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levitybooks 's review for:
Humboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
Video review here
Humboldt's Gift has some outstanding paragraphs. Here's my favourite:
It's a woman giving advice to Charlie Citrine for finding a wife in later life. Despite the quote's candid brilliance, Charlie continues to fill most of the book with pathetic and dishonest metaphysical monologues that mostly distract him from taking control of his life. He's musing on love while planning affairs.
The women of Charlie Citrine are the only characters that speak any true sense in this utterly dull stroll of a book, and their parts are disappointingly short and scattered. Charlie's thoughts are intellectually complex and there are some nice abstract ideas in the musings but they are so densely written and take up such a sizeable part of the book. It feels like Bellow had a lot of great ideas and needed to make a novel where there was so much space of nothing happening to shove them all into internal monologues.
To date, I've found that Saul Bellow, Richard Ford and Wallace Stegner write well from the perspective of middle-aged men, that sometimes have midlife crises, young kids and marital difficulties. But I think these tropes are already outdated for my generation, as people have kids later and marry less, so I'm getting wary of the use of what I can learn from this. Stegner shows a peaceful fare, Ford a man working uphill, but Bellow's characters always seem floundering, lost and unlikeable. Bellow often writes a main character that is unlikeably weak main character. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift is difficult to take seriously, his approach to writing and life seem too mismanaged.
I don't want to be able to empathize with the mundanity of a narcissistic, scatter-brained, failing poet. The life of real artists are often fascinating, but Bellow's characters (based on Herzog and Humboldt's Gift) have no clear desire and are entirely the fault of their own ruin. Bellow's characters reject reality and passion — they are dead alive. They are escaping living through abstract daydreams through which they think they are 'finding themselves'. I think I have a distaste for these books as it seems Bellow may be ridiculing self-reflection by taking it an unrealistic extreme with a character who is not self aware. I might be personally biased, being a PhD student, thinking he is adding to the trope of the 'bumbling academic' by presenting a distorted view of academic life.
Humboldt's Gift is the absolutely ideal depiction of a boring academic. But it does it to death over 400 pages, being only useful for someone trying to learn this role for a film. The only thing worse in the world than cruely is idleness, and it is most unbearable to see in well-educated people. I keep coming back to Bellow due to Christopher Hitchen's recommendation, but it's time to throw in the towel and resolve that I just don't get it yet. Maybe when I'm older.
Humboldt's Gift has some outstanding paragraphs. Here's my favourite:
"Communicate to them what you have to have and right away they tell you they've got exactly what you need, although they never even heard of it until just now. It's not even necessarily lying. They just have an instinct that they can supply everything that a man can ask for [...] So you go around looking for a woman like yourself. There ain't no such animal [but she says] 'Your search is ended. Stop here. I'm it.' "
It's a woman giving advice to Charlie Citrine for finding a wife in later life. Despite the quote's candid brilliance, Charlie continues to fill most of the book with pathetic and dishonest metaphysical monologues that mostly distract him from taking control of his life. He's musing on love while planning affairs.
The women of Charlie Citrine are the only characters that speak any true sense in this utterly dull stroll of a book, and their parts are disappointingly short and scattered. Charlie's thoughts are intellectually complex and there are some nice abstract ideas in the musings but they are so densely written and take up such a sizeable part of the book. It feels like Bellow had a lot of great ideas and needed to make a novel where there was so much space of nothing happening to shove them all into internal monologues.
To date, I've found that Saul Bellow, Richard Ford and Wallace Stegner write well from the perspective of middle-aged men, that sometimes have midlife crises, young kids and marital difficulties. But I think these tropes are already outdated for my generation, as people have kids later and marry less, so I'm getting wary of the use of what I can learn from this. Stegner shows a peaceful fare, Ford a man working uphill, but Bellow's characters always seem floundering, lost and unlikeable. Bellow often writes a main character that is unlikeably weak main character. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift is difficult to take seriously, his approach to writing and life seem too mismanaged.
I don't want to be able to empathize with the mundanity of a narcissistic, scatter-brained, failing poet. The life of real artists are often fascinating, but Bellow's characters (based on Herzog and Humboldt's Gift) have no clear desire and are entirely the fault of their own ruin. Bellow's characters reject reality and passion — they are dead alive. They are escaping living through abstract daydreams through which they think they are 'finding themselves'. I think I have a distaste for these books as it seems Bellow may be ridiculing self-reflection by taking it an unrealistic extreme with a character who is not self aware. I might be personally biased, being a PhD student, thinking he is adding to the trope of the 'bumbling academic' by presenting a distorted view of academic life.
Humboldt's Gift is the absolutely ideal depiction of a boring academic. But it does it to death over 400 pages, being only useful for someone trying to learn this role for a film. The only thing worse in the world than cruely is idleness, and it is most unbearable to see in well-educated people. I keep coming back to Bellow due to Christopher Hitchen's recommendation, but it's time to throw in the towel and resolve that I just don't get it yet. Maybe when I'm older.