Bellow, Saul

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Friendship and love
Bellow's last word
Talk About a Fair-Weather Friend!
Not a favorite, but worth reading

Ravelstein
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 067084134X
Release Date: 2000-04-24

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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: <blockquote> 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. </blockquote> 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

Book Description

Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent Midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously--and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends old and new, old suits, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.

Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow's new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny; an elegy to friendship and lives well (or badly) lived.

"Simply the best writer we have."-- The New York Times Book Review

"No contemporary of ours is more consistently brilliant and more defiantly risky than Saul Bellow."--Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

"His voice has the meticulous range and certainty of a cathedral choir. The wit is exquisitely mannered; the intelligence both fearless and elegant."--Boston Globe

Customer Reviews:

Read another's review.......2007-06-21

Anyone interested in interesting reviews should check out Michael Davis' interpretive essay of this book in his Wonderlust.

Friendship and love.......2007-06-14

It was easy for him to write a popular book. Indeed, teaching was a sort of popularization. Abe Ravelstein, through informal means, sent the narrator, Chick, back to Plato's SYMPOSIUM. Ravelstein believed the sprited were drawn to love and the bourgeoisie feared violent death. He wanted his students to cast aside their parents' beliefs. Chick's wife, Rosamund, had been one of Abe's students.

Ravelstein had entered the University of Chicago at age fifteen. Two decades later he returned as a full professor. Now, the large man from Dayton, Ohio, HIV postive, was dying. Abe had visited Chick in New Hampshire even though he didn't like the country. On such visits he had told Chick about affairs conducted by Chick's then wife, Vela.

It was a characteristic of Abe Ravelstein that he was very interested in the domestic arrangements of his students and his friends. In illness, in dying, there were many visitors. In the end the students waited, but Abe was no longer teaching, no longer holding court.

Abe Ravelstein had felt that his friend Chick had failed to consider his existence, his place, as a Jew. A mad form of nihilism had prevailed in Germany and other countries in the twentieth century. Chick believed that it had been hard for him to be a Jew amidst American language. American language was so hopeful.

When Ravelstein died, Chick discovered that it had been his habit to tell Abe new things whenever the men met. Chick had been chosen to do the portrait, the memoir of Ravelstein. The task was completed six years later.

The real-life model for Abe Ravelstein is Allan Bloom. One of the supporting characters is evidently based on Isaiah Berlin. This late work of Saul Bellow is both amazingly erudite and funny. I guess another appropriate adjective is exuberant.

Bellow's last word.......2006-12-27

This is late period Bellow. Very late period. His only novel that was written in his 80s (how many other writers make it that far?), and unsurprisingly it is a quieter, more modest efforts than the capacious, pugnacious, intellectually monumental novels that mark out Bellow at his peak.

Bellow's best characters have a deep souled universality about them. They are clearly fictional, yet take on a wholly formed realism that no other 20th Century writer has managed. Ravelstein marks Bellow shrinking back towards the standard rules of character - make one up based on someone you know. Ravelstein is unapologetically based on Alan Bloom, an intellectual titan of the Midwest, also given over to great material passions (his Turnbull and Asser shirts, his glass corporate ash trays) and huge gushing laughs with cigarette smoke rushing out of his nostrils. A good Bellovian character, and Bellow's fulsome almost cosmic prose does Ravelstein justice.

A smaller scale, more modest effort than classic Bellow, but Bellow completists (and if you read every book of only one author, you could do a lot worse than pick Bellow) should consider this one as a final intellectual heave from the late great man.

Talk About a Fair-Weather Friend!.......2006-05-26

The nastiness of this book, the awful interpretation of Allan Bloom's life, his work, his SELF--just floored me. I don't know who Saul Bellow saw in Allan Bloom, but I saw a man who could penetrate the minds of the greatest minds: Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rousseau. Bloom's day-to-day life? THIS is what matters? What if Plato had written about how Socrates went to the bathroom? That's how bad this book is in my opinion. A "friend" who missed the whole thing. A "friend" who savaged his "friend" to make a buck.

How in God's name can you write a (fictional) book about a man who was known for his wonderful teaching ability without one single scene of his TEACHING!

Dumb, But, more than dumb, cruelly unfriendly and, more than that, a way of upending someone who was dead and unable to defend himself. I think Bellow may have been, MUST have been envious of his friend's intellect and just let it rip.

I wish Bloom's heirs could get the money Bellow made from this book.

Not a favorite, but worth reading.......2006-05-21

Ravelstein was not even close to works like Humboldt's Gift, The Adventures of Augie March, and Herzog. It is based on Bellow's friendship with the scholar Allan Bloom, who was famous for his book The Closing of the American Mind. The Bloom figure in the book, Ravelstein, is dying of AIDS.

The book is surrounded by sadness, naturally. Ravelstein comes across as a man who either loves or hates, depending on whether one was in his favored inner circle. Clearly Bellow, portrayed here as "Chick," was one of the beloved.

I appreciated the character development, but the book seemed a bit unfocused and lacked the charm and insight that are found in his other works. Much of the philosophizing is superficial stuff.

Even so, Bellow is a master craftsman and, compared to a lot of the other writers out there, whatever he produced should be read.

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Of Fathers and Sons
A Day in the Life
Review of seize the Day
Powerful and bleak
The world don' t believe in tears!

Seize the Day (Penguin Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Typical American (Contemporary Fiction, Plume)

ASIN: 0142437611
Release Date: 2003-05-27

Book Description

GBF Discussion; Guide online

Introduction by Cynthia Ozick.

Customer Reviews:

Of Fathers and Sons.......2007-06-07

I recently finished reading Martin Amis's EXPERIENCE: A MEMOIR in which he cites Saul Bellow as a literary father figure (moreso, it seems, than his own author father Kingsley Amis). This made me want to read something by Bellow and since SEIZE THE DAY is a short novel (114 pages) from his peak period I chose to read this book first. Cynthia Ozick's introductory essay was not a very helpful introduction to the book. She quotes heavily from the novel, which is a bit of a spoiler. Perhaps it would have been better to read her essay after reading the novel.

