Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow (PDF)

Description

With his uncanny wit and perception, Saul Bellow tells the story of Charlie Citrine, a young man whose life is reaching a critical moment. Over several years, Charlie’s almost obsessive love of literature has led him into a deep friendship with the renowned poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, and when Humboldt dies, the young man’s life rapidly begins to unravel. A stalling career and an ugly divorce feed Charlie’s instability, and he engages in dubious friendships and an unwise liaison with the wrong woman. Amidst the chaos of a life in shambles, Charlie emerges by virtue of a legacy left by his departed companion, a legacy that offers him a glimpse of a new trajectory.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The eponymous Humboldt’s gift was the MacGuffin of the novel, as Hitchcock defined it, that is, a mysterious object sought by the characters in the story. Humboldt’s Gift was also a book which eluded my own search for it when I returned from a trip to San Francisco without the book in my possession. I had bought the expensive red leather-bound Franklin Books edition and read about three-fourths of the book, filling it with my notes and marginalia as a guide to my review. Thus, I was doubly chagrined to find that the book did not return with me to New Orleans. Yes, I could buy another copy, but it would not have my notes in it. So I delayed for a couple of months, hoping my son might locate the book at his home in San Anselmo where we stayed for a week. Finally giving up on the book, I ordered an identical copy, and what plopped into my mailbox was a cheap hardback on acid paper which was already yellowing. I had to negotiate a return to amazon.com for the first time, which went well, by the way, and soon a replacement book was in my hands. Now what? Do I read the entire book again or simply finish reading the part from where I left off? If I had the original book in my hands it would easy to tell where I left off as I dog-ear the last page read and have date glyphes on places where I pick up reading. Absent these clues, I scanned through the book until I found a passage containing something familiar that I had read a month or so earlier.The book plot is a “hero goes on a journey” starring the quintessential Chicagoan Charlie Citrine and his best friend Humboldt, already deceased, who had left him something as a parting gift, the MacGuffin. As I picked up the story line again, Charlie had been talked into going into a businessman’s office with this guy, and when they arrived, the guy pulled out a gun to kill the businessman. Police arrived and were ready to handcuff Charlie also, but only had one pair of handcuffs. The secretary tried to talk the police out of the arrest by saying that Charlie was a poet, not a murderer. This droll episode led me to write a poem. Imagine a beat cop calling the police station to ask for help:What’s a Cop to Do?Hey Sarge! Got me a poet here — What am I supposed to do with a poet? Handcuff him? If I did, he could still spout poetry! Put a gag on him? Then he could still think poetry! What’s a cop to do with a poet?This is life, not literature, Sarge. We’re too busy with life — You know, arresting crooks and thugs –We’re too busy to lock up poets. Can’t I just let this guy go?Please, Sarge –Look at this –He just wrote a poem about me.Please, Sarge! Can I just let him go?Please . . . ~^~Bellow filled this book with dozens of such vignettes in Charlie’s life as he wanders around thinking about Von Humboldt Fleisher, wondering about the gift, and searching for people who could him help him all the while trying to avoid his wife who is suing the literal pants off him as part of a nasty divorce.Into Charlie’s travails, Bellow mixed his own interest in the work of Rudolf Steiner. It was Bellow’s interest in Rudolf Steiner which led me eventually to read this book. I had read none of Bellow’s other novels, but I became curious in how this literate author might write about the Austrian philosopher and spiritual scientist whose works I have been a student of for several decades.To set the stage for the next passage, Charlie was working on his master essay, “Boredom” and the deep suffering he claimed accompanies it.[page 104] I hadn’t read those great modern boredom experts, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, and Baudelaire, for nothing. Over the years I had worked a lot on this essay. The difficulty was that I kept being overcome by the material, like a miner by gas fumes. I wouldn’t stop, though. I’d say to myself that even Rip van Winkle had slept for only twenty years, I had gone him at least two decades better and I was determined to make the lost time yield illumination.When I find myself overcome by some material, I fall asleep, and when I awake from my short nap, I usually stop reading the material. I figure it’s job of the author to keep me awake. When I first began reading Steiner in 1979, I didn’t understand much of what he said, but he kept me awake and searching until finally I began to make sense of his words. Our hero, Charlie Citrine, found Steiner and had a similar experience.