- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reissue edition (May 3 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0141001763
- ISBN-13: 978-0141001760
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 13 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 204 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #50,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Saul Bellow confined himself to shorter fictions. Not that this old master ever dabbled in minimalism: novellas such as The Actual and The Bellarosa Connection are bursting at the seams with wit, plot, and the intellectual equivalent of high fiber. Still, Bellow's readers wondered if he would ever pull another full-sized novel from his hat. With Ravelstein, the author has done just that--and he proves that even in his ninth decade, he can pin a character to the page more vividly, and more permanently, than just about anybody on the planet.
Character is very much the issue in Ravelstein, whose eponymous subject is a thinly disguised version of Bellow's boon companion, the late Allan Bloom. Like Bloom, Abe Ravelstein has spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, fighting a rearguard action against the creeping boobism and vulgarity of American life. What's more, he's written a surprise bestseller (a ringer, of course, for The Closing of the American Mind), which has made him into a millionaire. And finally, he's dying--has died of AIDS, in fact, six years before the opening of the novel. What we're reading, then, is a faux memoir by his best friend and anointed Boswell, a Bellovian body-double named Chick:
Ravelstein was willing to lay it all out for me. Now why did he bother to tell me such things, this large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio? Because it very urgently needed to be said. He was HIV-positive, he was dying of complications from it. Weakened, he became the host of an endless list of infections. Still, he insisted on telling me over and over again what love was--the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures.Ravelstein is a little thin in the plot department--or more accurately, it has an anti-plot, which consists of Chick's inability to write his memoir. But seldom has a case of writer's block been so supremely productive. The narrator dredges up anecdote after anecdote about his subject, assembling a composite portrait: "In approaching a man like Ravelstein, a piecemeal method is perhaps best." We see this very worldly philosopher teaching, kvetching, eating, drinking, and dying, the last in melancholic increments. His death, and Chick's own brush with what Henry James called "the distinguished thing," give much of the novel a kind of black-crepe coloration. But fortunately, Bellow shares Ravelstein's "Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands," and there can't be many eulogies as funny as this one.
As always, the author is lavish with physical detail, bringing not only his star but a large gallery of minor players to rude and resounding life ("Rahkmiel was a non-benevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed"). His sympathies are also stretched in some interesting directions by his homosexual protagonist. Bellow hasn't, to be sure, transformed himself into an affirmative-action novelist. But his famously capacious view of human nature has been enriched by this additional wrinkle: "In art you become familiar with due process. You can't simply write people off or send them to hell." A world-class portrait, a piercing intimation of mortality, Ravelstein is truly that other distinguished thing: a great novel. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Age does not wither Saul Bellow. The 84-year-old writer's new novel is echt Bellow--the grab-bag paragraphs stuffed with truculent observations; the comedic mix of admiration and rivalry that subtends the friendships of intellectual men; the impossible and possible wives. Abe Ravelstein, a professor at a well-known Midwestern college, is obviously modeled on the late Allan Bloom. To clinch the identification, Bellow's narrator, Chick, a writer 20 years older than Ravelstein, uses phrases to describe Ravelstein that are almost identical to phrases Bellow used about Bloom in his published eulogy. Like Bloom, Ravelstein operates his phone like a "command post," getting information from his former students in high positions in various governments. Like Bloom, Ravelstein writes a bestseller using his special brand of political philosophy to comment on American failings. And like Bloom, Ravelstein throws money around as if "from the rear end of an express train." In fact, Chick is so obsessed with the price of Ravelstein's possessions that at times the work reads like a garage sale of his student's effects. Ravelstein also spends lavishly on his boyfriend, Nikki, a princely young Singaporean. Chick's wife, at the beginning of the memoir, is Vela, an East European physicist. Ravelstein dislikes her, and suspects that her Balkan friends are anti-Semites. Eventually, Vela kicks Chick out of his house and divorces him (fans will not be surprised that Bellow, as seems to be his habit, makes this a thinly veiled attack on his ex-wife). Chick ends up marrying one of Ravelstein's students, Rosamund. When Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS, Chick mulls over his obligation to write a memoir of his friend, but he is blocked until he himself suffers a threatening illness. Chick's alternate na?vet? and subconscious rivalry with Ravelstein is the subtext here. Amply rewarding, this late work from the Nobel laureate flourishes his inimitable linguistic virtuosity, combining intimations of mortality with gossipy tattle in a biting and enlightening narrative. First serial to the New Yorker. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
not a good place to start,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ravelstein (Paperback)
Two stars because Bellow can do much better.Ravelstein is a rather confused book. Bellow's personal tribute does not quite carry over from his real-life friendship with Bloom. In the book, Ravelstein/Bloom is an intensely dislikeable character: a crank, a snob, and a bully. Bellow is overawed by what he perceives to be Ravelstein's intellect. It is perhaps a sign of Bellow's genius that even though it is clearly Bellow's desire to elevate Ravelstein to some kind of dark saint status, the mediocrity both of Ravelstein's soul and his mind shines through, as if accidentally, over and over. Bellow wants to write about friendship that becomes as profound as romantic love. The best analogy to the result is perhaps, weirdly, the Sorrows of Young Werther -- without the author-consciousness injecting some kind of reality into the proceedings. The end of the book is quite a failure: long, confusing dream sequences as Bellow's alter ego suffers his own medical failure. One might labor to understand the symbolism here, but what is the point? Bellow's strength is not symbolism, and it never has been; he is best with the flawed noblility of the intelligentsia, but he is strangely unable to take seriously Ravelstein's profound failures as a human. I have experienced the power of a magnetic teacher, and the fields one can leave behind in the lives of others; mine was a positive experience. Bloom was clearly one of these kinds of teachers. But Bellow's inability to truly see through and *into* these kinds of dynamical friendships is a strange failure for such a great writer.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
What's the point?,
By
This review is from: Ravelstein (Paperback)
Eh... This is the first book of Saul Bellow's that I have read. I can say this - it got me interested in reading Plato.Mostly this story centers on Ravelstein, a political philosopher, and his friend 'Chick', whom he has asked to write his biography. Throughout the book we learn the type of person Ravelstein is, which is not the most likable, and then near the end of the book it switches focus entirely and we are given an account of Chick's near-brush with death. Why? Am I missing something? I found this book to be anticlimactic. One thing that irked me is this: There are people in this world who focus on their identity with one group, be it race, religion, or class, and never leave that fact. It is always in their speech. They keep coming back to it. You can't get them away from it. Such is the case with this book, the fact here being one of Jewishness. There are flashes of great writing in 'Ravelstein', but not enough to overcome the irritations.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not to my taste...,
By
This review is from: Ravelstein (Paperback)
This is the third book by Saul Bellow that I have read, starting with Henderson the Rain King, Humbolt's Gift, and now Ravelstein and I have to say that I feel like I am going downhill fast. I have also noticed too many similarities between the main characters in all of these books to make me think each one is strikingly original.I don't understand why Bellow is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. There are moments of poetic brilliance, no doubt about it, but not enough to sustain a whole work. Ravelstein meanders around a thin plot and jumps between locations and times much to rapidly for me to follow. This book seems to be more of a short history of each character with more details than needed rather than a traditional story. After reading other reviews I now understand this is a biography of sorts, unfortunately I didn't know that when I started reading it. All in all I think this will be the last Bellow book that I read. It wasn't all bad but it sure wasn't genius as some people claim.
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