First published in 1956, the novel is about a middle-aged man in New York City who is separated from his wife (and sons) and living in a residential hotel, the Gloriana, the same hotel where his father keeps a separate apartment. I appreciated this book as a portrait of a middle-aged, middle class white male in mid-twentieth century America. One feels both sympathy for and frustration with the main character, Tommy Wilhelm. He's intelligent and well-meaning, but also weak and easily swayed by others' opinion of him and what he needs to do to become a "success." A failed Hollywood actor, he seems startled to learn, like Willie Loman, that personal attractiveness is not always enough to ensure success. His disappointment in himself is echoed by his own father, Dr. Adler, who is unwilling to give him words of encouragement (or the much-needed financial aid his son seeks). But his birth father is not the only father figure in his life to betray or disappoint him. There was also Maurice Venice, the sleazy agent who encouraged Wilhelm to drop out of college to pursue a career in pictures. And then, in the present day of the story (the entire novel unfolds in a single day like the much longer ULYSSES) there is Dr. Tamkin, a dubiously credentialed psychiatrist, who lures Wilhelm to invest in lard in the Chicago commodities market, precipitating the primary crisis of the novel. Against this tortured backdrop is the story of Wilhelm's own efforts to remain a visible and active part in his own sons' lives while trying to initiate a divorce from their mother. While some readers may perceive the depiction of the "blood-sucking" Margaret as misogynistic, Bellow's depiction of this failed relationship seems authentic, especially for the era he was writing about. Fathers' rights were few and women, even separated and divorced women, were expected to stay at home and take care of their children. And in the end, SEIZE THE DAY is a novel without either untarnished heroes or blameless victims. Even disappointing father figures can speak profound truths, as Dr. Tamkin does when he tells Wilhelm, "Don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery." In SEIZE THE DAY Bellow has given us a powerful meditation on what it means to pursue the soul's deepest desires and to mourn the many deaths and losses even the most optimistic among us is bound to encounter living out the life they've been given.

A Day in the Life.......2007-05-12

I found this book immensely satisfying in its form and its substance. Yet I felt quite relieved to finish it. The main character Wilhelm's feeling of oppression and despair was so contagious that like him, I as the reader felt that I was searching for relief. And all in the space of one day - or in fact, less than a day. A day in the life.
As the story progresses, it does not progress. It stands still, and Wilhelm is still trapped in his search for the simple, the beautiful. That is, until the last page, when he sinks into "the happy oblivion of tears." The readers, feels like clapping and cheering with every tear he sheds.
This is a man's world, where people "make a killing" in the growing complexities of 1950s New York. Even old men are caught in the obsession of making money. One gets the feeling there is no space for women here.
Although the hypnotic Dr Tamkin holds sway over Wilhelm, his main conflict is with his father - depicted as a vain, cold old man. Wilhelm suffers from that coldness. He is trying to find the warmth.
Bellow seems able to sum up a character in one paragraph. Also, in a Dickensian way, the appearance of the character IS the character.
This is a complete gem of a novel. We are taken through an important day in the life of Wilhelm, in the intensity of New York on the edge of the modern world, vividly depicted. It is a book you will want to dip back into time and again, for its beautiful pearls of language and emotion.

Review of seize the Day.......2007-03-09

The book was pretty goo, never would have read it if i didn't need it for my English class

Powerful and bleak.......2007-02-05

The American Dream is such an awesome, vast, teeming notion that promises so much and forgets those who are broken on its huge wheel. Tommy Wilhelm is one such man, a salesman in mid life who has lost his job, left his family and now festers in limbo, worrying, fretting with his burden in a hotel room. Everywhere he turns, he is scorned. By the mysterious Tamkin, a wild and shifty charismatic character who insists a fortune can be made easily be made by closely watching certain patterns: 'You think the Wall Street guys are so smart - geniuses? That's because most of us are psychologically afraid to think about the details.' He is, of course, a conman, who deceives Wilhelm out of the last of his money, but Wilhelm is too gullible to see this.

Then there is his father, Dr Adler - a proud, dying, stern man who treats his son with wretched contempt when he is forced to ask for money, unfeelingly, his father emasculates Tommy's condition in phrases that cut deep in their scathing: 'You cry about being helped,' he said. 'When you thought you had to go into the service I sent a check to Margret every month. As a family man you could have had an exemption. But no? The war couldn't be fought without you and you had to get yourself drafted and be an office boy in the Pacific theater. Any clerk could have done what you did. You could find nothing better to become than a GI.' Ouch.

All of this combines in a memorable scene towards the end of the novella, after Tommy has been humiliated by his ex wife, who holds him to his payments towards their children which he cannot afford and his father, boling with rage, rejects him entirely: 'Go away from me now. It's torture for me to look at you, you slob!'. Tommy goes out into the street: 'And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of ever age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence - I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.'

Despite all the circumstances, the slings and arrows Tommy has suffered, he retains the essential human essence, the grappling with existence that Bellow stared into deeply in his work. There is something of the defiance, the glorifying human passage of Augie March, that remains, even in the most desperate, desperate circumstances.

The world don' t believe in tears!.......2006-06-03

Saul Bellow was one of the most prominent, sharp and intelligent exponents of the American literature.

Carpe Diem constitutes a somber portrait around a looser, a man who systematically is incapable to win in any order of his life. Emotionally destroyed, spiritually demolished, financially bluffed, this man has been victim of the rest of the world in all orders. That oppressive anguish of visible creative impotence, product of a total absence of will, has transformed him into a true puppet.

This corrosive gaze still expands far beyond his inner demons and all the environment around him is the extension of his passiveness. A candid looser, a tricked man by his wife, is object of mockery for the rest of his social circle.

This novel was one the most bitter and crude works in the Fifties. It reflects the existential uncertainness of a weak spirited human being, immersed in world that simply does not understand him and besides incapable to feel and to cry with him.

An agonic portrait of a man worthy of the most genuine compassion, and also the a bitter metaphor around a man without emotional center.

Stunning and devastating.

The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

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The Best Novel EVER to come out of 20th Cent. America
Pointless
I just couldn't get into it
How does one find oneself?
More perspiration than inspiration...

The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0143039571

Book Description

As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, and keenly humorous, The Adventures of Augie March blends street language with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A “born recruit,” Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that is—to say the least— eccentric.

Customer Reviews:

The Best Novel EVER to come out of 20th Cent. America.......2007-04-04

Forgive me for gushing, but this is a work unequaled among modern American novels. Bellow's novels are invariably thoughtful, playful, funny and profound, and this is his greatest.

No, (as the reviews below attest) its not a novel to dip into between servings of the latest pablum masking as literature. It takes a little work on the reader's part, as do all of Bellow's works, but the pay-off is enormous.

It's instructive that reviewers below who've panned the book haven't read other Bellow before coming to Augie March. Bellow's writing style - long, elegant sentences full of digressions and asides - can be difficult until you find their rythmn, which typically takes 50-100 pages, but once you do the poetry of the book carries you along with little effort. And Augie March is the densest of Bellow's books, so the learning curve can be longer than usual, certainly when you havent read other Bellow.