[page 104, 105] So I kept doing advanced mental work in Chicago, and also joined a gymnasium, playing ball with commodity brokers and gentleman-hoodlums in an effort to strengthen the powers of consciousness. Then my respected friend Durnwald mentioned, kiddingly, that the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner’s books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will there fell a gap of sleep. It might be brief but it was deep. For one of man’s souls was a sleep-soul. In this, human beings resembled the plants, whose whole existence is sleep. This made a very deep impression on me. The truth about sleep could only be seen from the perspective of an immortal spirit. I had never doubted that I had such a thing. But I had set this fact aside quite early. I kept it under my hat. These beliefs under your hat also press on your brain and sink you down into the vegetable realm. Even now, to a man of culture like Durnwald, I hesitated to mention the spirit. He took no stock in Steiner, of course.By this point in the book, I was hooked. Most people I know take “no stock in Steiner”; either because they have never heard of him, or what they heard made him sound like a spiritual fruitcake, not worthy of their attention, only worthy of their ridicule. In Saul Bellow I found someone who portrayed Steiner as a font of wisdom and he portrayed Charlie’s attempts to understand and to explain Steiner, even though “his soul was banged up”.[page 106] Dear friends, though I was about to leave town and had much business to attend to, I decided to suspend all practical activities for one morning. I did this to keep from cracking under strain. I had been practicing some of the meditative exercises recommended by Rudolf Steiner in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. As yet I hadn’t attained much, but then my soul was well along in years and very much stained and banged up, and I had to be patient. Characteristically, I had been trying too hard, and I remembered again that wonderful piece of advice given by a French thinker: Trouve avant de chercher — Valéry, it was. Or maybe Picasso.How does one “find before searching” as Valéry suggests? Most often we find things we weren’t consciously searching for, but as we look back on the years or decades before the discovery, we can trace a path which we had been on which led us to the thing we eventually found. We can understand this process if we accept the presence in our life of a Guardian Angel which accompanies us through every lifetime, dropping hints which shape our decisions, directing our path to a goal of which we are otherwise not conscious. What can we do when this happens? — we can consciously thank the unconscious actions of our Guardian Angel.In this next passage Bellow attacks the Kant dictum that we cannot know the ding an sich, that is, the thing in itself, that we can only know what we perceive through our senses.[page 194] For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science.Charlie Citrine made a lot of money from his one successful play, and now his lawyer Tomchek, Srole (Tomchek’s associate), and Pinsker, his wife’s lawyer were carving up his estate as part of divorce proceedings and taking a large share for themselves. They didn’t like Charlie’s complaining about their work. Suddenly Charlie found inspiration for transcending the captious pettifoggers by using his new-found knowledge of higher worlds. Bellow here demonstrates one practical application of Charlie’s study of spiritual science.[page 212] Okay, they weren’t going to let me knock lawyers. Pinsker belonged to the club. Who, after all, was I? A filmy transient figure, eccentric and snooty. They disliked my style entirely. They hated it. But then why should they like it? Suddenly I saw the thing from their viewpoint. And I was extremely pleased. In fact I was illuminated. Maybe these sudden illuminations of mine were an effect of the metaphysical changes I was undergoing. Under the recent influence of Steiner I seldom thought of death in the horrendous old way. I wasn’t experiencing the suffocating grave or dreading an eternity of boredom, nowadays. Instead I often felt unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and sprinting through the star world. Occasionally I saw myself with exhilarating objectivity, literally as an object among objects in the physical universe. One day that object would cease to move and when the body collapsed the soul would simply remove itself. So, to speak again of the lawyers, I stood between them, and there we were, three naked egos, three creatures belonging to the lower grade of modern rationality and calculation. In the past the self had had garments, the garments of station, of nobility or inferiority, and each self had its carriage, its looks, wore the sheath appropriate to it. Now there were no sheaths and it was naked self with naked self burning intolerably and causing terror. I saw this now, in a fit of objectivity. It felt ecstatic.In a world of industrial Chicago, Charlie Citrine survived using his study of Rudolf Steiner to gain a perspective and a serenity in the midst of chaos. Even when a lawyer shouted at him, “You’re nothing but a prick with a pen!” Charlie was nonplussed, even thinking what a wonderful expression that was! You can say anything you like to a writer, and if you put it elegantly or in a novel way, no matter how vile the insult, the writer will smile.