The Natural by Malamud, Bernard - 1952

New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1952. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First edition. His first novel. A contemporary (dated 1952) signed and inscribed presentation copy. Fine in red cloth, one of 3 colors with no priority. The dustjacket has a 1/4" tear, and a crease to the rear flap, else the jacket's also fine. Specifically, The Natural is a baseball novel set in the 1930s, but it's really a Gothic novel taken out into the sunshine and set between the chalk lines. Its primary theme is the tragic flaw, while its minor themes touch a succession of juxtapositions including, choices and consequences, morality and responsibility, and rise and fall. Woven through the plotline is a symbolic myth of initiation and isolation, drawing from models of lore as distant as Chrétien de Troyes' Sir Percival (the original Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail), and as near as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and so it is a knight's tale of betrayal, lost virtue, redemption, and extinction, a chilling read, that's dark, deep, leveled, literate, mythological, supernatural, and profound. Generally, it's a reminder that novels are a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of secret charm, and of thought in cold storage, a small object that fills an immensity. Novels are, no less than, the history of everything that didn't happen (Book Code).