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The Dean’s December
- Author
- Saul Bellow
- Narrator
- Sean Runnette
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 5 May 2015
- Run Time
- 13 hours 5 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Albert Corde is a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago university. He and his wife, Minna, travel to Bucharest, Romania, where Minna's mother has suffered a stroke and is lying semiconscious in the local state hospital. As Corde tries to adapt to life in his mother-in-law's small apartment and cope with her relations and friends, news filters through to him of problems he left behind in Chicago: one of his students has been murdered, and a series of articles he is writing offends powerful and influential Chicagoans he had thought of as friends. Gradually it becomes clear that Corde's trip abroad is more than a brief interlude in a calm and orderly life, and that nothing will ever be the same again. Witty and erudite, The Dean's December will be a delight to fans of Saul Bellow.
Critics Review
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“Rich yet dry and static, Bellow’s somber new book (his first as Nobel laureate) is often more essay than novel: a wintery meditation on death—a death in the family, the death of American cities, the death of the planet—as filtered through the mind of Albert Corde…Certainly displays all [Bellow’s] paragraph-by-paragraph greatness—the gravely exuberant, not-a-word-wasted style; the wide-ranging powers of observation; the Talmudically restless intelligence. And every page of it commands the attention.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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“[Bellow’s] most spirited resistance to the forces of our time.”
Malcolm Bradbury, author of The History Man
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“The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.”
Philip Roth, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, praise for the author
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“Sharp, erudite, beautifully measured…[Bellow] is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western world.”
Times (London), praise for the author
User Reviews
No reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Saul Bellow
- Narrator
- Sean Runnette
- Duration
- 13 hours 5 minutes
- Release Date
- 5 May 2015
- ISBN
- 9781504607544
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Classic fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Historical fiction
Synopsis
Albert Corde is a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago university. He and his wife, Minna, travel to Bucharest, Romania, where Minna's mother has suffered a stroke and is lying semiconscious in the local state hospital. As Corde tries to adapt to life in his mother-in-law's small apartment and cope with her relations and friends, news filters through to him of problems he left behind in Chicago: one of his students has been murdered, and a series of articles he is writing offends powerful and influential Chicagoans he had thought of as friends. Gradually it becomes clear that Corde's trip abroad is more than a brief interlude in a calm and orderly life, and that nothing will ever be the same again. Witty and erudite, The Dean's December will be a delight to fans of Saul Bellow.
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