Jan 1, 2010
*New York City. Like many of Bellow’s protagonists, Sammler functions chiefly as an eye and a brain, and audiences see New York through his eyes. The city is, to use a phrase of Saul Bellow’s that he got from Wyndham Lewis, a “moronic inferno,” a metropolis ridden with detritus, broken objects and wrecked people, reduced to the level of a Third World capital. Its parks are full of dog excrement, and their flowers are soiled with pollution almost immediately after blooming. The X’s painted on the windowpanes of a building marked for demolition loom in...
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