Absolutely brilliant. Perhaps Malamud's finest work. If you are a writer yourself you'll find yourself identifying with Lesser and his desperate race to finish his novel. If you have ever considered wanting to write for a living, you'll love this book. Malamud has a way with words that's just breathtaking. It's present in The Assistant, it's present in the Fixer, and it's present here. And with three "endings," The Tenants' structure and plot never fails to captivate the reader. 5 Stars.

this may possibly be my all time favorite book. ever. it is about typewriters and dreams. don't be fooled by those who swear it is about afro-jewish race relations in washington heights, it is far too lovely for that.

Well, I think we can all agree that though these two men hold aspects of the human condition we can all relate to, they were bound to drive each other to madness. I like the sort of cathartic feel to this novel. Both characters have an insatiable desire to tell their story, yet both never see eye to eye. They never see that, in the end, they are one. I found them both incredibly annoying at times, because I could understand the aching for your voice to tear through the sleepless streets of 70's New York. I understood both sides, and I think that's what is good to take from this book. We are Lesser and Willie. We can be both at the same time. Not to mention the whole world knows the historical and societal implications of their relationship and who they are, as a Jew and a Black man. If only they could have held each other.

On the more technical side of things, I liked the way Malamud would change the point of view from an omnipresent one to Lesser's, sometimes within the same page. It gives you a good sense of the atmosphere in whatever scene you're reading. The dialogue is is upright, without guilt, especially in Willie's case.

Great book for people who want a little piece of history forgotten in some stale New York building.

The book shows the fierce dedication of artists, such as Lessor. The dedication transcends living arrangements, even love. It saddened me that Lessor did not consummate his relationship with Irene. She was ready to be a homebody in a marriage to him. She was supportive and loving, and Harry erred in passing up the time to be with her. He chose an uncomfortable, unfriendly home and isolation and lack of warmth to write and he need not have done so. He made the choice draconian and self-defeating. One did not have to exclude the other. He chose pain. I see him as foolish.

Problematic in ways it wishes to be, and ways it does not. Very much of its time in its politics, such politics having dated quite badly in places.

But. Some great writing at times, as one would expect from Malamud, but nowhere near one of his best works (e.g. Fixer or Assistant).

Reminded me of Stanley Elkin, but suffered for the comparison, as Elkin is a bloody genius.

داستان روایت نویسنده ای(هری لسر) است که در تلاش برای پایان دادن به داستانش در ساختمانی مخروبه و خالی از سکنه، درگیر حضور ناخوانده ای سیاهپوست می‌شود که از قضا او هم اهل نوشتن است. جنگ نویسنده با صاحبخانه برای تخلیه نکردن ملک از یک سو و جنگ و درگیری بین این نویسنده که گویی جنگ بر سر نژاد، معشوقه و نهایتا آرمان اصلی آن دو یعنی پایان دادن و به فرجام رساندن نوشته هایشان است دنیایی بین داستان‌ها وواقعیت زندگی این افراد می‌سازد..

It's more experimental stylistically than other Malamud than I have read, and I like how his yiddish idiom is used for this more radical purpose. The plot is surreal and maybe symbolic - two writers, one white and one black, squatting in a tenement, trying to finish novels keep their wary distance. The stories within the story are trippy, disturbing, and still resonant.

Kinga: "THE BEST NEW YORK NOVEL APART FROM ALL THE OTHER NEW YORK NOVELS: Bernard Malamud – The Tenants"

Malamud inizia dalla fine: dalla fine di un libro che lo scrittore Harry Lesser è incapace di finire, come se fosse «una forma di ripulsa escatologica».

Inizia con una scrittura priva di prospettiva, è immaginazione di immaginazione, come una creazione ricorsiva di Escher, due mani che vicendevolmente si vergano.

La voce narrante è mobile, una commistione tra quella del personaggio scrittore (Lesser) e quella dello scrittore Malamud; il tempo verbale è il presente dell'indicativo, che mescola pensieri indiretti di Lesser, osservazioni di Malamud, descrizioni, dialoghi tra i due, dialoghi con se stessi. Poi, a riga 35, il narratore assume una forma onnisciente, il tempo diventa un passato remoto e si inizia di nuovo, anche se Malamud continua a sbirciare dal presente.

«Gli inquilini» è un metatesto edificato sui contrasti, sulle distorsioni e i campi di forza che convogliano, nella letteratura, verità e società. La storia è semplice: lo scrittore Lesser è l'ultimo inquilino rimasto in un palazzo che il proprietario, il signor Levenspiel, vuole demolire e riedificare. L'arrivo di un inquilino abusivo, Willie, un altro scrittore, scatena delle tensioni, la prima di tipo raziale (Ebreo Lesser, Afroamericano Willie), la seconda di tipo generazionale (Lesser è il passato, Willie è il futuro). La seconda ne genera una terza quando entra in scena Irene. Dopodiché c'è un colpo di scena.

Un impasto da masticare per gli appassionati di Teoria della letteratura, una lettura meno digeribile per chi cerca una storia newyorkese. Come sostiene Aleksandar Hemon nella prefazione, il romanzo ha una profonda struttura dialogica, ed è un dialogo inconciliabile

«in definitiva violento tra (...) l'esistenza e la non-esistenza, tra Malamud e Malamud».

Trama: 2/5⁠
Personaggi: 3/5⁠
Dialoghi: 3/5⁠
Tema morale: 5/5⁠
Lingua e Stile: 4/5⁠
Facilità di lettura: 4/5⁠
Coinvolgimento: 3/5⁠

The reputation of The Tentants as a novel of Afro-Semitic race relations gave me low, low expectations. After getting burned bad by Rabbit Redux and Updike's retrospectively cartoonish take on "hip" African American culture in the '70s I'd expected a similar letdown. The Tenants surprised me by unfolding as a novel just as much - or more - about writing and the creative process as a novel about race. Racial tension figures prominently, I can't deny, but it seems to be more a narrative tool than a central focus.