Stick with the book. like all great literature, it rewards concentrated reading.

Pointless.......2007-03-05

Classic? Why? Slow, plodding and pointless. The style is pretentious and irritating. One doesn't care about any of the numerous characters. The narrator Augie isn't likable, and the so called adventures are nothing but a long string of stories that amount to nothing. Bellow seems to try to use every word he knows and in ways you've never heard in sentences that don't make sense.

I just couldn't get into it.......2006-10-09

This was my first (and probably last) experience with a book by Saul Bellow. I found this book to be extremely difficult to read. I got through about a quarter of it before finally giving up and donating the book to the library. This book might be a classic, but quite honestly I found it boring.

How does one find oneself?.......2006-06-20

In the course of his search for the meaning of life Augie March takes us through some pretty amazing chapters of experience, moving randomly from one rather unconventional situation onto another as it develops, taking things in, reflecting on his motives and decisions. Most of the book is set in and around Chicago in the 30s, but he also travels to other interesting places. The book is dense to read, like a thickly woven textile with many layers; I sometimes had to read a paragraph over as the denseness plays tricks with syntax in a way you have to get used to. Was Bellow loquacious? (Must find out.) He certainly writes as if, the words just come boiling out like a volcano, and always spot-on to convey the exact precise point. And his characters! So many are there, extraordinary, idiosyncratic, self-contained (Bateshaw, the maniac ship's carpenter; Mintouchian, the worldly-wise Armenian lawyer.) A chance description makes your hair stand on end, e.g., when Caligula the eagle lands on Thea's outstretched arm. Or when he first meets Renee, his brother's disastrous mistress. No one writes like this, no one.

After a bit the sheer range, breadth, and stature of this work start to sink in. Bellow certainly sets the standard.

More perspiration than inspiration..........2006-06-15

There seems to be a lot of hyperbolic praise for this book...and I can't figure out why. I gave it five stars, true, but, in terms of all-time, world-class literature...it barely breaks the surface. A better bildungsroman--by far--is Of Human Bondage. I recommend the book, but it won't be a transformative experience, or a tour-de-force that will leave you open-mouthed. In fact, it kinda goes astray when the action shifts to Mexico...but you won't regret reading the book. You may wonder what all the fuss was about, though.

Average customer rating:

Bellow against Nihlism
The modern consciousness
THE REAL DEAL
I cannot perpetuate this myth of greatness
a very strong (metaphysically and concretely speaking) ) well-rounded novel

Herzog (Penguin Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0142437298
Release Date: 2003-02-25

Amazon.com

A novel complex, compelling, absurd and realistic, Herzog became a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1964. In it Saul Bellow tells the tale of Moses E. Herzog, a tragically confused intellectual who suffers from the breakup of his second marriage, the general failure of his life and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century. He responds to his personal crisis by sending out a series of letters to all kinds of people. The letters in total constitute a thoughtful examination of his own life and that which has occurred around him. What emerges is not always pretty, but serves as gritty foundation for this absorbing novel.

Book Description

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.

Introduction by Philip Roth

Download Description

This concise supplement to Saul Bellow's Herzog helps students understand the overall structure of the work, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author.

Customer Reviews:

Bellow against Nihlism.......2007-04-25

What role does the intellect play in both an individual life and the wider culture? This is the exploration that lies at the heart of "Herzog," the deeply philosophical novel by Saul Bellow. Moses Herzog is a man under the spell of writing letters to anyone under the sun, dead or alive. This habit leads others to suspect his mental stability, though in fact he is "confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong." This is not always obvious when reading his manic, incomplete letters, or observing his choices and behavior regarding his family and career. Yet, Herzog's untidy, frustrating life, full of yearning and error, supplies an apt metaphor for the novel's wider philosophical position: man must face his own life, his own ordinariness, and seek value. To do otherwise is nihilism, and to hope for a tidy, unified fulfillment is a dream.

While Moses Herzog in his world, and Saul Bellow and ours, are widely identified as exemplars of the intellectual, this novel is keenly aware of the limits of thought and erudition, and deeply suspicious of the learned. Above all, Herzog rejects the idea authentic experience resides in the life of the mind, or more specifically, in theory and abstraction. One can't think fulfillment. Values and relationships provide fulfillment. Yet our philosophical tradition has begun to reject value, and become elitist and nihilistic. Socrates began in saying that he only knew that he knew nothing, and we have gone no farther than the idea that life and value are nothing and philosophy is only a word game. Herzog is

"...tired of the modern form of historicism that sees in this civilization the defeat of the best hopes of Western religion and thought, what Heideggar calls the second Fall of Man into the quotidian or ordinary.... The question of these modern centuries,..-The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life."

To be learned in not to be more moral or valuable, and there is a troubling malice behind the aesthetic revulsion towards modern society.

"Reaching at last the point of denying the humanity of the industrialized, "banalized" masses. It was easy for the wastelanders to be assimilated to totalitarianism. Here the responsibility of the of artists remains to be assessed. To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism."

This naturally leads to the exhortation, "The world should love lovers; but not theoreticians. Never theoreticians. Show them the door. Ladies, throw out the bastards!

And what of the plot? The story lacks a neat, plotted drama, and its details are not what stick with me, but it has its moments. The central conflict is the relationship between Herzog and a younger, hipper love, and his separation from their daughter. It does devolve into tedium at times, but as I reflect on the novel, I rarely recall those moments. Too many modern novels involve the tawdry affairs of the cultural elite. Yet, "Herzog" is successful because it is juxtaposed with Herzog's thought. An argument in favor of the ordinary is well supported by conflicts that can't be regarded as romantic. The story should be ordinary.

Yet make no mistake, this is a novel of ideas. To underline every insight is to use much ink. The advantage of couching all of this thought into a novel is that, paradoxically, the aphorisms can stand on their own. They don't have to be absorbed in, or tailored to a broader philosophical scheme or thesis. Herzog writes to Schopenhaur, and I wonder if Bellow would share Nietzsche's appreciation of Schopenhaur's willingness to contradict himself, to affirm that all contradiction can not be ironed out of experience. Man is not a syllogism.

Just as our fall from grace provided us with a necessary distance to recognize and appreciate, though not comprehend, God, so does thought and art augment our experience, make us more aware of it, and allow us to frame it differently. However, Herzog gains no actual, practical guidance as to the living of his own life. Witness the mess that is Moses Herzog's life. "But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanation."

"Herzog" requires reflection and re-reading. There are moments of tedium, but it remains tremendous force in favor of humanity. "We have ground to hope that a Life is something more than such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible, and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light." But there is light. This is life-affirming, melancholy, and inspiring. True art.

