Saul Bellow (1915–2005)
Author of Herzog
About the Author
Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada on June 10, 1915. He attended the University of Chicago, received a Bachelor's degree in sociology and anthropology from Northwestern University in 1937, and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. He taught at several universities including show more the University of Minnesota, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, New York University, and Boston University. His first novel, Dangling Man, was published in 1944. His other works include The Victim, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories, More Die of Heartbreak, and Something to Remember Me By. He received numerous awards including the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and three National Book Awards for fiction for The Adventures of Augie March in 1954, Herzog in 1964, and Mr. Sammler's Planet in 1970. Also a playwright, he wrote The Last Analysis and three short plays, collectively entitled Under the Weather, which were produced on Broadway in 1966. He died on April 5, 2005. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Saul Bellow in France on September 29, 1982
Series
Works by Saul Bellow
Novels, 1944-1953 : The Dangling Man; The Victim; The Adventures of Augie March (2003) — Author — 364 copies, 2 reviews
Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (2007) — Author — 281 copies, 2 reviews
Bellow: Novels 1970-1982: Mr. Sammler's Planet / Humboldt's Gift / The Dean's December (Library of America) (2010) — Author — 136 copies
New World Writing - Number 12 — Contributor — 7 copies
Best-in-Books: Great American Short Novels - Lost Horizon / Red Pony / Third Man / Single Pebble / Light in the Piazza / Seize the Day (1966) 4 copies
הסיפורים הנבחרים 4 copies
The Arts & the Public 3 copies
A Father-to-Be 3 copies
Romanzi 3 copies
Romanzi 2: 1960-2000 (Herzog; Mr. Sammler's Planet; Humboldt's Gift; A Theft; The Bellarosa Connection; Something to Rmember Me by; Ravelstein) (2008) — Author — 3 copies
Kirjailijan työ : Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Kurt Vonnegut (1985) 3 copies
Romanzi 1: 1944-1959 (Danglng Man; The Victim; The Adventures of Augie March; Seize the Day; Henderson the Rain King) (2007) 3 copies
Presença de mulher 2 copies
2002 2 copies
What Kind of Day Did You Have? 2 copies
Recent American fiction; a lecture presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fu (2012) 2 copies
הרצוג 2 copies
Le opere 1 copy
Saul Bellow MOSBY'S MEMOIRS AND OTHER STORIES Viking Press 1968 1st Edition [Hardcover] unknown 1 copy
℗L'℗uomo in bilico 1 copy
The Adventures Of Augie March (Everyman's Library Classics) by Saul Bellow (21-Sep-1995) Hardcover 1 copy
Das Opfer Roman 1 copy
Conex Bellarosa 1 copy
כוכבו של מר סאמלר 1 copy
Trăiește-ți clipa 1 copy
Recent American Fiction. 1 copy
ממשות 1 copy
Heros 1 copy
Presunto innocente 1 copy
רוולסטין 1 copy
BEL Acosado 1 copy
The Noble Savage 3 1 copy
לירושלים ובחזרה: דיווח אישי 1 copy
Jugar a perdre 1 copy
Ne muoiono più di crepacuore 1 copy
Agarra o dia 1 copy
The Noble Savage 2 — Editor — 1 copy
Eine silberne Schale. Erzählung. Aus dem Amerikanischen übertragen von Walter Hasenclever. Nachbemerkung von Utz Riese. (1983) 1 copy
Orange Souffle / The Wrecker 1 copy
Oběť 1 copy
Άρπαξε τη μέρα 1 copy
תפוס את היום 1 copy
הנדרסון מלך הגשם 1 copy
Associated Works
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Translator, some editions — 1,012 copies, 7 reviews
The World of the Short Story: A 20th Century Collection (1986) — Contributor — 511 copies, 4 reviews
Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times (2001) — Contributor — 479 copies, 5 reviews
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2: 1865 to Present (1979) — Contributor, some editions — 135 copies
Published and Perished: Memoria, Eulogies, and Remembrances of American Writers (2002) — Contributor — 41 copies, 1 review
The Second Gates of Paradise: The Anthology of Erotic Short Fiction (1997) — Contributor — 38 copies
Fifty Years of the American Short Story from the O. Henry Awards 1919-1970 (1970) — Contributor — 17 copies, 1 review
New World Writing: Sixth Mentor Selection - A New Adventure in Modern Reading (1954) — Contributor — 12 copies
Literary imagination, ancient and modern : essays in honor of David Grene (1999) — Contributor — 9 copies
Fifty Years of the American Short Story from the O. Henry Awards 1919-1970, Volume 1 (1970) — Contributor — 3 copies
32 Współczesne Opowiadania Amerykańskie - Tom I — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Bellows, Solomon