[page 213, 214] He was so sore that he surpassed himself and yelled even louder, “With or without a pen you’re a prick!” But I wasn’t offended. I thought this was a whopping epithet and I laughed. If you only put it right you could say what you liked to me. However, I knew exactly how I made Tomchek and Srole feel. From their side they inspired me with an unusual thought. This was that History had created something new in the USA, namely crookedness with self-respect or duplicity with honor. America had always been very upright and moral, a model to the entire world, so it had put to death the very idea of hypocrisy and was forcing itself to live with this new imperative of sincerity, and it was doing an impressive job. . . . “I wish I knew what the hell made you look so pleased,” said Srole. “Only a thought.” “Lucky you, with your nice thoughts.”Charlie went outside the lawyer’s room and meditated on a rose bush, and we learn that his nice thoughts were not some lucky accident as the lawyer Srole thought, but the result of hard work and study on Charlie’s part.[page 214] I concentrated all the faculties of my soul on this vision and immersed it in the flowers. Then I saw, next to these flowers, a human figure standing. The plant, said Rudolf Steiner, expressed the pure passionless laws of growth, but the human being, aiming at higher perfection, assumed a greater burden — instincts, desires, emotions. So a bush was a sleeping life. But mankind took a chance on the passions. The wager was that the higher powers of the soul could cleanse these passions. Cleansed, they could be reborn in a finer form. The red of the blood was a symbol of this cleansing process. But even if all this wasn’t so, to consider the roses always put me into a kind of bliss.Doris Scheldt learned spiritual science from her physicist father but she couldn’t hold a candle to Renata in Charlie’s view. “Why, Renata didn’t need an ignition key to start a car. One of her kisses on the hood would turn it on. It would roar for her.” (Page 250) Doris had the hots for Charlie, but the feeling was unrequited as her father bore more interest for Charlie. In this next passage we learn about the process Steiner describes as beneficial to living spirits who were left behind the material world in the time between death and a new birth, namely, the process of reading to the dead.[page 251] Her father had been a physicist at the old Armour Institute, an executive of IBM, a NASA consultant who improved the metal used in spaceships. But he was also an anthroposophist. He didn’t wish to call this mysticism. He insisted that Steiner had been a Scientist of the Invisible. But Doris, with reluctance, spoke of her father as a crank. She told me many facts about him. He was a Rosicrucian and a Gnostic, he read aloud to the dead. Also at a time when girls have to do erotic things whether or not they have the talent for them, the recent situation being what it is, Doris behaved quite bravely with me. But it was all wrong, I was simply not myself with her, and at the wrongest possible time I cried out, “Renata! Oh Renata!” Then I lay there shocked with myself and mortified. But Doris didn’t take my outcry at all hard. She was thoroughly understanding. That was her main strength. And when my talks with the Professor began she was decent about that as well, understanding that I was not going to sleep with the daughter of my guru.Charlie studied Rudolf Steiner’s works and found Doris’s father, Dr. Scheldt, much help in clarifying the ideas of spiritual science. Even though Charlie found the ideas complex and mystifying, they always seemed to make sense to him in some deep, unexplainable way, similar to my own experience of studying Rudolf Steiner’s works, “they always rang true”. It helps one to understand the metaphor of “ring true” if one realizes that the custom of ringing bells in a church tower goes back to a time when people could still see into the spiritual world and noticed that demons scattered from an area when a bell was rung. Words ring true for us when they arrive as an insight into the spiritual world, whether or not we consciously understand the meaning of the words.