Scan barcode
tudorcosma's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
lghrndn's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
although slow at times, Ravelstein is a beautiful meditation on the ways that human lives intertwine with one another and the persistence of hope that "the pictures won't stop." I also appreciated the phenomenological observations about Abe Ravelstein, Hyde Park, and intellectual circles in the 20th century.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism, Terminal illness, Suicidal thoughts, Medical content, and Death
bibliomaniac2021's review against another edition
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
davidellison's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
blackoxford's review against another edition
5.0
Ways of Dying
This is a novel about ageing; more specifically about that stage in life when death has become a persistently conscious prospect. But about whose ageing and whose death is debatable - that of the eponymous Ravelstein; or of the narrator, Chick, who is preparing to write Ravelstein’s biography; or, perhaps, of the reader who may have yet to reach that point of maturity? So I don’t concur with the conventional wisdom that Ravelstein is merely or primarily a tribute to the friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow. For me the key is the very different way in which each of Bellow’s literary characters confront the ending of his life.
Ravelstein, the man, is a biographical treasure trove: charming, eccentric, urbane, connected, clever and rich. Chick, although somewhat older, is a type Yiddish has the perfect word for - a nebbish, defined functionally as a person who upon entering a room makes it feel as if someone has just left. Compared to Ravelstein, Chick is not merely normal, he is biographically boring in his hapless normality.
Nevertheless, unlike Ravelstein, Chick develops. He has an intellectual and emotional history. Ravelstein has apparently never varied in his tastes, behaviour or attitudes since childhood. In fact his entire being seems set ab ovo. Ravelstein is mentor to the older man but his advice never varies: Be more like me, how I have always been.
So, while there is a great deal of admiring description by Chick of Ravelstein, the real ageing process is happening in Chick. It is he who, contemplating the facts of Ravelstein’s life, suddenly finds himself maturing and therefore questioning his own standards. “For seventy-odd years I had seen reality under these same signs,” he discovers to his dismay. In other words, he is learning and therefore changing through thoughts of death.
This is the kind of breakthrough (or agony) Ravelstein will never experience. Rather he has, despite his eccentricity, insisted on a fundamental type of conformity and single-minded consistency. Hence his criticism of Chick, “Mankind had first claim on our attention and I [Chick] indulged my “personal metaphysics” too much, Ravelstein thought.” Ravelstein was not one for speculation but for practical action. He could learn only about the how not the why of existence.
The result is that Ravelstein’s flamboyance, influence and wit simply fade with his declining physical state. He is quite literally less and less of what he has always been. Never experiencing self-doubt, he has no need to question this trajectory. Isn’t death the same terminus for us all? One must succumb but with valorous disregard not changes of character; or so he clearly believes.
Chick on the contrary is a man with ‘issues’. He is a mediocre writer, with immigrant parents, of unresolved Jewishness, divorced, married now to a much younger woman, and , above all, subject to the “charismatic order” exuded by Ravelstein. He too is on a trajectory into old age, but a rather more uncertain one than Ravelstein. Ravelstein, among other things, didn’t have to get over Ravelstein’s death.
It is this uncertainty and Chick’s reaction to it which is the real action of the book. He paradoxically grows or expands towards death (or near-death anyway since he’s around to write about it). Bellow handles that reaction with graceful subtlety - Bloom was his friend after all - but nonetheless decisively. His will be a different kind of death than Ravelstein’s.
The central question that Bellow is raising, therefore, is ‘how does one best go about dying?’ Ravelstein was his last work, and he was ill when he was writing it. So how could the subject of death not been on his mind? His friendship and admiration for Bloom provides just the right context for an otherwise potentially dull philosophical analysis, or, worse, a literally deadly lapse into terminal solipsism. I think his artistic problem was not the subject itself but the way to present it palatably to those of us who haven’t quite reached the same stage of old age. In this I believe he has succeeded completely.
Postscript 10Jan19 some interesting background on Ravelstein: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward
This is a novel about ageing; more specifically about that stage in life when death has become a persistently conscious prospect. But about whose ageing and whose death is debatable - that of the eponymous Ravelstein; or of the narrator, Chick, who is preparing to write Ravelstein’s biography; or, perhaps, of the reader who may have yet to reach that point of maturity? So I don’t concur with the conventional wisdom that Ravelstein is merely or primarily a tribute to the friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow. For me the key is the very different way in which each of Bellow’s literary characters confront the ending of his life.
Ravelstein, the man, is a biographical treasure trove: charming, eccentric, urbane, connected, clever and rich. Chick, although somewhat older, is a type Yiddish has the perfect word for - a nebbish, defined functionally as a person who upon entering a room makes it feel as if someone has just left. Compared to Ravelstein, Chick is not merely normal, he is biographically boring in his hapless normality.
Nevertheless, unlike Ravelstein, Chick develops. He has an intellectual and emotional history. Ravelstein has apparently never varied in his tastes, behaviour or attitudes since childhood. In fact his entire being seems set ab ovo. Ravelstein is mentor to the older man but his advice never varies: Be more like me, how I have always been.
So, while there is a great deal of admiring description by Chick of Ravelstein, the real ageing process is happening in Chick. It is he who, contemplating the facts of Ravelstein’s life, suddenly finds himself maturing and therefore questioning his own standards. “For seventy-odd years I had seen reality under these same signs,” he discovers to his dismay. In other words, he is learning and therefore changing through thoughts of death.