- Birthdate
- 1915-06-10
- Date of death
- 2005-04-05
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Chicago [1939]
Northwestern University [1937]
University of Wisconsin - Occupations
- writer
- Organizations
- U.S. Merchant Marines
- Awards and honors
- Nobel Prize (Literature, 1976)
PEN/Malamud Award (1989)
National Medal of Arts (1988)
Croix de Chavalier des Arts et Lettres (France)
American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award ( [1952])
Man Booker International Prize Finalist (2005) (show all 10)
Jefferson Lecture (1977)
Emerson-Thoreau Medal (1977)
Chicago Literary Hall of Fame (2010)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature ∙ 1958) - Relationships
- Bellow, Adam (son)
Bellow, Alexandra (wife)
Botsford, Keith (colleague)
Tarcov, Edith (friend)
Howland, Bette (protégée) - Short biography
- Saul Bellow est un écrivain et universitaire américain.
Il est né en 1915, à Lachine, une banlieue industrielle de Montréal, le 10 juin 1915. Ses parents ont émigré deux ans auparavant de la Russie du tsar, de Saint-Pétersbourg. Le père de Saul, Abraham Bellow – le « gentilhomme » évoqué dans le roman le plus autobiographique, Herzog –, après avoir fait faillite comme boulanger, exerce plusieurs petits métiers.
Enfant, Saul Bellow grandit dans un quartier miséreux de Montréal, au contact de la communauté juive. Lorsqu'il a neuf ans, la famille Bellow émigre de nouveau et s'installe dans un quartier polonais du West Side de Chicago.
Saul a une enfance rêveuse et solitaire – studieuse aussi, car il est très tôt attiré par les choses de l'esprit. L'influence juive est prépondérante; il suit d'ailleurs un enseignement talmudique.
Étudiant brillant, il fréquente l'université de Chicago, puis la Northwestern University où il étudie l'anthropologie et la sociologie. Jeune écrivain, pour gagner sa vie, il collabore quelque temps à l'Encyclopaedia Britannica tout en enseignant dans un collège de Chicago. Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il sert dans la marine marchande; dès la fin du conflit, il s'installe à New York.
Au confluent de trois cultures - américaine, russe et yiddish -, Saul Bellow se veut un moraliste, un chroniqueur de son siècle et un découvreur d'idées nouvelles. Cet humaniste est peut-être l'écrivain américain qui récapitule le mieux l'expérience des immigrants ou fils d'immigrants à la découverte de leur Amérique, en porte-à-faux dans leur pays et dans leur époque : de cette instabilité, de ce désarroi du moi, il a fait le thème de toute son œuvre, laquelle atteint rapidement une audience internationale et est couronnée du prix Nobel en 1976. - Nationality
- Canada (birth)
USA (naturalised) - Birthplace
- Lachine, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Places of residence
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Place of death
- Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
- Burial location
- Morningside Cemetery, Brattleboro, Vermont, USA
- Map Location
- Illinois, USA
Members
Discussions
One Book One Chicago Fall 2011 in Chicagoans (August 2011)
The Adventures of Augie March - eromsted in Review Discussions (December 2009)
Reviews
I'm going to rave a little here. Do forgive me in advance. This is my second reading of this masterpiece. It was shortly after publication of Humboldt's Gift that Bellow won the Nobel Prize. That in itself usually doesn't mean much, mostly the literature awards are given out for political reasons these days, but I think in the case of Bellow Oslo got it right. From the start the storytelling is brilliant and it never flags. Charlie Citrine, a young man filled with a love of literature, show more writes to his hero poet Von Humboldt Fleisher from his home in Appleton, Wisconsin, and is invited to visit the great man in Greenwich Village. Citrine comes to New York just as Humboldt is hitting his sole crest of popularity because of his book of ballads. Humboldt, however, soon loses it all; drinking and medicating himself in a manner that can only be called suicidal. No wonder he's perpetually blocked now. In the meantime, Charlie Citrine, his protege, writes a hit Broadway play which is made into a hit Hollywood movie. Citrine is swimming in money. And Citrine's success can only be viewed by Humboldt in his madness as a betrayal. Humboldt comes to loathe Citrine whom he accuses of using his life as the basis for the main character of his play Von Trenck. When Citrine wins the Chevalier de Légion d'honneur from the French government, Humboldt hits the ceiling. "Shoveleer!," he writes, "Your name is lesion."