[page 252, 253] Then Dr. Scheldt begins to speak on the text, I am the light of the world. To him that light is understood also as the sun itself. Then he speaks of the gospel of Saint John as drawing upon the wisdom-filled Cherubim, while the gospel of Saint Luke draws upon the fiery love, the Seraphim — Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones being the three highest spiritual hierarchy. I am not at all certain that I am following. “I have no experience of any of this advanced stuff, Dr. Scheldt, but I still find it peculiarly good and comforting to hear it all said. I don’t at all know where I’m at. One of these days when life is quieter I’m going to buckle down to the training course and do it in earnest.” “When will life be quieter?” “I don’t know. But I suppose people have told you before this how much stronger the soul feels after such a conversation.” “You shouldn’t wait for things to become quieter. You must decide to make them quieter.” He saw that I was fairly skeptical still. I couldn’t make my peace with things like the Moon Evolution, the fire spirits, the Sons of Life, with Atlantis, with the lotus-flower organs of spiritual perception or the strange mingling of Abraham with Zarathustra, or the coming together of Jesus and the Buddha. It was all too much for me. Still, whenever the doctrine dealt with what I suspected or hoped or knew of the self, or of sleep, or of death, it always rang true.We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but what if what we call a weakness in ourselves is really a misunderstood or undervalued strength? Would we continue to try to rid ourselves of such a weakness? Take Iolanthe who claims that he is in love and someone says to him that love is a weakness. Iolanthe replies, “Yes, but it is a weakness that is so strong!” Many people have weaknesses that are so strong, they can only think like Iolanthe, “This is a weakness.” Love can be thus considered a gift to be welcomed or a problem to be overcome. Would Humboldt’s gift to Charlie turn out to be an unwelcome problem?[page 272, 273] — I tuned out and gave my mind to one of my theories. Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves. Take the case of Stronson [RJM: who tried to have Charlie arrested for murder], a man who entered into desperate schemes to swindle gangsters. Or take myself, a lover of beauty who insisted on living in Chicago. Or Von Humboldt Fleisher, a man of powerful social instincts burying himself in the dreary countryside.When Charlie was in the squad car, being hauled to the police station, he recalled twenty years earlier when Humboldt had been arrested and forced into a straitjacket.[page 277] He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew about drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets.When Charlie went to see his accountant Murra, high up in his fancy glass skyscraper office, Murra spent an hour telling Charlie that “he had failed to convince the IRS that it had no case” and submitted a bill to Charlie for $1500 for essentially achieving or producing nothing. (Page 280) If you hire a poet instead of an accountant, at least you’ll get a poem out of the deal. For example, Charlie mused about what Rip van Winkle might have done with his life, if he had not been put to sleep by the dwarves.[page 281] He had an ordinary human American right, of course, to hunt and fish and roam the woods with his dog — much like Huckleberry Finn in the Territory Ahead. The following question was more intimate and difficult: what would I have done if I hadn’t been asleep in spirit for so long?My mind went completely off the rails when I read about Huck in the Territory Ahead — for over twenty years I have been buying my shirts from a catalog named Territory Ahead and I never knew, until now, that the catalog’s name likely came from a passage in the famous Mark Twain novel, Huckleberry Finn. A quick Google search informed me that Huck said he wanted “to get to the Territory ahead of the rest.” So, Good Reader, since you de facto hired me by virtue of reading this review, I must complete my part of the deal by writing a poem for you. Seeds of the FutureHey, Huck, where you heading? “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Where’d you get that shirt? “Do you know the Territory Ahead?”Yeah, I heard you talk about it, so?”Well, I’m heading North to Nanaimo.” Nice shirt, that one. “Thanks to the Territory Ahead.”Huck, did you know Angels sow seeds of the future in us? “Yep, visions of the Territory Ahead, huh?” Never thought of it that way, up until now. “Yep, it’s their gift to us.” Like Humboldt’s gift to Charlie? “Nice way to put it, my friend.”So, where you reckon this Territory Ahead is, Huck? “It’s just waitin’ ’round the bend.”Humboldt’s Gift? What was it? Perhaps it was the mandolin-like vignettes of life in Chicago and overseas for Charlie Citrine? Yes, there was a script left for Charlie by Humboldt in his will and that becomes a resurrection of Charlie’s career, but the plot line is not the point of this novel, rather it is the lives which Humboldt and Citrine touched and the stories they generated, stories which will enrich any reader brave enough to open this large book and engage life with Saul Bellow as one’s guide. Read entire review in DIGESTWORLD #142 by Bobby Matherne

