The Dean’s December
- Author Saul Bellow
- Narrator Sean Runnette
- Publisher Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date 5 May 2015
- Run Time 13 hours and 5 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Classic fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Historical fiction.
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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
u201cRich yet dry and static, Bellowu2019s somber new book (his first as Nobel nlaureate) is often more essay than novel: a wintery meditation on ndeathu2014a death in the family, the death of American cities, the death ofn the planetu2014as filtered through the mind of Albert Cordeu2026Certainly displays all [Bellowu2019s] paragraph-by-paragraph greatnessu2014the gravely exuberant, nnot-a-word-wasted style; the wide-ranging powers of observation; the nTalmudically restless intelligence. And every page of it commands the nattention.u201d
u201c[Bellowu2019s] most spirited resistance to the forces of our time.u201d
u201cThe backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelistsu2014William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.u201d
u201cSharp, erudite, beautifully measuredu2026[Bellow] is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western world.u201d
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