In that earlier age, he could have tested himself more directly. cummings poem, and the death of the nineteenth-century age of heroes obsesses him. “Buffalo Bill’s defunct,” he says, quoting the e. They’re saying, as Axel reads them, to take risks, to put the self on the line. One of the students in his class has Axel figured out so completely that she always has the right answer, when he asks what Thoreau is saying, or what Dostoyevski is saying. But he doesn’t seem to teach their works so much as what he finds in them to justify his own obsessions. He teaches Dostoyevski, William Carlos Williams, Thoreau.
At one point, he’s driven to bet money he doesn’t really have on college basketball games picked almost at random out of the sports pages.Īnd yet Axel Freed is not simply a gambler, but a very complicated man in his mid-thirties who earns his living as a university literature teacher.
If I only bet on the games I know, I could at least break even.” But he doesn’t want that. “I play in order to lose,” he tells his bookie at one point.