The modern consciousness.......2007-04-06

Herzog is a novel showing Bellow writing at his highest pitch: all that wide and deep intelligence, deep water thinking, the formidable awareness of American postwar society and its origins throughout history, the dynamic social and personal forces that clutter around a man's head, clouding his thinking.

I can't think of a single post war novel that features better characterisation than Herzog. Moses is a prime Bellovian character - formidably intellectual, though directing his intellect not at any specific practical means, but more a custodian of the soul, a deep moralist. He wants to know how a man should live his life in the modern world; does the individual consciousness have any significance any more?

Although one of the most intelligent men in America, Herzog is clueless when it comes to the practicalities of life. His second wife, Madeline, a strong willed woman has cuckolded him for his erstwhile friend, Valentine Gersbach, a man who swings his wooden leg 'like a gondolier', and taken custody of his daughter. Moses goes through the gears of mental instability during the few summer weeks over which the novel takes place. He writes impassioned letters, all unsent, to philosophers, presidents, successful academic colleagues, ultimately God, frenzidly trying to work out his personal plight, deeply probing deeply Tolstoy's maxim that kings are the slaves of history, the individual life is the highest form of consciousness.

Amidst a cast of superbly drawn characters - Will and Shura, his practical, wealthy, conventionally successful brothers, his manipulative ex wife, his sensual Latin lover Ramona, his shrink, his lawyer, Moses gradually works towards some sort of pact, an acceptance with modern reality, a way to let the wild forces of modernity run their course without struggling too much.

One caveat - Bellow writes in a strongly masculine tradition. He is not one of these kaleidoscopic voices that hones in on a wide range of view points. His locus is the highly academic, intelligent, male (and laced with Jewish) consciousness. Not so fashionable these days. This novel may not be for everyone.

THE REAL DEAL.......2007-01-02

There's big-time grade inflation on this forum and no one is guiltier of this practice than me. I feel that if the book is entertaining, fits together tightly, stretches my thinking, and has passages of beauty, well, give it five stars. As the author of two novels that were finally self-published, I figure: Why make success even harder for the author?

Within this context, I'd say that HERZOG is also a five-star book, except that it's much much better. This is because in each of these categories--entertainment, structure, insight, and beauty--HERZOG is truly superb. It's off the charts.

The narrative line of HERZOG is simple. Essentially, this presents the thoughts and experiences of Moses Herzog over a few days as he travels from New York to Martha's Vineyard, back to New York, then to Chicago and ultimately to the Berkshires.

But as Herzog travels (and writes his zany letters), Bellow provides a spectrum of many characters who are both fully realized and who offer some choice to Herzog, which is somehow a reflection of, or parallel to, his own problems. The amazing thing about this is that these choices always come out of character. No one in HERZOG is simply a thin veil worn by Bellow to preach or to fill out a point in the argument.

Can the universe be considered benevolent? Or is reality crazy, cruel, and mercenary? These are the questions that torment Herzog on his journey. Certainly, there are plenty of high-minded professorial letters, with Herzog heckling Nietzsche and so on. But many of these letters are simply educated fun and it's the people that Herzog knows who really carry and explore the argument. It's absolutely brilliant stuff.

At the same time, Bellow organizes many of these characters in "V". At one corner is Moses Herzog, a self-absorbed academic who, in his own mind, is benevolent albeit befuddled. At another is Madeline, his ex-wife, in whom craziness and selfishness mix in a single dark brew. Then, Bellow arranges his characters on this "V" so that differences gradually narrow and ultimately disappear in Herzog's brother Willie, who helps Herzog at his nadir.

Near the end of this novel, Herzog plays a game with his little daughter June: try to distinguish between the world's shortest tall man and its tallest short man, its hairiest bald man and its baldest hairy man. Ultimately, this is also what Bellow does with his characters, showing that benevolence and pragmatism can finally exist in a single decent and sane person.

The flawless structure of this novel, however, is only part of its brilliance. Here's my favorite bit of Bellow's prose. It's funny, probably a professorial reference to Whitman, and straight out of Herzog's character: "...what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home..."

READ THIS GREAT BOOK

I cannot perpetuate this myth of greatness.......2006-09-29

I cried. No, scratch that, I sobbed...from boredom.

a very strong (metaphysically and concretely speaking) ) well-rounded novel.......2006-05-21

This was more my speed. I have to say saul bellow writes in a manner that is appealing to me, because he aptly dives into philosophy and sociological issues without a frenzied style like some other heavyweights in literature. I noticed the lack of heavy fragmentation right off, yet there was enough to give the reader a sense of jumping in and out of moses' head and into the world around him. I particularly liked the book's attention to the many distractions that we face everyday. Moses represents the moral character of people trying to live by ideas, but he is continually distracted from doing so, because of the many different practical issues that spring up. For instance, moses has to decide what he is going to do with his house in the berkshires (so it won't become more of a money pit than it already has) and he continually has to make practical decisions regarding Madeleine. In academia one does tend to work a lot with ideas, but as humans we all must address many, many practical issues which tend to keep a person from completely retreating to the "ivory tower." Bellow does an excellent job of representing the stress of trying to reconcile ideas with practicality in a relatively straightforward prose. One of the main contradictions that we all must face, which bellow has handled very well, is sexual attraction and consciousness. It seems if moses had really done a check on whether Madeleine was a good fit for him, he would have immediately decided to move on. Instead, he seemed caught up in Madeleine's sexual attractiveness and its strong effect on nearly every man she met.

Henderson the Rain King (Penguin Classics)

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I didn't like it...
Absurd but engaging Africa, a great writer.
A LARGE MAN, A SPECIAL FRIEND AND A LION CUB
Inspirational and Entertaining Story of one Man's Search for Meaning
All for Joni Mitchell

Henderson the Rain King (Penguin Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Humboldt's Gift (Penguin Classics)
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ASIN: 0140189424

Customer Reviews:

I didn't like it..........2007-04-01

The blurbs on the book cover promised laughs. There weren't any. This book made the MLA 100. I'm mystified why. It is competently written, I admit, but Henderson is an unlikable jerk, and the dialogue given him by Bellow is ridiculous. I didn't care if Henderson lived or died; I didn't care what Henderson thought; I didn't care about the book. I wanted to hurry up and finish the damned thing, already.

Absurd but engaging Africa, a great writer........2007-03-24

First of all who am I to review a Pulitzer prize winner? Anyway, this book was very highly recommended to me by my friend an English college professor. He knew I had lived for two years in Africa and enjoyed good writing.

