the Year