Malamud, Bernard Books

The Natural

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 100 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A hideously BAD book 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I love books. I collect, preserve, protect and treasure books. After reading this one, I immediately threw it in the trash.

This may well be the most badly written book in the history of the planet. Should there turn out to be alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe, and they've written books, this would also be far worse than anything they ever wrote.

The language, sentence structure, plot development (or extreme lack thereof), pacing and narrative could not possibly be worse. The 'author' should have been jailed for fraud and crimes against humanity.

order never arrived 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 9 people found this review helpful.

The book I ordered never arrived. I checked tracking and DHL passed it off to USPS who delivered it somewhere on 12/28/07. The end result is "Sorry Charlie"

Editorial Review:

Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of The Natural, makes the mistake of pronouncing aloud his dream: to be the best there ever was. Such hubris, of course, invites divine intervention, but the brilliance of Bernard Malamud's novel is the second chance it offers its hero, elevating him--and his story--into the realm of myth.

The Fixer: A Novel

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a surfeit of persecution 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

What a difficult book to read, and, I can only imagine, to write. We start with the injustice of poverty and lack of opportunity in the shtetl and move almost directly into a variety of unjust accusations leveled against Yakov Bok, who has become a scapegoat for all the imagined evil deeds of all the Jews in Russia.

Bok leaves the shtetl with hopes of a better life in Kiev. At first, things look up for him. Serendipity finds him a good job, and he is able to afford some books, and even put away some money. The catch is that he has to live in a district from which Jews are forbidden from living. All goes well, although Bok is not a popular figure, until a young boy is found murdered in a cave nearby.

The police show up at his door, arrest him, and summarily throw him in prison. Things go from bad to worse as he is forced to submit to increasingly cruel and dehumanizing treatment, not least of which is having to repeatedly listen to the many crimes he is supposed to have committed. But he steadfastly declares his innocence, and it is this that is supposed to make him one literature's greatest heroes. I'm not so sure about this, but certainly he is a strong character.

His strength almost makes this book harder to read, though. I found myself almost wishing he would confess, even though I knew he was innocent, just so the horribleness would end. But he and I both knew that confessing to a crime that he didn't commit wouldn't help at all, either his own dignity, or the plight of the Jews in Russia. So we endured together until the trial, to which Bok is on his way at the end of the book. At first I was disappointed that we don't fight out what happens at the trial, but then I realized that the result of the trial isn't the point of the book. It's the persecution and the strength that it reveals that really matter.

Editorial Review:

A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardThe Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

The Assistant: A Novel

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Assistant is spelled with the letters S.A.I.N.T. [T] 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

The word "Assistant" includes the letters S.A.I.N.T And, the person who is the assistant herein well reflects Christianity's concepts of sainthood or someone who is "born again."

A simple ground floor grocery man, Morris Bober, lives in a simple second story flat with his wife, Ida, and beautiful 23-year old daughter, Helen. Business is worsening, and while it falls, he meets Frank Alpine - an Italian goyim.

Frank works for peanuts for Morris and manages to raise the business from its ashes. Things begin to look good - but Ida's fears of a goyim living so close to her very Jewish daughter are well deserved.

Frank is not a saint by birth. Frank is an orphan who lived an abusive childhood, and he merely wants to be loved. He practically enslaves himself for Morris - partly to be loved and partly for penance. But, whatever his evil ways were, he is almost devoid of the same after meeting Morris. Malamud probably intentionally chose Frank to be Italian - and incorporates what the Roman Catholic Church associates as "being born again": baptism. Working in the grocery for Morris is Frank's baptism.

What makes this book so fascinating is the concept of rebirth after criminality. Really, criminality's born again Christianity became vogue a decade or decades after publication of this novel (1957) with the 1976 book written by Charles Colson of Watergate fame.

This insightful work on Christianity becomes even more fascinating when one considers the source - a young Jewish writer who grew up in a delicatessen with an impoverished father who is much like Morris. And, the greatest part of the rebirth arises in the end when Italian Frank - learning about Judaism - converts. He is a born again Jew.

The grocery is commonly referred to as a prison which confined Morris and later confines Frank. But, from that prison others benefit. And, most particularly we learn of the goodness of those imprisoned in poverty - something espoused by Saint Francis who is mentioned numerous times in this book.

This is a great story. This is a great book with many layers. And, this book could be assigned to religion students as well as the obvious English or literature students.

Editorial Review:

Introduction by Jonathan Rosen

Bernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who “wants better” for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store.

Like Malamud’s best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven vital for several generations of writers.

The Complete Stories

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Due to his formidable skill as a novelist--and to the fact that one of his novels, The Natural, had the good or bad luck to be repackaged as a large-screen vehicle for Robert Redford--Bernard Malamud hasn't always been recognized as short-story master of the first rank. As this collection demonstrates once and for all, he is. The anthology pieces, such as "The Magic Barrel," "The Silver Dish," or "Rembrandt's Hat," would be more than enough to place the author in the pantheon. But the 54 stories gathered here represent an astonishing abundance of narrative smarts and brilliant, Yiddish-accented prose. Malamud's heroes meet all manner of misfortune--there's something distinctly Job-like about even his most contented characters (a typical one has "a sort of indigenous sadness [that] hung on or around him")--yet the author suffuses their woes with gentle comedy. And while Jews occupy center stage in almost every tale, they are universal rather than parochial figures: as the beleaguered tailor in "Angel Levine" triumphantly informs his wife, "Believe me, there are Jews everywhere."