The verdict: Bellow is undoubtably a great writer. This book is an unusual vehicle to showcase his talent. I had a hard time liking the Henderson in the book, the main character, too much of an ugly american but with a subtle side with some charitable nature. The Africa detailed here is too fantastic, a tribal fantasy but it is a clever way to bring the adverturesome Henderson into contact with King Dahfu. King Dahfu is the highly educated African caught between the western world and his traditional home. Some of the best writing in the book comes in the dialogue between Henderson and Dahfu, man's stuggle for meaning but in an entertaining way with just enough humor.

There are some brilliant lines in this book, lines that make you pause to savor them, scenes vividly painted and strong emotion, enough here that makes me want to read more from Bellow even if it isn't about Africa.

A LARGE MAN, A SPECIAL FRIEND AND A LION CUB.......2007-03-22

This is such an entertaining novel. Henderson is a colorful and honest narrator and his story becomes surprising real to the reader. It has been over a week since I finished Henderson the Rain King and it is still vivid in my memory. I started my Saul Bellow collection with the Adventures of Augie March and I did not find Augie to be a likeable hero. Henderson is a very flawed man, but is touching in his struggles.This book is a brilliant reminder of the powers of friendship.

Inspirational and Entertaining Story of one Man's Search for Meaning.......2006-08-06

In this book, Saul Bellow creates one of the most colorful and interesting characters in American Literature. Eugene Henderson is an eccentric millionaire restlessly struggling with a lack of purpose and an inner-voice that keeps crying out "I want, I want." In order to find meaning in his life and silence this voice inside him, he travels to the deepest reaches of the African jungle.

There, stricken with a constant fever and facing challenges including wrestling with a tribal warrior and foraging on locusts for survival, the 'unkillable' Henderson will stop at nothing to acquire this enlightenment. His adventures, which can be quite comedic at times, are rewarded by the wisdom he obtains from the tribal leaders including the highly educated and equally eccentric King Dahfu.

The result is a very inspirational and entertaining story that will stay with you for a long time.

All for Joni Mitchell.......2006-07-29

Its strange what leads us to read books. With so many out there, what makes us decide (a book by it's cover?) on one book over another is interesting in and of itself. I decided to read this book only becuase it was the inspiration for Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" song. I had to find out why.

I found the quotes she drew the lyric from, but also found I loved the book as well. I almost never read fiction (see my review list) but I am glad I read this one. Is that helpful to you? I doubt it, but a good book it is and that can't be a bad thing..

Saul Bellow: Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (Library of America)

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Bellow Vol.2
A beautiful edition of three powerful works by an American master
The best of Bellow in one great volume

Saul Bellow: Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (Library of America)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962: The Wayward Bus / Burning Bright / Sweet Thursday / The Winter of Our Discontent (Library of America)
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ASIN: 159853002X
Release Date: 2007-01-11

Customer Reviews:

Bellow Vol.2.......2007-02-06

Another great collection of Bellow's works. Hope the Library of America comes out with the next volume sooner than a year.

A beautiful edition of three powerful works by an American master.......2007-02-06

These are three very fine, even great, novels. Of course, one doesn't simply dash through Bellow. Each page requires and rewards close reading. While Bellow has been criticized for putting some things in his novels to show off his vast erudition, I found those details interesting and that they contributed to an understanding of the characters in each story.

The first novel is also the shortest. "Seize the Day" is about a middle-aged man who has lost his way in life. Tommy Wilhem can't escape his father or his wife. He hasn't ever found a way to get a footing in life or to carve out a place of success for himself. Tommy's mother died too soon, and it seems his father is living too long. Not that we wish the old guy would die, but because he is so focused on himself that he has become a competitor to his son and does not respond as much of a father, let alone an indulgent one. The wife Wilhelm has left won't give him a divorce (this is before no-fault divorces) and is using everything at her disposal to punish Tommy. Should Tommy surrender and come home emasculated? Yes, Wilhelm has or had a girlfriend, but he doesn't even pull that off well.

Tommy is so desperate for approval that he first went to Hollywood to become the movie star a crooked agent said he could be. The central part of the story involves the investment strategies of Dr. Tamkin. Tommy hopes against reason that Tamkin can succeed and get him not only out of the financial pit he is in, but make him a success so he can finally be his own man. Well, a man of any kind. Some read the end of the story as Tommy finding a place for himself at last and that he will turn things around. I think this is a quite optimistic gloss on what the text actually says.

"Henderson the Rain King" is actually a lot of fun. While many have made the observation that Eugene Henderson's initials, the big gun, Africa, and hunting all betoken a satire of Hemingway, the writing is nothing like his. There is no doubt that Bellow is poking fun at a great many schools of then modern writing, but he is also dealing with the same kinds of themes teased out in "Seize the Day", but in comic form and drawn on a much larger canvas.

Henderson is a huge and physically imposing middle-aged man who is quite wealthy. However, he didn't earn the money, nor was he supposed to get it by inheritance. His father didn't have much use for him, but the favored son died and so the $3 million went to Eugene when dear old Dad died. Henderson was also quite unsuccessful in love, though he did have some adventures along those lines. He can never settle on anything because of the inner voice that cries out "I want, I want, I want". He is able to still the voice for a time with each new thing he tries, whether it is pig farming, playing the violin, painting, taking on a new lover, or adventuring in Africa.

It is this adventuring in Africa that provides the central adventures of the story and the title of the book. It is so much fun that I have to leave it for you to read and enjoy. It isn't all comic, though there are some serious, and some tender moments. The ending does leave the door open for hope that Henderson has found a way to quiet that voice at last. However, it is also possible to read it as another temporary respite and that Eugene will need to find another distraction to throw himself into in order to find another spot of peace.

"Herzog" is unquestionably a masterpiece. This book seems to be the fulfillment of Bellow's desire for "an American novel that might more optimistically search for the `sealed treasure' of ordinary life" [from the entry for 1960 of the chronology provided in this edition]. The actual story of the book occupies only a few days in the life of Moses Elkanah Herzog. Don't you think that name is significant? Is he Moses the lawgiver? Hardly. What about the liberator - the one drawn forth in the reed basket or the one who draws his people out of slavery from Egypt to the Promised Land? Or is Bellow using ironically? What about the contrast between the English - American Moses verses the Yiddish - Hebrew Moshe that we hear him called by his stepmother? Which is he, really? Is he both the assimilated American still rooted in his childhood Yiddish? The middle name, Elkanah, means "God created" and refers to several different Levites (priestly class) in the Bible. Might this be a reference to his being a professor? A Ph.D.? The idea that the modern priests are the professors and educated elite? Again, there would be a certain sense of irony here, because Moses has quit his job, and a great deal of the book is him rejecting and commenting on the whole range of modern thought (as it was in the early 1960s).