Charlie Citrine is one of the most fascinating characters to emerge from late 20th century American literature. What I admire so much about this book is its unflagging narrative thrust. Line by line it satisfies the reader on an almost physical level. The humor is laugh out loud. The erudition makes me giddy. Just how is it possible for Bellow to incorporate so much knowledge about literature into the book and not end up with some deadly boring piece of tripe? It's miraculous. Citrine is always talking about his reading (Rudolf Steiner, Santayana, Gide, Aristotle, and so on) which is deftly incorporated so as to reflect upon his own tribulations and those of the other characters. This is quite a rogue's gallery, too, consisting of both the high and the low: mobsters; crooked judges; writers; literary chislers, harridan exes; lawyers; Rubenesque golddiggers, old Russian bath house guys; blue collar guys; virtually all ethnicities and predilections as only a great American city like Chicago can produce. I've read all of Bellow's novels and this I think is his best one. I even prefer it to Augie March, which is saying something. This is also a great novel for those who want to know how to write a great novel. With this text in hand and one's own considerable talent on tap, why, you can't miss. It's all right here in black and white. Read it, please, and let me know what you think. show less
Charlie Citrine is one of the most fascinating characters to emerge from late 20th century American literature. What I admire so much about this book is its unflagging narrative thrust. Line by line it satisfies the reader on an almost physical level. The humor is laugh out loud. The erudition makes me giddy. Just how is it possible for Bellow to incorporate so much knowledge about literature into the book and not end up with some deadly boring piece of tripe? It's miraculous. Citrine is always talking about his reading (Rudolf Steiner, Santayana, Gide, Aristotle, and so on) which is deftly incorporated so as to reflect upon his own tribulations and those of the other characters. This is quite a rogue's gallery, too, consisting of both the high and the low: mobsters; crooked judges; writers; literary chislers, harridan exes; lawyers; Rubenesque golddiggers, old Russian bath house guys; blue collar guys; virtually all ethnicities and predilections as only a great American city like Chicago can produce. I've read all of Bellow's novels and this I think is his best one. I even prefer it to Augie March, which is saying something. This is also a great novel for those who want to know how to write a great novel. With this text in hand and one's own considerable talent on tap, why, you can't miss. It's all right here in black and white. Read it, please, and let me know what you think. show less
For the sake of brevity I'll give a grade to each short story in succession first and then a summary explanation afterwards for those who wish to run that marathon with me, now, here, I can live my fantasy of telling a young Solomon 'Saul' Bellow as his creative writing teacher with one of those old world accents that he's 'good but could be better' but at least better criticism than 'oh, well, that's interesting':
By the St. Lawrence: B+
A Silver Dish: B
The Bellarossa Connection: B+
The Old show more System: A-
A Theft: D-
Looking for Mr. Green: A
Cousins: A
Zetland: B+
Leaving the Yellow House: B
What Kind of Day Did You Have?: B-
Mosby's Memoirs: B-
Him with His Foot in His Mouth: B+
Something to Remember Me By: A
Afterword: A+ (Wherein the writer explains and even codifies his position, very well done and does wonders for explaining the works that had come before regarding both intent and execution, Bellow at his most iconoclastic and most steadfast)
I know this isn't a popular opinion, but Bellow is not a great writer. A good writer? Yes, certainly. A very good writer? At times, yes. But great? No, afraid not. The lows of the likes of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, as far as Jewish American fiction goes (the title of 'Jewish American Novelist apparently irked Bellow), may have been pretty dismal (Mailer's obnoxiousness, Roth's pathos to near pathological melodrama/whining, and Heller's seeming inability to escape from the shadow of Catch-22) but their highs were so much higher than what I've read so far of Bellow, they evinced from their respective oeuvres so much joy, so much angst, passion, anger, power, and a breadth of literary scope that