The nice gentle man with his mild way of dealing...
The nice gentle man with his mild way of dealing with conflict and contradiction, the confident ex-athlete sensible and resourceful in any struggle with an adversary who is fair, comes up against the adversary who is not fair--the evil ineradicable from human dealings--and he is finishedHe whose natural nobility was to be exactly what he seemed to be has taken in far too much suffering to be naively whole againNever again will the Swede be content in the trusting old Swedian way that, for the sake of his second wife and their three boys--for the sake of their naive wholeness--he ruthlessly goes on pretending to beStoically he suppresses his horrorHe learns to live behind a maskA lifetime experiment in enduranceA performance over a ruinSwede Levov lives a double life And now he is dying and what sustained him in a double life can sustain him no longer, and that horror mercifully half sub-81 merged, two-thirds submerged, even at times nine-tenths submerged, comes back distilled despite the heroic creation of that second white chanel purse marriage and the fathering of the wonderful boys