Herzog is worn out. And very much like Tommy Wilhelm and Eugene Henderson, he suffers from a kind of impotence of the soul. His promiscuity is actually evidence of the sickness in his soul rather than a sign of robustness. He has former wife and son he threw over for a beautiful younger model, but she threw him over and cuckolded him with his "best friend" and took the daughter they had away to Chicago. It is obvious that Herzog wants her as a kind of possession and how that beauty makes him feel about himself. But it is a story that is richly played out in this large novel. Along the way, Herzog also had a longish relationship with a Japanese woman who was devoted to him, but he threw her away, too. At the time of the novel, he is involved with a strong woman named Ramona, and one of the results of her strength, which he needs and loves, is to run away from her to visit some friends. Immediately after arriving at his friends' home, he flees them, as well.

The story is famous for his impotent letter writing to historical figures, world authorities, friends, enemies, doctors, shrinks, and many other folks. But he rarely sends any of them. He does send a telegram to Ramona towards the end of the novel.

This is an amazingly detailed work that achieves a great deal in revealing the inner life of its protagonist. It was a best seller in its day and won the national book award. It is hard for me to believe that a great many of those who bought it read it from cover to cover. Maybe I am wrong. The topics of divorce, sexual affairs, cuckoldry, and madness were much more taboo than it would soon become. Maybe it was those subjects that caught the imagination of the public. However, there is nothing sensational or erotic in this work of art. That would be left to the pulp novelists such as Jacqueline Susann and an army of others beginning a few years later.

I do want to share one contrary thought that kept coming back to me as I read these novels. To these post-this and post-post-that sophisticates for whom all belief is provincial and even childish and for whom their sexual desires and phantasies become their gods and all important self-definition. Look at the wreckage of your lives, the lost wives, husbands, and children. Look at the lack of lasting happiness. Notice the need for pharmacological assistance to fight depression. Might I suggest something? Make your family the center of your life and give up the sexual fantasies and dalliances. Keep your children close and set aside the things that detract from these foundational values. Oh, I know this sounds so hick and, worst of all, center-of-the-country values. But it really isn't that. It is a form of happiness that actually works. Maybe it doesn't make for interesting novels, plays, movies, or TV shows, but those matter nothing at all. Keep your first wife or your first husband, (after you chose each other carefully - not for narcissistic reasons) and both focus on each other and your kids. Life will actually be better, and you will need a lot less legal and chemical help. Really.

All three of these novels are quite memorable. Bellow's importance has been recognized as has the quality of his work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and was also given many other awards throughout his life. "Seize the Day" was made into a movie starring Robin Williams in 1986, but I can't find it in print anywhere. One of the things I do wonder about is having twenty-year-old college students read these works. It isn't that they can't read them, of course they can. However, it is hard for me to see how they can relate to these middle aged folks without having lived more and experienced more of the vagaries of real life.

This is a fine edition from the Library of America with a great chronology of Bellow's life and some notes on the text.

The best of Bellow in one great volume .......2007-02-04

This remarkable volume contains what are in my opinion the three best novels of Bellow. One is the remarkable short novel, 'Seize the Day' the second is his African adventure the wildly comic 'Henderson' the third , his arguably best book, 'Herzog'. Herzog is his great meditation on history and civlization as he traces five - days in the life of Moses Herzog, a former university teacher, a historian, who is struggling to survive in the wake of his divorce from his second wife. In the course of this work Herzog writes letters to the living and the dead, including the famous dead a feature which gives special life to the book. In 'Seize the Day' the upper West Side of New York is the scene of the hero, Tommy Wilhelm's loss of a hold on his own life. As he pleads for money with his successful patronizing father Dr. Adler he falls into the clutches of the charlatan- wiseman Temkin and blows his last seven- hundred dollars on a speculative venture Temkin has recommended. The pathos of this tale of money- machine- murder of the soul- is great. It is a masterpiece of concise comic description and deep insight into the human heart. The final funeral scene is a truly great one.
These novels are among the finest twentieth- century American Literature has given us.
'Library of America' has done a service by putting them together in one most attractive volume.

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My Favorite Bellow Novel
Bellow's Epic
Bellow is a master
no title
Among the Most Entertaining Bellow Novels

Humboldt's Gift (Penguin Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Herzog (Penguin Classics)
Seize the Day (Penguin Classics)
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Ravelstein (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

ASIN: 0140189440

Customer Reviews:

My Favorite Bellow Novel.......2006-05-21

This is my favorite Saul Bellow novel of the several I have read. It is based on the life of the amazing poet Delmore Schwartz, and chronicles the deterioration and fall of a man of genius. Bellow obviously loved Delmore, and the protagonist in this work is viewed sympathetically, but with candor. Bellow was at the height of his powers when he wrote this fine novel. I recommend it highly for its fascinating plot, great character development, and style of prose.

Bellow's Epic.......2006-03-29

Humboldt's Gift is one of the greatest American novels of the XX century; I have confirmed it myself after reading and rereading it. And as it's expected with a major work like this, many have complained about it. Really I have nothing to criticize this book, but I would have put more descriptions in it. Anyway, the use of literary technical devices (as Bellow was aware of this) for making the prose alive is superb.

A story as this had to be told in the First Person narrative voice. The novel is mostly retrospective, and the speaker, Charlie Citrine, the typical consonant/dissonant narrator. One begins to read it and seems like a dreary ocean of words: there are no chapter numbers, anything but spaces, to tell you that something had just been said. Anyway, these spaces separate the meditations of Charlie on Von Humboldt, his many women, some major parts of his life... like pauses, from one thought or remembrance to the another... But what is the present of this novel that takes us to review Citrine's life since the 1930s? You really can't easily find it, but the "narrative present" consists only of four months (from December 1973 to April 1974). The rest of the novel's temporal structure lingers between the 1930-40s (when Citrine's friend, von Humboldt, was at the peak of his career), the 1950s and from there on.

So, much happens during the four winter months of 1973-1974, but is little told, because the account of the past will complete it all... His remembering of his past, Charlie Citrine's own account, its furious and full of anecdotes, and Bellow's continuous scene changes help us to be entertained permanently. Not expect to find an ordered restrospective of a life here: the book is quite inductive, built from particular bits to finally give a whole panorama of a life. Memories come and go, and later are completed; we happen to be reading a passage in 1956, but then we are back ton 1974, and then back to WWII time. Past events are simply evoked through the exercise of voluntarily recalled memories: Bellow collects them as they are pertinent to the story, bit by bit, so you don't know everything until you have read the whole book.

