Dubin's Lives is such a subtle, compassionate and wry masterpiece of literary work. A very rich and highly-readable novel that tells an unlikely, but moving tale of love and marriage. I totally enjoyed this. Bernard Malamud was one hell of a writer!

His style is something amazing. To have it bouncing around in my head was a pleasure. This might have received 5 stars if I weren't so sick of reading accounts of the male midlife crisis.

A biographer struggles with work, life and family.

I found this a very interesting and thought provoking (probably because of my age and that I write) - but it could have been shorter (there were a lot of odd / wordy sections). The affairs seemed realistic, but I kept feeling they sounded like wishful thinking by a middle aged author.

Overall an enjoyable, but long read, taking around eight hours to complete.

At tmes there is almost a sensory pleasure to be derived from Malamud's skill in style, detail and story line. In the end, though, it is a well-told story of a selfish, nearly solipsistic life, in a mode very specific (I think) to late-middle-aged males. Every decision Dubin makes s for himself, in his own interests, and as the novel goes on, he even turns the decisions and choices of others into nothing more than a means of justifying his own choices and decisions.

The book offers much to think about in terms of personal relationshops, Dubin with his wife, his mistress, his casual flings, his daughter and step-son, his friends. I often found myself thinking, "Why is he acting this way at this particular time?" One eventually figures out what a life would look like when it has become unmoored from any consideration outside of itself.

Long ago, a creative writing teacher recommended this book to me. I've finally read it, and in turn I highly recommend it. Malamud shows a mastery of prose and an immense talent for description. His passages describing the changing seasons are incredible!

At first, the author's tendency to bend the "laws" of punctuation and grammar threw me a little. The first twenty pages didn't hold my interest, but after that I adjusted to his style and grew to appreciate it. It was worth persevering.

The book tells a story that is at once absorbing, sensual, frustrating and heartbreaking. Whatever the author's intentions, I found the title character to be rather less than admirable -- and normally a book with an unlikeable protagonist would be hard-pressed to keep my interest. This one did earn my interest, and even gained moments of insight and sympathy that brought me inside the flaws of the main character and allowed me to understand him, even if I never exactly liked the man.

I recommend this book for its deep exploration of a flawed man as he grapples with love, aging, and temptation. Well done.

Dubin’s Lives by Bernard Malamud
Wonderful, 10 out of 10

After The Assistant and The Fixer this is the third book by Barnard Malamud that I enjoy so much that I took time finishing it...
As opposed to the first two masterpieces, where the characters had little in common with me, in Dubin’s Lives I identify with the main character.
We have about the same age, and many of the issues that disturb him have been present in my life, especially recently.
That does not mean that I agree or understand the important decisions that Dubin takes and the choices he makes...
The main aspect that is hard to comprehend has to do with his marriage and the affair that he has with Fanny.
The marriage has a weird debut, with Kitty and Dubin deciding that they should love each other and marry.
-tHow do you do that?
-tWell, this is somehow another shared experience…
To some extent, I understand this moment, for I have also said to myself that I need to settle down and give up the tomcat life.
Then there are also times when I wonder if my spouse likes me or she thinks that I am a no good selfish male pig…
Which I may be, I have not determined yet.
Kitty is very disappointed with her husband and this is again a familiar feeling, for I had my own occasions to depress my wife.
That being said, the people in the novel are fictitious and their complications do not find their way here, in this house.
For instance, Fanny is off to Venice with the philandering fifty five year old and things fall apart after a promising debut.
When Dubin returns to the hotel room, Fanny is having sex with the gondolier and this does not stop here.
However awkward and surreal, this casual sex is followed by yet another intimate relationship with the captain of a small boat.
The captain of the small boat that takes tourists to the airport has enough appeal to get Fanny to bed and this is already promiscuous.
At least from where I see it, but that is probably a different background an education and a culture that permits affairs for the macho male- only.
I did not like these two escapades even if I still felt that Dubin should have made a clean break with his spouse and settle with the (much) younger woman.
For a long time, the writer and his wife seem to do not much else but fight each other and make one another miserable.
They seemed to have good moments but the time spent with Fanny appeared to be sensational, without the negativity of the troubled marriage.
Dubin comes to the point where he offers very little to his wife who is unhappy, enters therapy and has an affair of her own.
-tWhy go on like this?
-tOne personal answer is that marriages have ups and downs and it is worth fighting for a long relationship
As for other answers, regarding marriage- the bible is written by John Gottman, the Supreme Guru who predicts with 90% accuracy which marriages will work, after only some minutes of listening the conversations- his amazing book- 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work
As for Dubin’s Lives –it is an amazing book

