Shorter notices
Pictures of Fidelman Bernard Malamud (Eyre and Spottiswoode 25s). Arthur Fidelman is a failed painter who goes to Italy and becomes, through six episodes, a failed everything—everything, that is, to which his creator's sexual imagination will stretch. Highly incredible as an artist, he is the latest version of the type of woeful masochist-hero most often found in Malamud's, as in much current American, fiction. A mediaeval flagellant might have achieved more with less effort, but then, he would not have been working for a market.
Bandits E. J. Hobsbawm (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 30s). Turpin, Robin Hood, Sal- vatore Giuliano, Jesse James, Pancho Villa, Ned Kelly and all those: a nice idea and nice pictures, but the text turns out no more than a nest of commonplaces. Straight stories of the individual bandits' lives would have been preferable to this hopelessly in- flated attempt to turn them into suitable subjects for sociology.
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