Recommended reads from the Jewish Book Council

Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt Saul Friedländer Yale University Press, 2013. 200 pp. US$25.00   Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence-in his many letters, in his extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating book investigates some of the sources of Kafka's personal anguish and its complex reflections in his imaginary world. In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafka's life (family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair) that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafka's dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafka's closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the author's novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafka's letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of "sainthood" frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality.

 

 

Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir Greg Bellow Bloomsbury USA, 2013. 240 pp. US$26.00 In this look inside the life of one of America's greatest 20th century writers, his father the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, Greg Bellow offers a view no one else has of a man known to be quick to anger, prone to argument, politically conservative, and palpably vulnerable to criticism. Yet there was a bond of tender emotion between Saul Bellow and Greg, his firstborn. In Saul Bellow's Heart, Greg Bellow gives voice to a side of Saul unknown to most others, the "Young Saul"--emotionally accessible, often soft, with a set of egalitarian social values and the ability to laugh at the world's folly and himself; rebellious, irreverent, and ambitious.Saul's accessibility and lightheartedness waned as he aged, and his social views hardened.This is the "Old Saul" most known to the world, and these changes taxed the relationship between Bellow and his son so sorely that Greg often worried whether it would survive. But theirs were differences of mind, not of heart.  Interweaving stories based on autobiographical references in Saul's books that only he might recognize, Greg Bellow reveals himself to be a fine prose stylist, never shying away from the truth. In Saul Bellow's Heart, he has written a memoir that gives equal weight to the rebellious, irreverent, and ambitious young writer who raised him, and the older literary giant, famous and fiercely private.