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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
Charlie Citrine is a decorated writer and what they used to call a swell, living the high life in Chicago. He has it all. A Mercedes, a high maintenance girlfriend, the best of everything. But all is not as great as it seems. He's on the brink of financial ruin. His ex-wife has sued him for more alimony, his expensive girlfriend is pushing him to marry her, and now he's run into the orbit of a smalltime hoodlum who aspires to get involved with Charlie and his affluent, intellectual life.
Charlie is haunted by the spectre of his old mentor, the now deceased poet, Humboldt Fleisher. He and Fleisher, once great friends, had become estranged and they were not in touch when Humboldt died. But even as Charlie reaches back into the past to connect with Humboldt. Humboldt reaches from beyond the grave with an unexpected bequest.
Charlie is doing that spiritual reckoning that people in mid-life often do, searching for meaning, looking up past friends and lovers, wondering whether death is the end of the line, or if there's something beyond. He's caught between the life of the mind and the carnal urges of the body.
His questings and travails are sometimes hapless and comic, but also serious and moving. This book captures what it's like to be an intellectual in anti-intellectual America, where rough and tumble, vulgar commerce is king. Flash and substance both attract.
Instantly one of my favorite books.
Charlie is haunted by the spectre of his old mentor, the now deceased poet, Humboldt Fleisher. He and Fleisher, once great friends, had become estranged and they were not in touch when Humboldt died. But even as Charlie reaches back into the past to connect with Humboldt. Humboldt reaches from beyond the grave with an unexpected bequest.
Charlie is doing that spiritual reckoning that people in mid-life often do, searching for meaning, looking up past friends and lovers, wondering whether death is the end of the line, or if there's something beyond. He's caught between the life of the mind and the carnal urges of the body.
His questings and travails are sometimes hapless and comic, but also serious and moving. This book captures what it's like to be an intellectual in anti-intellectual America, where rough and tumble, vulgar commerce is king. Flash and substance both attract.
Instantly one of my favorite books.
Bellow’s novels are simply something else. In the department of prose, he is the best. A style of his own completely — erudite, precise, and yet American, slightly vulgar. One can refer to the best example of this style by reading the first lines of perhaps his best novel The Adventures of Augie March: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way; first to knock, first admitted. Sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow is in one sense eulogizing, in another just meditating on his late friend, Delmore Schwartz, who inspired the titular Humboldt Von Fleisher. As with Herzog and Augie, there is much of Bellow in the main character, and many of the experiences in the novel are stories that have been recorded first hand by Bellow or by his friends. In Letters, a collection of Bellow’s correspondences, there is a letter to Bellow’s childhood friend, then an old man, Dave Peltz (who inspired George Sweibel in the story, I believe) apologizing for using a story from Peltz’s life in Humboldt’s Gift.
“Now, David the nice old man who wants his collection of memory-toys to play with in old age is not you! You harm yourself with such fantasies. For the name of the game is not Social Security. What an error! Social Security is an entirely different game. The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing. Touch them with your imagination and I will kiss your hands.”
This book touches themes that with a fellow Bellow devotee I would love to discuss, the pull of charismatic people, with whom Citrine (the main character) gets totally wrapped up, echoing Augie’s adventure down Mexico way. The disability to fend off the women that charm and break down the vulnerable Herzog and Citrine and Augie. The wonderful value of a strong memory and connection to family and childhood. Multiple characters in Humboldt’s Gift use Charlie as an extension of their memory, like when Naomi’s daughter asks where her great uncle had lived.
I almost wrote “overall” just now, but there isn’t much of an overall. Putting some words down about this wonderful novel and even more wonderful author was enough. Please, if you’re reading this far, give Augie a try, give Herzog a try. They’re heady and philosophical and so on, but they’re worth fighting through a page or two of sometimes unintelligible(to me, a luddite) rambling to find that through line of deep love and humanity.
In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow is in one sense eulogizing, in another just meditating on his late friend, Delmore Schwartz, who inspired the titular Humboldt Von Fleisher. As with Herzog and Augie, there is much of Bellow in the main character, and many of the experiences in the novel are stories that have been recorded first hand by Bellow or by his friends. In Letters, a collection of Bellow’s correspondences, there is a letter to Bellow’s childhood friend, then an old man, Dave Peltz (who inspired George Sweibel in the story, I believe) apologizing for using a story from Peltz’s life in Humboldt’s Gift.
“Now, David the nice old man who wants his collection of memory-toys to play with in old age is not you! You harm yourself with such fantasies. For the name of the game is not Social Security. What an error! Social Security is an entirely different game. The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing. Touch them with your imagination and I will kiss your hands.”
This book touches themes that with a fellow Bellow devotee I would love to discuss, the pull of charismatic people, with whom Citrine (the main character) gets totally wrapped up, echoing Augie’s adventure down Mexico way. The disability to fend off the women that charm and break down the vulnerable Herzog and Citrine and Augie. The wonderful value of a strong memory and connection to family and childhood. Multiple characters in Humboldt’s Gift use Charlie as an extension of their memory, like when Naomi’s daughter asks where her great uncle had lived.
I almost wrote “overall” just now, but there isn’t much of an overall. Putting some words down about this wonderful novel and even more wonderful author was enough. Please, if you’re reading this far, give Augie a try, give Herzog a try. They’re heady and philosophical and so on, but they’re worth fighting through a page or two of sometimes unintelligible(to me, a luddite) rambling to find that through line of deep love and humanity.
I hated this book with a passion. I hated the self importance of the narrator, I hated the people he surrounded himself with, and the society he'd got himself into, only to try and escape. It reads a little like an extremely boring Laurel and Hardy movie. His old buddy Humboldt sounded like the only likeable guy on the planet, and he was pretty much done for. This took me forever read, and that's about all I can manage to write about it after finishing it weeks ago. A week after finishing New York magazine published a big piece about Bellow, and it seems he's a bit like Marmite. I'm definitely on the dislike side of the opinion.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Saul Bellow is really good at writing as it turns out. Kind of meandering but extremely funny. Can't get enough 20th-century literary fiction about neurotic Jewish men
As sprawling as "Augie" and as neurotic as "Herzog," "Humbolt's Gift" may be the most ambitious novel of Bellow's I've read in the way it tries to weave its ideas about culture, the artist, and aging sexuality into a funny quasi-satire that tells the ordeals of smug Pulitzer-winner Charlie Citrine. It doesn't come off perfect all the time, and it may be a bit overlong, but when you compare it to the diffuse irony that characterizes so much contemporary fiction today, you have to give it credit for going out on such intellectual and emotional limbs. Just short of a classic, I'd say.
Review on https://alexalvizo.com/2022/11/17/humboldts-gift/
This...I wanted to like this more than I did. But this character is just so passive and so self-righteous and so blandly misogynistic that I couldn't get excited about any of it.