Bellow just (from this collection and Dangling Man at least) cannot match. Also, it seems to me that Bellow isn't much of a storyteller. His disseminating of ideas is wonderful, but the narratives of some of the pieces in this collection feel tacked on, almost vestigial. Like Bellow was writing philosophical, literary or anthropological treatises (pick your poison) but he apparently remembered at some point that he's a novelist and should give these ideas some legs with characters, settings, voices, those sorts of things. But it's like taking a beautiful painting and putting a radio next to it with classical music playing, or a great movie with a man paid to sit next to the screen and give commentary at the theater.
But I gave this a four out of five. Why? Because Bellow's pros outweigh his cons here. And because I like lights at the ends of tunnels, I'll start with the negatives.
Bellow has an odd relationship with women, at least in his pages. There are way too many instances of women being depicted as unattractive in one way or another. Be they too fat, too skinny, with bulging or exaggerated physical features (usually faces and hands, though the male characters get it just as badly in description) and, to put it lightly, mentally inferior to most of the men, namely the protagonists, in their lives. They're not depicted as stupid by any means but too often they let out an exclamation of 'Oh, I just don't know!' or something to that effect to their male counterparts that comes off as both 'old fashioned' (sexist) and a bit too cutesy, as another reviewer put it, I think 'overly intellectualized and sexism made cutesy' in the vein of 'those gosh darn women!'. This is in large part why I rated A Theft so lowly, it takes the weaknesses of Bellow and explodes them, especially the issue of women characters. It's definitely the weakest piece of the collection.
But it's a molehill not a mountain, annoying but not, as my father would say 'a hanging offense'. Where Bellow loses points with me is in the repetitiousness of his settings and characters (seriously, how many different ways can you have older professorial gents, usually Jewish) look back on their lives and the great histories they lived through while coming to a revelatory, and usually somehow Jewish in origin but shot through the barrel of Western philosophy in execution, climax?). I understand that writers have their milieus that they feel comfortable in and, sometimes, Bellow hits it out of the park (The Old System, Him with His Foot in His Mouth, By the St. Lawrence) but just as often it's overly pretentious, overly allusive naval gazing that only returns to the plot when Bellow remembers to. Mosby's Memoirs and What Kind of Day Did You Have are particularly guilty of this though, like most of Bellow's work, the positives, the joys and genuine pleasure I got from these stories more than made up for the snobbishness and glacial pacing.
Dialogue is tough here, Bellow seems to strain under the lash of too many influences. He wants to be the street smart American Jew born of Russian Jews who's, at the same time, an American Jew who understands the folly of other American Jews and empathizing with European Jews whilst taking the best of both worlds and being able to see what they all can't. He wants to talk philosophy, anthropology, psychology, popular trends, old ideas, new ideas, Judaism, and on and on and on. With seemingly every story, and the dialogue along with every other aspect shows such strain that I'm surprised that his stories don't sink off the page and burrow in the ground or just burst from the pressure . And don't ask if Bellow's funny, when he tries, I cringe, but he's a wit, no doubt and occasionally manages a good joking slight or observation.
Bellow, despite the incredible praise showered on him (Martin Amis calling this collection 'Our greatest writer's greatest book', really?), has his detractors. Just from glancing at this wikipedia profile I saw that Vladimir Nabokov referred to him (privately) as a 'miserable mediocrity'. Now, I wouldn't go that far. Sure, Bellow is a bit too much like Dickens in his pacing and in his characters, there's an almost saccharine quality to even the dark aspects that, despite many claims to the contrary regarding both him and Dickens, to me can hardly be called 'realist'. There's an old fashioned austerity and earnestness to Bellow that almost borders on the severe at times. It's not Victorian, but it can be suffocating at times.
