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2 internautes sur 2 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5
Odyssey of an American poet, Nov. 17 2003
As in Bellow's "Herzog" and "Seize the Day," the protagonist of "Humboldt's Gift" is a highly educated late-middle-aged man who's made a minor mess of his life but weathers the storm with any resources of which he can avail himself. Charlie Citrine, an Appleton, Wisconsin, native transplanted to Chicago, is an author and a briefly successful playwright who spends the novel reminiscing about his longtime friendship with the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, an eccentric genius and self-diagnosed manic depressive, and describing the people and events in his life that somehow seem to shape themselves around his relationship with Humboldt.Humboldt once had a goal to raise the esteem of the poet's role in American society. In 1952 he believed an Adlai Stevenson presidency would allow the involvement of more intellectuals in government; when this hope crumbled, he sought and won an ephemeral poetry chair at Princeton, where he and Citrine concocted a strangely Sophoclean movie treatment about a doomed Arctic expedition and a man who became a cannibal. This was not the last of their show business aspirations; Citrine's play, "Von Trenck," based loosely on Humboldt's life and therefore vexatious to Humboldt, was a hit on the theater circuit and was made into a movie. Citrine's dubious fortune attracts all kinds of problems with love and money. His ex-wife Denise is straining him over an uncomfortable divorce settlement; his new girlfriend, a much younger woman named Renata, takes advantage of him and leaves him stranded in Madrid to babysit her son. A simple poker night results in an undesirable association with a small-time gangster named Rinaldo Cantabile from which he can't seem to extricate himself. Character creation is where Bellow really excels; he seeks the individual in every person he invents and never exploits stereotypes or resorts to caricatures for the sake of broad humor. Observe the swaggering confidence of Citrine's friend George Swiebel, an actor turned construction contractor; the smug demeanor of the dapper, cosmopolitan Thaxter, whom Citrine hires as an editor for a magazine yet (and probably never) to be published; the affectionate gruffness of Citrine's older brother Julius, a wealthy, sickly businessman who never shed his working-class sensibilities. These are people you'd be no more surprised to meet in reality than on the pages of a book. A criticism against Bellow is that he has a tendency to sacrifice cohesive plots for the random portrayal of human hysteria, a collection of disparate people thrown together haphazardly. The problem is not that his novels lack believability; rather, they are often too believable, and sometimes I think they would benefit from just a little more artifice. In that regard, "Humboldt's Gift" strikes me as one of his better novels along with "Henderson the Rain King," built upon a substantial story that achieves a certain amount of closure because the protagonist is finally entrusted with a responsibility (the "gift") that, handled properly, could change his life for the better.
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de Philip Roth
de Wallace Stegner
de Saul Bellow
de Philip Roth
de Ford Madox Ford