When I looked at the back of the book to see what it was about I was dismayed. I wanted to read Malamud (I heard about him from Dorothy on the Golden Girls) but his titles in the Manila bookshop I was in were limited. Writing about having affairs with younger women seemed to be an obsession with the patriarchal writers of Malamud's time and didn't think I could find anything new from it. Still having lingered in the bookshop for too long I just went for it, and I was pretty happy about doing that. Immediately I was struck with the beauty of the writing. Though the descriptive writing is accurate and often original, what I like best is the dialogue. Dubin often speaks so thoughtfully about his biographical subjects; Fanny's attraction to him becomes almost believable when you hear the wisdom in his words. I felt the end a bit too wish fulfilling but I had learned to love the characters, especially Fanny, who comes across as absolutely well rounded and shimmering.

E' incredibile come questo autore ne "Il Commesso" abbia detto tantissimo con poche parole e qui invece con tantissime parole non dice nulla. Noioso fino all'inverosimile.
Sig. Dubin prendi le tue vite e va a quel paese!

A biographer friend of mine recommended this novel because the main character is a biographer. I had to get it from Interlibrary loan because our county library did not own a copy, which tells you something I suppose. But I'd never read Malamud except for a few short stories in anthologies. I was very disappointed. I was expecting more, I guess, but this is really another self-involved white male midlife crisis story from the era when Alice Adams, Raymond Carver, and a lot of the writers I admire were fighting to get published. Leaves me wondering (again) how Malamud, Roth, Updike, Bellow et al managed to be kings of the literary mountain for so long. William Dubin in this novel does reflect on the relationship of being a biographer to his own life but not with much insight. His crisis occurs when he's writing a biography of D. H. Lawrence. Instead of thinking about his own life and what to do about it, he mistreats his wife, practically ignores his children, and has an affair with a 23-year-old housekeeper. It feels more like a story from the Fifties than the Seventies.

labor, love, long, least, last ...

a labor of love to read the longest and least (in my opinion) of Malamud's works, the last of his books on my shelf to be read ... I say labor of love because Malamud is one of my favorite writers but this book is a long and laborious reading experience ... this will be the only book by Malamud that I don't give 5 stars to ... I have had similar experiences with other favorite writers that I have "finished up" this year ... the last novel that I had to read by Ursula K. Le Guin was the longest, dullest of her career, the one time she was inspired to write an homage to 19th century lit ... the last collections of Alice Munro that I had to read, both an early and a later collection were her dullest in my experience, both of the books dulled by being too close to autobiography ... like Munro this longest of Malamud novels, of marriage, infidelity, the tortures of writing, New England rural life and aging suffers from being his closest to autobiography ... one of my favorite quotes about writing is from Muriel Spark, in which she remarks that she loves the characters she creates like "a cat loves a bird" and it occurs to me that perhaps when a writer ventures too far into the realm of autobiography this sort of relationship is off the table - it seems that loving one's literary alter-ego like a cat loves a bird would be almost impossible ... everything that Malamud puts into this book, there is just too much of it - too much of Dubin himself anyway - a little more of Fanny, the young woman Dubin has an affair with, might have been okay, I was a little more interested in Fanny's Life than Dubin's Lives ...

Due stelle e mezza

I'm half way through it and I still can't decide if I like it or not. It's easy to put down, but I do want to know what Dubin is going to do next.