The death of the author

The American novelist Saul Bellow, a true heavyweight of twentieth century literature, died a week ago today, on 5th April, at the age of 89.

Only a couple of months ago I finished Bellow's 1953 classic 'The Adventures of Augie March', a fast-paced yarn which continually and unexpectedly changes direction and which exhibits an extraordinary authorial gift for creating memorable characters - even those on the periphery of the narrative, those who appear only fleetingly for a few pages, are expertly realised and rendered in a wealth of minute detail. The first half at least is a Dickensian portrait of the author's city - in Bellow's case, Chicago - and the reader is set squarely in the action, life rushing before your eyes. (My thoughts on the novel can be read in full here.)

By all means, take a look at the Guardian obituary. Read the reflections of Christopher Hitchens, who wrote an introduction to a recent Penguin Classics edition of '... Augie March', and Ian McEwan, who took a passage from 'Herzog' as the epigraph for his latest novel 'Saturday': "Saul Bellow started publishing in the 40s, and his work spreads across the century he helped to define. He also re-defined the novel, broadened it, liberated it, made it warm with human sense and wit and grand purpose ... We are saying farewell to a mind of unrivalled quality. He opened our universe a little more. We owe him everything".

But don't neglect He Who Cannot Be Named's personal tribute to his favourite author: "While making my way through the supposed pick of mid-twentieth century American fiction this month, I realised why I loved his novels so much compared to the stolid, depressing gruel that was so often served up again and again by a bunch of deadbeat beatniks or social realists with truncheons inserted high up their anuses. He's breathless, frantic, knowledgeable, fast; he's everything".