Ravelstein (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (original 2000; edition 2001)

En la vida de Saul Bellow su relación con el filósofo Allan Bloom fue decisiva. Tanto que en esta novela Bloom se convierte en Abe Ravelstein, un brillante profesor universitario que, gracias al éxito de su revolucionario libro, se convierte en un intelectual millonario. Pasión y conocimiento se unen en esta deslumbrante narración.
En el Hotel Crillon de París, Abe Ravelstein y su amigo Chick celebran, entre lujos y excentricidades, el éxito del revolucionario libro del primero. Tras años como brillante profesor universitario, con un salario que no le permitía alcanzar la vida hedonista y fastuosa que tanto deseaba, Ravelstein se ha convertido por fin en un intelectual millonario. Así se inicia la travesía por las emociones y las ideas de estos dos fascinantes personajes, que recorren en sus valientes conversaciones temas como el amor, la historia, la política y el humor.

This is Bellow's final novel, a sketch of a single character, or better put, a single relationship: the friendship between Ravelstein, the great-souled title character, a professor of political philosophy, and Chick, a novelist and confidante of Ravelstein, and the novel's narrator. The novel is a roman-a-clef based on Bellow's friendship with the controversial political philosopher Allan Bloom, who was most famous for his jeremiad on American education The Closing of the American Mind. But the novel isn't really *about* Bloom in the sense that it attempts to defend or even explore his ideas on education or politics or the classics in any depth. Rather, the book is about Ravelstein as a man, with passions, quirks, failings, and great loves, and it is about Ravelstein and Chick as American Jews after the Holocaust, especially the former's sense of having to continually fight the threat of extinction, whether it be physical or cultural. And of course it is about death, and the power of literature to defy it, though the novel would probably pose this as a question rather than advance it as an argument. I have a weakness for Bellow generally, but this ranks up there with the best of his work. ( )

When it was published critics called it one of Bellow's "minor" books. I disagree. It's softer and subtler than Augie March or Henderson the Rain King, but the narrative exuberance here is unsurpassed even by Bellow himself in earlier decades. Because the book is at its heart the story of friendship between two men who loved one another, Bellow's inability to write about women except in a misogynistic way is a minor flaw in this particular book, one that barely registered for me here, even though the same flaw made Herzog impossible going for me. Ok, I can do without women flaunting their pudenda in their ex-husband's faces as a mean way of saying goodbye, a scene that happens in Ravelstein, and in at least one other Bellow book. Augie March, I think. But even so. While reading Ravelstein I could forgive these trespasses, because I was swept along by the life force of these two main characters, Chick and Ravelstein. I was captivated by the depth of their friendship, and I was moved by this clear-headed, thoughtful, beautiful exploration of their own mortality as it played out in these pages. Only Henderson the Rain King came close for me to Ravelstein's moving and deep a portrayal of friendship and mortality. ( )

I’m not entirely convinced that the roman à clef is a worthy vehicle for a great writer. And there is little doubt that Saul Bellow is a great writer. Nor is there much doubt that numerous characters in his novels have been modelled directly on people he knew intimately, friend and foe. However, only a few of his novels so explicitly take up this correspondence with the non-fictional that they typically get labelled in this manner. Ravelstein, Bellow’s last novel, is one of these. In it, he sketches the larger-than-life character of a professor by the name of Ravelstein, who is a thinly disguised stand-in for Bellow’s friend, Allan Bloom. These are Ravelstein’s last days. He is HIV-positive, subject to numerous rare and unrelenting infections, but determined to see his way out of the world in much the way that he lived in it: unapologetic, highly opinionated, self-centred (in every sense), and fiercely devoted to his close friends. It took Bellow some eight years after the death of Bloom to pen this fictionalized memoir. In the interim he himself came perilously close to death. And so the book as a whole became as much a meditation on death as it is a depiction of one particular death.

At least part of the novel holds up well. In particular, the first section, which was published as a standalone in The New Yorker, is tightly written and full of the flamboyance that ever after gets associated with Ravelstein (and now Bloom). Thereafter the novel begins to unravel. Arguments and anecdotes re-emerge almost without change from their first mention. It begins to seem like Bellow is circling his subject but can’t quite lock it down. He meanders. He is subject to only periodic lucidity. He falters under the weight of the burden that his friend has laid upon him in requesting that he take up this biographical task. Maybe it’s all a brilliant representation of decline. Or, less charitably, it might simply be a less than fully edited effort. At some point, at any rate, I began to lose interest both in the subject, i.e. death, and in the subject, i.e. Ravelstein.

Any writer who lasts as long as Bellow will produce works of varying quality. Fortunately there are many other titles in his oeuvre that will capture, challenge, and delight the reader even if this is not one of them. ( )

I've read all of Bellow, the best American novelist during my lifetime, though Updike became, in his last books, a close second--and a better reviewer.
I do not say this simply because Bellow's best friend at the U MN was my Ph.D. advisor Leonard Unger: a charming photo of them on a sofa smoking and laughing, with their wives framing it, was printed in Rolling Stone in the 50s. (In the pic I think Leonard was just cracking one of his myriad jokes, probably a Jewish joke, according to his wife Sherley who was there.) Bellow and Unger together composed, over lunch at the UMN Faculty Club,
a translation of the first four lines of the Wasteland by TS Eliot (Leonard's early specialty)--into Yiddish.
Ravelstein's a remarkable book partly bec Bellow wrote it in age, and partly bec it's nearly impossible to focus a gripping novel on the life of an academic, here Bloom. My line on the book: It would have been a much better, wittier book had Bellow written it about another of his friends, Leonard Unger. ( )