But what I enjoyed about Bellow more than anything else and what pushed this rating from a three to a four star was and is something quite simple: Bellow carries with him into each story a zest and enthusiasm for the craft that I've found lacking in many other of the 'greater' works. Cynicism and nihilism are great, hell, I love them both (irony there?) but if you don't give a damn about writing about life about most anything, then it just gets exhausting after a time to read about the meaninglessness of it all, the useless attempts at on and on and on. It's a rare writer that can espouse these things and be great, Bellow isn't one of these but he isn't trying to be. He writes with boldness and strength and in the words of John Updike (referring to Nabokov, again, a bit ironic here?) he writes prose ecstatically. And in works like Looking for Mr. Green and Something to Remember Me By this idea is best exemplified with this sense of literary expansiveness and adventurous exploration. Bellow does this so well that it almost clears him from his numerous shortcomings, and at times even makes the flaws into darker shades of a wonderful mosaic. show less
By the St. Lawrence: B+
A Silver Dish: B
The Bellarossa Connection: B+
The Old show more System: A-
A Theft: D-
Looking for Mr. Green: A
Cousins: A
Zetland: B+
Leaving the Yellow House: B
What Kind of Day Did You Have?: B-
Mosby's Memoirs: B-
Him with His Foot in His Mouth: B+
Something to Remember Me By: A
Afterword: A+ (Wherein the writer explains and even codifies his position, very well done and does wonders for explaining the works that had come before regarding both intent and execution, Bellow at his most iconoclastic and most steadfast)
I know this isn't a popular opinion, but Bellow is not a great writer. A good writer? Yes, certainly. A very good writer? At times, yes. But great? No, afraid not. The lows of the likes of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, as far as Jewish American fiction goes (the title of 'Jewish American Novelist apparently irked Bellow), may have been pretty dismal (Mailer's obnoxiousness, Roth's pathos to near pathological melodrama/whining, and Heller's seeming inability to escape from the shadow of Catch-22) but their highs were so much higher than what I've read so far of Bellow, they evinced from their respective oeuvres so much joy, so much angst, passion, anger, power, and a breadth of literary scope that Bellow just (from this collection and Dangling Man at least) cannot match. Also, it seems to me that Bellow isn't much of a storyteller. His disseminating of ideas is wonderful, but the narratives of some of the pieces in this collection feel tacked on, almost vestigial. Like Bellow was writing philosophical, literary or anthropological treatises (pick your poison) but he apparently remembered at some point that he's a novelist and should give these ideas some legs with characters, settings, voices, those sorts of things. But it's like taking a beautiful painting and putting a radio next to it with classical music playing, or a great movie with a man paid to sit next to the screen and give commentary at the theater.
But I gave this a four out of five. Why? Because Bellow's pros outweigh his cons here. And because I like lights at the ends of tunnels, I'll start with the negatives.
Bellow has an odd relationship with women, at least in his pages. There are way too many instances of women being depicted as unattractive in one way or another. Be they too fat, too skinny, with bulging or exaggerated physical features (usually faces and hands, though the male characters get it just as badly in description) and, to put it lightly, mentally inferior to most of the men, namely the protagonists, in their lives. They're not depicted as stupid by any means but too often they let out an exclamation of 'Oh, I just don't know!' or something to that effect to their male counterparts that comes off as both 'old fashioned' (sexist) and a bit too cutesy, as another reviewer put it, I think 'overly intellectualized and sexism made cutesy' in the vein of 'those gosh darn women!'. This is in large part why I rated A Theft so lowly, it takes the weaknesses of Bellow and explodes them, especially the issue of women characters. It's definitely the weakest piece of the collection.