So why to read this book that seems so monstrous in size and so difficult at first glance? Well, it's worth the tour through America's last 60 years of existence. And it's also a way to understand better Saul Bellow, as a writer, an intellectual and a human being. There is so much faith and hope in this book that you can compare to Henderson The Rain King or The Adventures of Augie March, both picaresque-like. It's a page-turner, something rare to find in a pure literature roman. And not that boring (not in theme, but in prose), as The Victim, or Dangling Man. But among all, it's beautiful, because is us, humans, and Bellow knows how depict our flaws and virtues in an almost unnoticed manner; he is a master of depicting naturally human life.

Writers physically die, but prevail in their books. Joseph Brodsky once said that the battle against time was always going to be won by writers and poets. Saul Bellow, who passed out in 2005, has prevailed.

This is not a book to relax; is one to read and enjoy, because an individual's life story is not relaxing; in fact, can be dissappointing.

Bellow is a master.......2006-02-26

I loved reading "Adventures of Augie March," "Herzog", "The Deans' December, but "Humboldt's Gift" was my favorite Bellow novel. So full of rich narrative and characterizations, and like any good writer, some ambiguous passages to keep readers on their toes. All the criteria of a great novel are within it's pages - catharsis, redemption, neurosis, scholarly research, the edict of modern society to change it's ways or face annihilation. Along with Roth and Updike, Bellow has to be one of the greatest 20th century writers.

no title.......2006-01-27

What a read! and listen. I simultaneously read and listened to this book on tape. And that was a good way to get through it and appreciate it. Fabulous combination of James Joyce and Woody Allen. This book won the Pulitzer (1976) and that same year Bellow won the Nobel Prize. Surely Cantabile is one of the most marvelous characters in all literature.

Among the Most Entertaining Bellow Novels.......2005-12-10

I am a Bellow fan and have read 12 of his 13 novels and created an amzon guide: "A Guide to Reading Saul Bellow."

In case you are new to Bellow, his writings and themes reflect his life, his writings, and his five marriages during his five active decades of writing. He hit his peak somewhere around the time of "Augie March" in 1953 and continued through to the Pulitzer novel "Humbolt's Gift" in 1973. He wrote from the early 1940s through to 2000. His novels are written in a narrative form, and the main character is a Jewish male, usually a writer but not always, and he is living in either in New York or Chicago. Bellow wrote approximately 13 novels plus other works. Bellow progressed a long way as a writer over the five decades. This story was written at the end of the prime of his career and is nothing like the early novels "Dangling Man" or "The Victim" written 30 years earlier. Those were heavy slow reads. "Dangling Man" is often boring, and Bellow was in search of his writing style in that period of the 1940s. The present novel is light reading, written in an easy to follow style.

"Humbolt's Gift" has all the trademark Bellow ingredients: a writer struggling to create his next work, a messy divorce, travel - here to Madrird, problems with money, the relationship to a wealthy brother, and a tie to a fellow writer or celebrity. Here the other writer is a former friend now dead, Von Humbolt Fleisher, a poet from Geenwich Village in New York and one time Princeton Professor. It is one of his more upbeat and entertaing novels. It has one flaw: a weak plot. Somewhere around the middle one realizes that this is all about writing and entertaining the reader with prose, and less about a coherent story. It is mostly a series of narrative stories and flashbacks, with the flow of the narrative making tangent after tangent off the main story line of the novel. The book is not as detailed nor as rich in prose as "Herzog," which I consider to be a brilliant novel, but this present work is an entertaining and certainly an enjoyable read.

The narrative is by a Bellow like character, Charlie Citrine, an older 60 something writer with a 20 something girlfriend, Renata, and a wife, Denise, seeking support payments. He is befriended by Cantabile, a Chicago minor crime figure with a Ph.D. student wife. The latter is studying Humbolt's life and works.

This is an entertaing read and I recommend it as an introduction to Bellow. It is set mainly in Chicago, but has travels to Houston, New york, Paris, and Madrid. There are many flashbacks in the style of "Herzog" but it is lighter than "Augie March" and more entertaining than "Mr. Sammler's Planet" or the later novel "The Dean's December." Is it his best work? It is definitely one of his monumental works, and won a Pulitzer - his only one. It is not as complicated as a few of his other primary novels such as "Augie March" and "Herzog" but it is a solid 487 pages and entertaining. In reading the novel, after reading about eight other Bellow novels, it became clear to me why he was awarded the Nobel Prize and other awards. He is able to create the right balance between his narrative style, the story, the characters, the prose, and the sometimes futility of modern life.

As a side note Charlie Citrine makes a number of comments on writing - which one assumes are Bellow's own philosphy - and we learn that primary is the consideration or goal to entertain. This seems to be reflected in all his novels and especially in Ravelstein, where it is hard to separate the real professor Bloom from the Ravelstein caricature.

Highly recommend.

Seize the Day (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

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Brilliant Jewish anti hero in a cannibalistic financial world
Williams the actor
Very good
Pathetic Tendency Made Funny
And then he snapped

Seize the Day (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140189378

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant Jewish anti hero in a cannibalistic financial world.......2007-03-20

An interesting film adapted from Saul Bellow, the famous Nobel Prize winner. Here the character, a middle-age Jewish man, is accumulating all kinds of difficulties: he is fired, he is separated from his wife who hassles him for money, he is rejected financially and emotionally by his own father, he is fooled by a fake finance wizard who practically robs him of his money, and I should say etc and so on. The character is perfectly hysterical in an absolutely paranoid direction and we can see him going down little by little and it all ends up on a total dead end blind alley impasse. In other words a perfect loser in the Jewish culture who ends up crying on his own fate in the funeral of some other guy he does not know at all among people who don't know him nor he them. That is pure Saul Bellow who dedicated his whole writing career to such losers and total misfits in the world of making money not only to survive, not even to live, but to exist. In other words he is self immolating himself at the social stake of financial failure. Brilliant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

Williams the actor.......2007-01-12

I know it sounds sacreligious, but I've never thought Robin Williams was funny and the harder he tries to be funny the more unfunny I find him. I was really impressed therefore, the first time I saw him in a dramatic performance a few years ago and it was Seize the Day. I had no idea that he had such talent. He communicates everything that there is to be felt in the story by the strength of his performance.

Very good.......2006-11-19

This thin novel is a joy to read because it is a bright study of a man who is vaguely tortured by his own circumstances of the "now." The past haunts him. The future terrifies him. There is no wiggle room for this sorry fellow because the whole of the book takes place in one day's time. I could not help but see it as an ingenious story that dwelled insistently on the strength of palpable context and bare emotion.

