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valerica167's review against another edition
2.0
Cu chiu, cu vai, am terminat-o. Ce am înțeles din ea nici eu nu știu.
bibliomaniac2021's review against another edition
funny
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
habeasopus's review
3.0
Deep, insightful, but just bleak enough not to be enjoyable. I remember as a child the horror stories about life behind the iron curtain, and here it all is again. The pettiness, the listlessness, and the constant fear of the surveillance state, all taken as banal givens by the subject and primary narrator of this novel.
The intense loneliness and longing for human connection just ooze out of every page of this book. It seems that academic and professional achievement do nothing to satisfy in this regard, and home is just as bad as foreign soil. Capitalism is just as morally bankrupt as communism, so where does that leave us?
Bellow doesn’t offer a lot of hope, but he doesn’t offer it pretty brilliantly.
The intense loneliness and longing for human connection just ooze out of every page of this book. It seems that academic and professional achievement do nothing to satisfy in this regard, and home is just as bad as foreign soil. Capitalism is just as morally bankrupt as communism, so where does that leave us?
Bellow doesn’t offer a lot of hope, but he doesn’t offer it pretty brilliantly.
tudorcosma's review against another edition
dark
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
spyralnode's review against another edition
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
A plethora of disconnected, flat characters and a mishmash of plot elements made this book a pain to read. I didn't have a good time.
We follow the Dean, who is travelling from Chicago, US, to Bucharest, Romania, to support his wife as her mother is living through her last days. At the same time, another plot line follows the death of one of the Dean's students, the factors that may have contributed to it, and who might have been at fault.
The multiple plotlines were very confusing here, the chronology would intersect to the point that it wasn't clear what is a memory and what is happening at the same time. It wasn't quite as dreamy or eerie that I'd describe it as intentionally messing with the reader, more unstructured and unplanned. There were also so many characters that it was difficult to follow who's who, they weren't given sufficient focus, and the only thing that registered with me were their names.
The geographical distribution, paired with the 80s, made for a huge possibility for comparing and contrasting Communist Romania with capitalist US. Unfortunately the ideas, just as the characters, remained superficial. Having read Petru Popescu for example would deliver much more sensitively and broadly on the Romanian experience during those times, from the political setup to life for the everyday person. Bellow, in turn, focused on corruption and hierarchy, but failed to deliver a complete picture and only scraped the surface. From the names being written incorrectly (such as 'Ioanna' instead of 'Ioana' which you can guess particularly irked me), to what seemed like unfulfilled research, it disappointed severely.
If you'd like to understand more about the recent history of Romania - Mihail Sebastian is fantastic for the beginning of the 20th century, and Petru Popescu for time during Communism.
We follow the Dean, who is travelling from Chicago, US, to Bucharest, Romania, to support his wife as her mother is living through her last days. At the same time, another plot line follows the death of one of the Dean's students, the factors that may have contributed to it, and who might have been at fault.
The multiple plotlines were very confusing here, the chronology would intersect to the point that it wasn't clear what is a memory and what is happening at the same time. It wasn't quite as dreamy or eerie that I'd describe it as intentionally messing with the reader, more unstructured and unplanned. There were also so many characters that it was difficult to follow who's who, they weren't given sufficient focus, and the only thing that registered with me were their names.
The geographical distribution, paired with the 80s, made for a huge possibility for comparing and contrasting Communist Romania with capitalist US. Unfortunately the ideas, just as the characters, remained superficial. Having read Petru Popescu for example would deliver much more sensitively and broadly on the Romanian experience during those times, from the political setup to life for the everyday person. Bellow, in turn, focused on corruption and hierarchy, but failed to deliver a complete picture and only scraped the surface. From the names being written incorrectly (such as 'Ioanna' instead of 'Ioana' which you can guess particularly irked me), to what seemed like unfulfilled research, it disappointed severely.
If you'd like to understand more about the recent history of Romania - Mihail Sebastian is fantastic for the beginning of the 20th century, and Petru Popescu for time during Communism.
janson's review against another edition
3.0
A bit too Camus-ish for me, meditative for meditation’s sake and I’d guess Bellow is trying too hard post Nobel.
jonathantoews19's review against another edition
2.0
Didn't even finish it. It's funny -- my last Bellow read was "Ravelstein," and one of the most glaring issues I took with that book was how little it dealt with issues of class/race, given how much the neighborhood of Hyde Park played a role in the narrative. "The Dean's December" does tackle these subjects, but in such a shitty way that I couldn't get swept up in the prose the way I usually do with Bellow novels. His politics are fucked.