But it's a molehill not a mountain, annoying but not, as my father would say 'a hanging offense'. Where Bellow loses points with me is in the repetitiousness of his settings and characters (seriously, how many different ways can you have older professorial gents, usually Jewish) look back on their lives and the great histories they lived through while coming to a revelatory, and usually somehow Jewish in origin but shot through the barrel of Western philosophy in execution, climax?). I understand that writers have their milieus that they feel comfortable in and, sometimes, Bellow hits it out of the park (The Old System, Him with His Foot in His Mouth, By the St. Lawrence) but just as often it's overly pretentious, overly allusive naval gazing that only returns to the plot when Bellow remembers to. Mosby's Memoirs and What Kind of Day Did You Have are particularly guilty of this though, like most of Bellow's work, the positives, the joys and genuine pleasure I got from these stories more than made up for the snobbishness and glacial pacing.
Dialogue is tough here, Bellow seems to strain under the lash of too many influences. He wants to be the street smart American Jew born of Russian Jews who's, at the same time, an American Jew who understands the folly of other American Jews and empathizing with European Jews whilst taking the best of both worlds and being able to see what they all can't. He wants to talk philosophy, anthropology, psychology, popular trends, old ideas, new ideas, Judaism, and on and on and on. With seemingly every story, and the dialogue along with every other aspect shows such strain that I'm surprised that his stories don't sink off the page and burrow in the ground or just burst from the pressure . And don't ask if Bellow's funny, when he tries, I cringe, but he's a wit, no doubt and occasionally manages a good joking slight or observation.
Bellow, despite the incredible praise showered on him (Martin Amis calling this collection 'Our greatest writer's greatest book', really?), has his detractors. Just from glancing at this wikipedia profile I saw that Vladimir Nabokov referred to him (privately) as a 'miserable mediocrity'. Now, I wouldn't go that far. Sure, Bellow is a bit too much like Dickens in his pacing and in his characters, there's an almost saccharine quality to even the dark aspects that, despite many claims to the contrary regarding both him and Dickens, to me can hardly be called 'realist'. There's an old fashioned austerity and earnestness to Bellow that almost borders on the severe at times. It's not Victorian, but it can be suffocating at times.
But what I enjoyed about Bellow more than anything else and what pushed this rating from a three to a four star was and is something quite simple: Bellow carries with him into each story a zest and enthusiasm for the craft that I've found lacking in many other of the 'greater' works. Cynicism and nihilism are great, hell, I love them both (irony there?) but if you don't give a damn about writing about life about most anything, then it just gets exhausting after a time to read about the meaninglessness of it all, the useless attempts at on and on and on. It's a rare writer that can espouse these things and be great, Bellow isn't one of these but he isn't trying to be. He writes with boldness and strength and in the words of John Updike (referring to Nabokov, again, a bit ironic here?) he writes prose ecstatically. And in works like Looking for Mr. Green and Something to Remember Me By this idea is best exemplified with this sense of literary expansiveness and adventurous exploration. Bellow does this so well that it almost clears him from his numerous shortcomings, and at times even makes the flaws into darker shades of a wonderful mosaic. show less
A brilliant commentary from forty years ago about how elites have manipulated the societies they dominate. In communist Bucharest, the government has carefully calculated to what degree its citizens should be exposed to pain and coercion by doing its best to anaesthetize familial, old world and Christian sensibilities. In eighties Chicago, American capitalist culture has designated a pleasure principal which is achieving the same dissociating milieu, and which is fine if you manage to show more succeed but devastating just as much, or even more so, to those who have no hope of doing so.
This conundrum presses in on the dean during a sudden visit to Caeucescu's Romania to attend the last illness of his mother-in-law. At the same time he must follow a court case in Chicago, about which he has written articles for Harper's. These articles have emphasised corruption in the city and, tellingly, the resultant savagery, despair and sheer rottenness there; and they have upset the University, the fashionable law fraternity, the county and city overlords.
A great novel, darker than any of Bellow's I've read before. You have to remain grateful that writers like this had the intellectual fire-power to deliver such challenging fiction, and to do it so well. show less
This conundrum presses in on the dean during a sudden visit to Caeucescu's Romania to attend the last illness of his mother-in-law. At the same time he must follow a court case in Chicago, about which he has written articles for Harper's. These articles have emphasised corruption in the city and, tellingly, the resultant savagery, despair and sheer rottenness there; and they have upset the University, the fashionable law fraternity, the county and city overlords.
