| Humboldts Gift (Penguin Classics) |
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Product Details
Two twentieth-century literary masterpieces from the Nobel Prize winner
Saul Bellows Pulitzer Prizewinning novel explores the long friendship between Charlie Citrine, a young man with an intense passion for literature, and the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlies life is falling apart: his career is at a standstill, and hes enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.
Product Reviews
 (2 stars) - Where's the Beef?
Having read Mr. Sammler's Planet, I had high hopes for this novel. I pictured something loaded with insight
and jewels of descriptions on every page. This book has scant few of these things and lots of name dropping rambling unconvincing philosophy and boring characters...(Where are all the wonderful characters in Sammler's Planet?). In short it is a dud and long. I especially liked the commentator who said realism and stream of thought do not automatically produce a good novel. Where's the beef?
 (3 stars) - Pretty good
I'm not up to the long discussion this book deserves but will say that for every element of it that is sublime and breathtakingly novel, there are corresponding parts that are tedious and self-conscious. The story, as it were, has more or less been completely told by page 200.
(3 stars) - Overrated and unmemorable Novel
Clearly Bellow wrote beautiful prose and some of his passages in this are excellent. My problem with the novel is that I felt that I was wading through endless digressions and pretentious ruminations of the main character Charlie Citrine to get to the hidden gems. I struggled to finish this and frankly wouldn't recommend it. Citrine in the end is neither a believable or sympathetic character and his inner dialogue becomes a study in boredom. Since at one point he goes into great detail to discuss boredom in modern life maybe that was the point. I almost felt like the author was intentionally testing the readers ability to endure the pacing of this book.
 (5 stars) - Bellow's Best
I read several other of Bellow's novels and frankly found none of them very memorable. I was disappointed and a bit surprised; I'd enjoyed virtually all of Roth's work and couldn't understand why Bellow left me cold. I'd started Humboldt's Gift and given it up after a hundred pages. I finally thought I'd give it another try, and I'm very glad I did. Maybe it was that I had to be in my 50's to fully appreciate a novel about a man in his 50's, facing issues that are much more remote and theoretical only ten years earlier. His use of language, which I'd never found remarkable before, is extraordinary. He grapples with psychological realities and ultimate issues with both great humor and true profundity. The characters are fully realized, and at least to me, easily recognizable among the people I've known in my own life--most certainly myself included. While it's not a short book, if you give it a chance and can relate to the main character, you won't be able to put it down.
 (4 stars) - Mind without culture
Bellow brings forth another of his ragged souled protagonists. Intellectual dreamers, lost in the turbulence of the American 20th Century. Charlie Citrine is a historian of ideas, obsessed with literature, poetry and ideas and the legacy of his poet friend, the legendary Von Humboldt.
As a cruel reminder of how America can break its most sensitive artists (witness the tragic David Foster Wallace), Humboldt is a warning backdrop to the whole novel. A feted success in his day, he winds up in mental turmoil chewing on pretzels in a New York flophouse while Citrine flies overhead in a helicopter, flush with the success of a Broadway play.
Citrine struggles with this particularly American dilemma - to use his mind for material success, knowing in his heart it doesn't achieve the beauty and spiritual fulfilment he craves in his wild philosophical monologues, riven with the inspirations of thinkers such as George Steiner.
Meanwhile, the real world dilemmas of his mid life unfold in Chigago - that brutal, steel pressed, mercantile city. His wife is divorcing him and cleaning him out, he is hustled by a reckless gangster Rinaldo Cantabile who pursues him through bath house, toilet stall, skyscraper construction and Citrine's apartment to tap into his intellectual resources and try and make a fast buck. If this wasn't enough, he is involved with an elusive and manipulative young Latin woman, Renata - a distinct copy of Ramona from Herzog - in the typical middle aged man's doomed pursuit to regain his youth through sex.
At one point Citrine focuses on how to live a life of the mind where there is no culture. And this is the key dilemma Bellow grapples with in so much of his fiction. The plot - Humboldt's eponymous gift - is ultimately fairly inconsequential. But this big novel is worth reading for its mature treatment of middle aged American masculinity, power and artistic struggles.
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