The Magic Barrel: Stories

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

50 years later, still relevant 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

These stories about New York, even when read fifty years later by someone like me from a totally different demographic, in Los Angeles, are still relevant. There are universal self-loathing themes for all immigrants, at all times. I wouldn't call it immigrant lit, but it's more like human diaspora lit, the transience of people, and how people make sense, however limited, of the world around them. Strongly recommend. Malamud is able to make writing about trash untrashy, but not in a falsely glorifying way, but in a humanizing way. These are real short stories, not failed novellas.

Editorial Review:

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri

Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggleing New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.

The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

A New Life

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"An overlooked masterpiece. It may still be undervalued as Malamud's funniest and most embracing novel." --Jonathan Lethem

In A New Life, Bernard Malamud--generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer--took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.

When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him." Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it.

A New Life--as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear--is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.

The Tenants

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Short, gritty novel about rival novelists(1 black, 1 white) 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Set in a decaying Manhattan tenement waiting to be condemned, "The Tenants" tells the story of a white novelist desperately trying to finish his novel before the wrecking ball comes down on him. Things get complicated when an aspiring African-American writer moves in and a rivalry begins.

Editorial Review:

With a new introduction by Aleksandar Hemon

In The Tenants (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building. Henry and Willie are artistic rivals and unwilling neighbors, and their uneasy peace is disturbed by the presence of Willie's white girlfriend Irene and the landlord Levenspiel's attempts to evict both men and demolish the building. This novel's conflict, current then, is perennial now; it reveals the slippery nature of the human condition, and the human capacity for violence and undoing.

God's Grace (Twentieth Century Classics)

Bernard Malamud

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A truly beautiful, exceptionally moving book 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 13 people found this review helpful.

There's a staggering range of emotion here: from apocalyptic doom, to fearful survival, to irascible and choleric comedy, to wrenching simplicity of striving towards good, and bringing about a cataclysm. Humanity or, better still, human history personified... God's Grace is like Swift's Gulliver's travels: simple enough to captivate a casual reader, deep enough to drown a philosopher. A moving masterpiece.

Human nature on trial 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Calvin Cohn, a Jewish paleontologist, son of a rabbi, is the only human survivor of a thermonuclear disaster. He has to content himself with the company of a few chimps and baboons. God is responsible for this second flood and He blames humans for destroying nature; Cohn has survived due to an error and he is let to live and make the best he can. In this scenario of desolation, Cohn becomes a god-like creature, he believes he can recreate the world, impose a new social order based on high moral and spiritual values, hard working, order, aiming to turn his fellow chimps into a better lot than humans. Amongst the chimps there is "Buz", a Christian who has been taught how to speak, sweet "Mary Madelyn" the only reproductive female of the group, "Esau" the nonconformist, a mysterious albino ape, and the cast-out gorilla "George" who is enchanted by the cantor's singing...

This a novel heavy in meanings, in the use of parables, fables and allegories. Following Malamud's pessimistic outlook on human nature, Cohn is just one more of his characters standing in a long line of losers, an individual who fears his fate and becomes the object of ridicule and pity. In his disguised reincarnation of Adam, Moses, and finally Christ, Cohn symbolizes the necessity of gaining moral wisdom through suffering. In a metaphorical language and fantastic-like "Chagall" prose, Malamud creates a thought-disturbing novel, an account of human nature fragile standing, and a celebration to its strenghts as well as a lament to its weaknesses.

Editorial Review:

God's Grace is an apocalyptic tale set in an imaginary time and place. It is an audacious story and probably the author's most controversial work.

The Natural

Bernard Malamud

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Editorial Review:

Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bernard Malamuds first novel is also the first--and still the best--novel ever written about baseball. His story of a superbly gifted natural at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era is invested with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work.

First published in 1952, this novel has since become an American classic. Five decades later, Alfred Kazins comment still holds true: Malamud has done something which--now that he has done it!--looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology.

Conversations with Bernard Malamud (Literary Conversations Series)

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Editorial Review:

Bernard Malamud gave his first interview in 1958, his last in 1986. During the intervening twenty-eight years he was formally interviewed at least forty times. This book collects twenty-eight of the best interviews, ranging from brief conversations with journalists to more extended and leisurely conversations with academics and writers.

Winner of two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, this universally praised author of The Magic Barrel, The Fixer, The Natural, and many stories that are acclaimed among the masterpieces of American fiction appears in these interviews quite appropriately as an artist devoted more to his work than to discussing it. This collection includes interviews in which Malamud gives a commentary on each of his novels and on many of his short stories. What emerges from these encounters with this great author is a sense of Malamud's deep, lifetime commitment to his art and to a seriousness of purpose.

Though there is very little domestic detail or literary gossip in Malamud's conversations, these interviews reveal the essence of a great writer that the multitudes of readers inspired by his books crave to find and retain.