A great novel, darker than any of Bellow's I've read before. You have to remain grateful that writers like this had the intellectual fire-power to deliver such challenging fiction, and to do it so well. show less
It's amazing to me that people argued about Great American Novels as recently as 2003, fifty years after Augie March settled the question. It even starts with "I am an American" and ends with "America"! How can it not be the GAM?!
I'll never tire of this book, the only modern inheritor of the picaresque tradition and the first since Huck Finn. It's different from everything else I've read by Bellow, consciously visceral and eclectic, a multisensory kaleidoscope of the American century. It's a show more goddamn long novel but somehow the creativity never lapses and the voice never wavers and never sounds writerly, despite being intensely literary as in this streetcar trip:
It was stiff cold weather, the ground hard, the weeds standing broken in the frost, the river giving off vapor and the trains leghorn shots of steam into the broad blue Wisconsin-humored sky, the brass handgrip of the straw seats finger-polished, the crusty straw golden, the olive and brown of coats in their folds gold too...
Or this description of the coalyard manager Happy Kellerman:
He was a beer saufer; droopy, small, a humorist, wry, drawn, weak, his tone nosy and quinchy, his pants in creases under his paunch; his nose curved up and presented offended and timorous nostrils, and he had round, disingenuous eyes in which he showed he was strongly defended.
Bellow is brilliant at punctuation; his sentences move not like rivers but like traffic, interruptedly, with trams and big shots' cars and stumblebums syncopating the flow. The novel is profoundly planted in the picaresque tradition: in its rambling plot, of course, the story of an American trying on everything for size, but also in its assertion of the primacy of the real, the tangible, the sensual world:
Everyone tried to create a world he can live in , and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
This is the reality-preferring, the reality-delighting, creed of the picaresque. It's an ironic inversion of Hamlet's spiritualist finger-wagging to Horatio. The world has more in it — more actual people, more dreams — than are dreamt of in your philosophy — turning the "philosophy" from the original "science" to the modern, hand-waving sense. Of "people generally": "they dug for unreality more than treasure, unreality being their last great hope because then they could doubt what they knew about themselves was true." This from the most hard-headed character in the novel, Mimi, who embodies resilience and pragmatism.
And the language here is such a treat, such a multifarious delight, it adds up to an alternate, better, reality of its own. Bellow stacks nouns like a gourmet burger chef: "...if I chose to be a lawyer, I wouldn't need to be a mere ambulance chaser, shyster, or birdseed wiseguy and conniver in two-bit cases." And he knows the power of the monosyllable: "blue gas stink in this hot brute shit of a street". Language is tactile, pungent, impinging on the ear: a band "began to pound and smite" and shortly after "clashed, drummed and brayed". These verbs are of the construction trade or the military, and they describe Bellow's tactile technique in this book.
The overriding theme of Augie's life (until he runs out of paper) is his clientism, his being serially adopted in his fatherlessness, his dependence on others as he gropes for his own identity: "Admitted that I always tried to elicit what I hoped for; how did people, however, seldom fail to supply it so mysteriously?" This is something I identify with — maybe in part 'cause of my race and gender, but even within the world of the story, and my world, Augie's and my caromings seem fortunate. But to what extent do Augie and I over-appreciate our dependence on others, our status as objects of fate? The novel take Heraclitus' "fate is character" for its leitmotif. To what extent is that true? Less and less I think so.