Pathetic Tendency Made Funny.......2006-06-03

A middle-aged man at his wit's end; his past, present, and future seem bleak. Mr. Bellow wrote with ease and humor about such a man. Although the character is in his forties and has barely jumped over one hurdle after another throughout his whole life due to his own naivety, he continues to make more mistakes than ever. The story takes place only in one day. In about 115 pages the reader finds out what makes the man he is. It is also up to the reader to conclude Mr. Bellow's account of this man. Mr. Bellow's writing was fluent where he detailed each appearance and action thoroughly with a very good sense of humor. It is a fast and interesting read.

And then he snapped.......2005-03-13

Very faithful adaptation of Saul Bellow's novel, with Robin Williams in the lead role as Tommy Wilhelm, a 40-year-old man down and out on his luck and howling at the world because of it. Williams lets out all the stops and creates a harrowing and harried character who loses all hope. A powerful picture.

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library Classics)

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The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library Classics)
Ralph Ellison
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (Modern Library Classics)
Shadow and Act

ASIN: 0812968263
Release Date: 2003-09-09

Amazon.com

Ellison was a believer in the hybrid nature of American culture, a position clearly articulated in the essay "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks." Elsewhere, he writes about the music of jazzmen Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian, the fiction of Richard Wright and Stephen Crane, and about the creation of his novel, Invisible Man that rocketed him to fame. This book brings together the contents of Ellison's Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, as well as a dozen or so other essays and talks previously uncollected.

Book Description

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. “Ralph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

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Necessary Questions
See Evan Sayet's analysis...
Nice Intro...
An analysis of historical importance
Uncanny

Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Opening of the American Mind

ASIN: 5551868680

Book Description

The Closing of the American Mind, a publishing phenomenon in hardcover, is now a paperback literary event. In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today. It has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change.

Customer Reviews:

Necessary Questions.......2007-05-22

This was the most difficult fun and knowledge seeking free time reading I have done in years. At times Dr. Bloom was speaking to me, freely articulating my own disappointment with the academy. His comments about the free fall of traditional inquiry and the current status of the social sciences and humanities was piercing. Since I was born in the 50s, the transformations he spoke of that became so apparent to him in the 80s were experienced in the public school and university careers of those of us born in the first decade or so after WWII.

In spite of the delight in reading Dr. Bloom's astute observations of those years, in no time, the next pages would lose and confuse me, forcing a re-read and consultation of other sources. Ironically, this exemplified the point he was making since those areas had to do with philosophy. (Plato is next.) Nonetheless, this is a marvelous work of incredible intellectual depth by a very scholarly man who was aware, and somewhat saddened, by the trends of his times.

The book is long, requires real dedication, but in my opinion it was well worth the read. The first two thirds of the book seem as if they are not related to one another, but then, by the last part, especially the chapter The Sixties, all the detail about the German School, Marcuse, Plato, converge. Although the 60s seemed groundbreaking and exciting to the youth of its time (including me), Bloom ventures to state, quite convincingly, that it was void of intellectual gravitas due a highly stylized, yet simplistic view of its philosophical and historical context.

Dr. Bloom also greatly delves into the role of the university and his founded fears of the compromise of the special status of inquiry in the academy being wedded to popular culture and politics. He repeatedly asserts that there's a lack of support, in his experience even among some professors, to uphold the bigger questions of existence, philosophy, religion, science, culture - what have you - that transcend popular culture and politics.

On the topic of politics, one might be tempted to state that Dr. Bloom took sides, and that his opus has left-right implications. It may have appeared a bit critical of what is commonly thought of as the left, but the notion of being "progressive", of throwing off tradition, of being less discriminate about what is good or evil, ugly or beautiful, right or wrong, tends to be the territory of the modern left. I never felt he was simply being opinionated, but that he just attributed his assessment of the late 20th century academia to certain movements and philosophies that permeated many areas of the university. Dr. Bloom greatly laments what the university has become because he clearly loved the institution and believed it was indispensable to the knowledge and mysteries of mankind.

See Evan Sayet's analysis..........2007-05-19

[...]
Evan says that Prof Bloom's book influenced him, but Evan has expanded on the reasons why Modern Liberals act like they do.

I recommend everyone watch Evan's talk.

Nice Intro..........2007-04-24

The best part about this book was the intro. In fact all you need to understand what the late Mr. Bloom was trying to put forth is in the introduction.

The rest of the book is a chore to read. The confusing and tedious writing style leads to a lot of re-reading of sentences to figure out the point the author is trying to make. Someone should have counseled Mr. Bloom that "Brevity is the soul of wit."

An analysis of historical importance.......2007-03-26

This is a truly outstanding analysis of what went wrong with America in our generation, and how the erosion of our freedom accompanies the decomposition of our culture.

That said, let's get the other editorial reviews off the back page and up front where folks can see them:

The New York Times Book Review:
An unparalleled reflection on today's intellectual and moral climate....That rarest of documents, a genuinely profound book.

The New York Times:
Remarkable....hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy.

The Wall Street Journal, William Kristol:
Brilliant....No other book combines such shrewd insights into our current state....No other book is at once so lively and so deep, so witty and so thoughtful, so outrageous and so sensible, so amusing and so chilling....An extraordinary book.

The Washington Post Book World, S. Frederick Starr:
Rich and absorbing....A grand tour of the American mind.
.

Uncanny.......2007-01-21

Reading this book is uncanny because all the vague, hushed impressions that I have had over the years since I first came to consider myself a reader and thinker, are here laid out pretty articulately and well. As a high school student I saw the apathy around me and hated it, it depressed me horribly. As a college student (now in my third year) I am finally finding that I am not alone in thinking that something is missing both from education and from the whole spiritual (if you will) surround of American life. Bloom makes excellent points on just about every page. A review complaining about Bloom's "misreading" of Nietzsche made me snicker. The philosopher with a hammer is apparently infinitely hijackable. Okay, so I am no Nietzsche expert, but from what I could tell, Bloom read the man thoughtfully, which is really all that one can do with such a slippery figure.

I have to confess I have not finished the book but at page 100 I am sure it will give me a lot to think about, and not only does it provide good summary of Western social thought but also a way to think about these theories applying to reality, to today--arguing for the continued relevence of these dead thinkers. I always believed this--I just needed someone to push this home, eloquently argue it. Read this book! Even if this review of mine is less than perfect, pick up the real book. I think it's a great starting point to reading the thinkers themselves.

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