The two writers who dominate the novel, Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint, serve as starkly contrasting foils. Lesser has written one good novel, one bad, and is working in his tenth year on a third. He creates slowly and meticulously, as Malamud himself famously did. As such, the ending of his novel eludes him. Ideas for lesser come with great effort, but once they do he crafts them expertly. Willie Spearmint (later simply Bill Spear, wink wink) writes unceasingly, ideas coming faster than he can transcribe them at times. But his writing style, as far as Lesser is concerned, stinks.

Ultimately, Willie's blackness is less about race specifically and more about identity and culture broadly. Willie is immersed in his ethnic identity, while Lesser feels awkward saying "shalom" to another Jew. Their differing approaches to writing parallel their differing approaches to heritage and life in general. Malamud explores these two seemingly polar approaches to creativity and the world at large by bouncing the two men of each other violently.

A Jewish novelist lives in a decaying tenement in the early 1970s, refusing his landlord's increasingly desperate offers to buy out his last tenant so that he can raze the building. The novelist is determined not to leave before he finishes his novel. A black novelist (named Willie Spearmint...get it? William [Shake]spear[e]) moves in as a squatter, and the two critique each other's writing, fight over a woman, and trade racist insults.

I passionately loathed the first third/half, for two reasons: a) the precious, self-absorbed writer, focused on writing to the detriment of everything and everyone else, in denial as to how little what he does matters. "Whiny, lazy, narcissist," I noted. And b) the puerile attempts to shock, with sexual, scatological, and racially charged language. How better to show that you have nothing interesting to say?

But at a certain point, I kind of got it. I think Malamud wants to talk about race relations in blunt and essentialist terms that were not PC then and are far less now. Forget our common humanity. Here there are different species: black, white, Jew. Incompatible, immutable, each with their own deep, clashing lived experience and writing style and sense of being. The grime and decay, the self-destructive personalities, the obsession, all are part of this grand psychic battle to the death.

Willy grew up in the Deep South, or in Harlem. He was molested as a child by his uncle, or maybe by his mother's pimp. He may have been in jail. Though he is slippery about his biography, he is definitely no genteel, educated black writer. Lots of n***** this, b**** that. "I write it well but say it bad," he complains, in response to a critique of his writing. The Jew (Lesser, who refers to Willy as "the black") fantasises about sleeping with a black woman.

There is some kind of a rap battle/cursing contest. This reminded me of a scene from The Sot-Weed Factor, which resembles this also in its coarse, Rabelaisian physicality: damp underpants, testicles tightening in fear, awkward and unsatisfying sex scenes.

To sum: the parts of book which reach for pathos are the worst, impossible to take seriously. Two self-obsessed, aggrieved writers sobbing while burning the other's work, locked in a battle which will destroy both. But the parts that work are a weird, psychedelic landscape of race war fantasy, which are disturbing and horrifying, yes, but in an interesting way, confronting social taboos by exaggerating them. I will briefly let the book speak for itself:

Related to this was a piece called 'The First Pogrom in the U.S. of A.'. In it a group of ghetto guerrillas in black leather jackets and caps decides it will help the cause of the Revolution to show that a pogrom can happen in the US. of A. So they barricade both ends of a business block, 127th Street between Lenox Avenue and Seventh, by parking hijacked trucks perpendicularly across both ends of the street. Working quickly from lists prepared in advance, they drag out of a laundromat, shoe store, pawnbroker's shop, and several other kinds of establishments owned by them on both sides of the street. Every Zionist they can find, male, female, and in-between. There is none of that Hitler s*** of smashing store windows, forcing Zionists to scrub sidewalks, or rubbing their faces in dog crap. Working quickly in small squads, the guerrillas round up and line up a dozen wailing, hand-wringing Zionists, Goldberg among them, in front of his Liquor Emporium, and shoot them dead with pistols. The guerrillas are gone before the sirens of the pigs can be heard.

Willie had rewritten the pogrom twelve times, Lesser gave up searching for more of it. In one draft, some of the black clerks try to protect their former bosses but are warned off by shots fired in the air. One of them who persists is killed along with the Zionists. As a warning to Uncle Toms he is shot in the face.

There was a pencilled note at the bottom of the last page of the story, in Willie's handwriting. "It isn't that I hate the Jews. But if I do any, it's not because I invented it myself but I was born in the good old US. of A. and there's a lot of that going on that gets under your skin. And it's also from knowing the Jews, which I do. The way to black freedom is against them."

Yeah, you couldn't write this nowadays, not for publication in any case. The book opens with an epigraph from Antiphon and ends like this.

One night Willie and Lesser met in a grassy clearing in the bush. The night was moonless above the moss-dripping, rope-entwined trees. Neither of them could see the other but sensed where he stood. Each heard himself scarcely breathing.

"Bloodsuckin' Jew N*****hater."

"Anti-Semitic Ape."

Their metal glinted in hidden light, perhaps starlight filtering greenly through dense trees. Willie's eyeglass frames momentarily gleamed. They aimed at each other accurate blows. Lesser felt his jagged axe sink through bone and brain as the groaning black's razor-sharp sabre, in a single boiling stabbing slash, cut the white's balls from the rest of him. Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.

THE END

Mercy, the both of you, for Christ's sake, Levenspiel cries. Heb rachmones, I beg you. Mercy on me. Mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy

There is (somewhat unbelievably) a movie version with Snoop Dogg.

I couldn't really get into this book.