But I'll always love this book. It's a humongous beating heart of human sympathy, of love and trying to make things better. It's weird and sad (like at the end of chapter 4 when they commit Georgie to the institution — I cried) and full of dead-ends and wrong turns and schemes and capers. Rereading it caused me to fall five books behind schedule for my 2022 reading goal, and I don't regret a single second. show less
I'll never tire of this book, the only modern inheritor of the picaresque tradition and the first since Huck Finn. It's different from everything else I've read by Bellow, consciously visceral and eclectic, a multisensory kaleidoscope of the American century. It's a show more goddamn long novel but somehow the creativity never lapses and the voice never wavers and never sounds writerly, despite being intensely literary as in this streetcar trip:
It was stiff cold weather, the ground hard, the weeds standing broken in the frost, the river giving off vapor and the trains leghorn shots of steam into the broad blue Wisconsin-humored sky, the brass handgrip of the straw seats finger-polished, the crusty straw golden, the olive and brown of coats in their folds gold too...
Or this description of the coalyard manager Happy Kellerman:
He was a beer saufer; droopy, small, a humorist, wry, drawn, weak, his tone nosy and quinchy, his pants in creases under his paunch; his nose curved up and presented offended and timorous nostrils, and he had round, disingenuous eyes in which he showed he was strongly defended.
Bellow is brilliant at punctuation; his sentences move not like rivers but like traffic, interruptedly, with trams and big shots' cars and stumblebums syncopating the flow. The novel is profoundly planted in the picaresque tradition: in its rambling plot, of course, the story of an American trying on everything for size, but also in its assertion of the primacy of the real, the tangible, the sensual world:
Everyone tried to create a world he can live in , and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
This is the reality-preferring, the reality-delighting, creed of the picaresque. It's an ironic inversion of Hamlet's spiritualist finger-wagging to Horatio. The world has more in it — more actual people, more dreams — than are dreamt of in your philosophy — turning the "philosophy" from the original "science" to the modern, hand-waving sense. Of "people generally": "they dug for unreality more than treasure, unreality being their last great hope because then they could doubt what they knew about themselves was true." This from the most hard-headed character in the novel, Mimi, who embodies resilience and pragmatism.
And the language here is such a treat, such a multifarious delight, it adds up to an alternate, better, reality of its own. Bellow stacks nouns like a gourmet burger chef: "...if I chose to be a lawyer, I wouldn't need to be a mere ambulance chaser, shyster, or birdseed wiseguy and conniver in two-bit cases." And he knows the power of the monosyllable: "blue gas stink in this hot brute shit of a street". Language is tactile, pungent, impinging on the ear: a band "began to pound and smite" and shortly after "clashed, drummed and brayed". These verbs are of the construction trade or the military, and they describe Bellow's tactile technique in this book.
The overriding theme of Augie's life (until he runs out of paper) is his clientism, his being serially adopted in his fatherlessness, his dependence on others as he gropes for his own identity: "Admitted that I always tried to elicit what I hoped for; how did people, however, seldom fail to supply it so mysteriously?" This is something I identify with — maybe in part 'cause of my race and gender, but even within the world of the story, and my world, Augie's and my caromings seem fortunate. But to what extent do Augie and I over-appreciate our dependence on others, our status as objects of fate? The novel take Heraclitus' "fate is character" for its leitmotif. To what extent is that true? Less and less I think so.
But I'll always love this book. It's a humongous beating heart of human sympathy, of love and trying to make things better. It's weird and sad (like at the end of chapter 4 when they commit Georgie to the institution — I cried) and full of dead-ends and wrong turns and schemes and capers. Rereading it caused me to fall five books behind schedule for my 2022 reading goal, and I don't regret a single second. show less
Lists
Lucy's Long List (11)
Elegant Prose (1)
Jim's Bookshelf (1)
1940s (1)
Florida (1)
AP Lit (1)
Wishlist (1)
Short and Sweet (1)
1970s (1)
bound (1)
Chicago Books (1)
Epistolary Books (1)
Allie's Wishlist (1)
1970 Club (1)
Folio Society (1)
Reading LIst (11)
Five star books (3)
My TBR (3)
Jewish Books (3)
Favourite Books (4)
A Novel Cure (4)
1950s (2)
Nifty Fifties (2)
100 knjiga (1)
1960s (1)
Best First Lines (2)
. (2)
Unread books (2)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 142
- Also by
- 58
- Members
- 33,749
- Popularity
- #571
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 429
- ISBNs
- 942
- Languages
- 26
- Favorited
- 132