This is the kind of breakthrough (or agony) Ravelstein will never experience. Rather he has, despite his eccentricity, insisted on a fundamental type of conformity and single-minded consistency. Hence his criticism of Chick, “Mankind had first claim on our attention and I [Chick] indulged my “personal metaphysics” too much, Ravelstein thought.” Ravelstein was not one for speculation but for practical action. He could learn only about the how not the why of existence.
The result is that Ravelstein’s flamboyance, influence and wit simply fade with his declining physical state. He is quite literally less and less of what he has always been. Never experiencing self-doubt, he has no need to question this trajectory. Isn’t death the same terminus for us all? One must succumb but with valorous disregard not changes of character; or so he clearly believes.
Chick on the contrary is a man with ‘issues’. He is a mediocre writer, with immigrant parents, of unresolved Jewishness, divorced, married now to a much younger woman, and , above all, subject to the “charismatic order” exuded by Ravelstein. He too is on a trajectory into old age, but a rather more uncertain one than Ravelstein. Ravelstein, among other things, didn’t have to get over Ravelstein’s death.
It is this uncertainty and Chick’s reaction to it which is the real action of the book. He paradoxically grows or expands towards death (or near-death anyway since he’s around to write about it). Bellow handles that reaction with graceful subtlety - Bloom was his friend after all - but nonetheless decisively. His will be a different kind of death than Ravelstein’s.
The central question that Bellow is raising, therefore, is ‘how does one best go about dying?’ Ravelstein was his last work, and he was ill when he was writing it. So how could the subject of death not been on his mind? His friendship and admiration for Bloom provides just the right context for an otherwise potentially dull philosophical analysis, or, worse, a literally deadly lapse into terminal solipsism. I think his artistic problem was not the subject itself but the way to present it palatably to those of us who haven’t quite reached the same stage of old age. In this I believe he has succeeded completely.
Postscript 10Jan19 some interesting background on Ravelstein: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward
jonathantoews19's review against another edition
2.0
This feels like Humboldt's Gift but with a philosophy professor instead of a poet. As a huge fan of H's G, I'm honestly at a lost as to the difference. I found a Johns Hopkins grad student's paper on the Internet that apparently goes into it, but I don't have any institutional credentials so I don't know what the fuck it's supposed to be.
But if Ravelstein is just more Humboldt's Gift, it's still something I'd be excited about, going into it. And I was, at first -- the scene wherein Bellow's "intellectual hero" explains why he loves Michael Jordan so much was a really cool intersection of modernity; something I think that makes Ravelstein invaluable regardless of what I say (i.e., because we get "Bellow in the '90s," which is a trip).
The dark side of bringing Saul Bellow's fiction to a contemporary setting is that it brings with it the need to frame actions/views of his characters in that same lens. All the problematic shit in Herzog, Henderson, Sammler, etc., is easier to gloss over because it's so detached from the world we live in today. But the things that come of out Ravelstein and company's (and, thereby, Bellow's) mouths are just downright ignorant at times, and maliciously so in the worst cases.
I think what's lost in Bellow's fascination with the "intellectual elite" is any sympathy for the rest of us. "The Adventure of Augie March" had great respect for the demimonde, whereas his later career works seem to forget about real people and their struggles in favor of the cultural hegemony found within the University of Chicago (which is bananas, when you think about it, seeing as it's surrounded on all sides by the lumpenproletariat).
And that's a real shame. I love Saul Bellow because when I read "Humboldt's Gift" for the first time I had never before seen someone talk about ideas and language so telescopically before and it absolutely blew me away. "Ravelstein" continues in that tradition, I suppose, but it does so at the cost of exposing the cultural, racial, and class-conscious blind spots that exist when you keep your big, brilliant head in the clouds for so long.
But if Ravelstein is just more Humboldt's Gift, it's still something I'd be excited about, going into it. And I was, at first -- the scene wherein Bellow's "intellectual hero" explains why he loves Michael Jordan so much was a really cool intersection of modernity; something I think that makes Ravelstein invaluable regardless of what I say (i.e., because we get "Bellow in the '90s," which is a trip).
The dark side of bringing Saul Bellow's fiction to a contemporary setting is that it brings with it the need to frame actions/views of his characters in that same lens. All the problematic shit in Herzog, Henderson, Sammler, etc., is easier to gloss over because it's so detached from the world we live in today. But the things that come of out Ravelstein and company's (and, thereby, Bellow's) mouths are just downright ignorant at times, and maliciously so in the worst cases.
I think what's lost in Bellow's fascination with the "intellectual elite" is any sympathy for the rest of us. "The Adventure of Augie March" had great respect for the demimonde, whereas his later career works seem to forget about real people and their struggles in favor of the cultural hegemony found within the University of Chicago (which is bananas, when you think about it, seeing as it's surrounded on all sides by the lumpenproletariat).
And that's a real shame. I love Saul Bellow because when I read "Humboldt's Gift" for the first time I had never before seen someone talk about ideas and language so telescopically before and it absolutely blew me away. "Ravelstein" continues in that tradition, I suppose, but it does so at the cost of exposing the cultural, racial, and class-conscious blind spots that exist when you keep your big, brilliant head in the clouds for so long.
More...