⭐Having read all of Mr. Bellow’s work, the short stories, the novels, the novellas (yet not the play – I don’t want my high opinion of the writer tarnished unnecessarily), I can say without question that he was on top of his game when he wrote this marvelously affecting novel. What strikes me is the amount of critics who have written that Citrine is a thinly disguised Bellow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Citrine is a layabout. He spends the entire text running away from responsibilities. He is so busy chasing one pipe dream after the other he has “no time” to do or write anything worthwhile. He is totally self-obessed, and hardly a sympathetic character. Bellow was many things, but a man who spent years dreaming is not one of them. Many miss the humor evident in this book (as they did in that other masterpiece, HERZOG). Citrine of course recognizes his faults, but can do nothing to right them. He is wrong for chasing Renata, but cannot stop. And why is he attracted to Renata – her skin, her body. She isn’t good enough for him on an intellectual level and she at last is smart enough to realize he’s a wrong number. He believes he is wrong for not marrying her, but yet does not when he is given the chance. And why does he want to marry her? To keep her within reach. Love seems to have little to do with the matter. He wishes he had married his childhood sweetheart, Naomi Lutz, but she is too clever to link herself with him. Some have assumed that because Citrine is hung up on Rudolph Steiner’s theories, Bellow was also. But this is quite an aesthetic leap. One must not mistake the artist with his creation. If one does, he does so at his own peril. I suppose these confusions between Citrine and Bellow are a compliment to the life like realism of Bellow’s work. Even at novel’s end, Citrine is still bemoaning his life, but wants nothing more than to rest (as if he has been doing anything else for years). Other critics have written that Bellow treats Delmore Schwartz (Humboldt) shabbily. As I see it, Von Humboldt is drawn with a great deal of sympathy. He is certainly a more virtuous character than Citrine, who cannot even muster up the courage of greeting his long time friend as the latter nears his doom. I have read this novel no less than six times and each time I have been struck by Bellow’s gift for describing a gesture, a countenance, as well as his gift for the telling metaphor. A face is described as “whiter than the moon when seen at 3pm”. Another character requires only a brushstroke to render the entire man: “He was a simple, modest person. .All he wanted was to live forever” or “When he took a lady’s hand you wondered just what he was going to do with it”. His sociological insights are brilliant: “This type, the impulsive-wrongheaded, was now making it with the middle class,” “America was God’s experiment. Many of the old pains of mankind were removed, which made the new pains all the more peculiar and mysterious,” Higher education is not spared: “Also, as he had said to me, you could be gaga in a tenured chair at Princeton, and would anybody notice?” One could go on. This man could turn a phrase to perfection. I highly recommend this novel. It is a comic masterpiece.

⭐I remember reading that Bellow was accused of nicking the idea of this story from another book. Well, c’mon most writers do that anyway. However, the beauty of this book and all of Bellow’s writing is the artistry and poetry of his sentences. This book is filled with great writing. The story of a man who is kind of pushed along by another man’s gift or talent is an old one, but don’t let that worry you. In the background is another of Bellow ‘s preoccupations, antisemitism. A great book by a genius.

⭐I enjoyed this work on so many levels that perhaps it seems churlish to cavil at its occasional longueurs; Bellow’s language is supple, energetic and beautifully vivid and the reader is artfully carried along the currents of the prevailing Zeitgeists as Charlie Citrine attempts to come to terms with Humboldt’s ‘legacy’. What exactly this legacy is does not become clear until quite late in the book and I particularly liked the way the fraught relationship between the two men ran the gamut from hero-worship (on Citrine’s part) through professional rivalry, outright enmity all the way back to a weary acceptance and even a kind of retrospective affection. Particularly poignant was Citrine’s last glimpse of his old hero: a shambling, shuffling wreck, nibbling on a pretzel in the street. (Humboldt actually dies putting out his rubbish.) How are the mighty fallen and Humboldt the great poet, a passionate but deluded man, ends up not as you would expect in a Byronic blaze of glory, but as a shabby, half-insane nonentity.Will the same happen to Citrine? Women seem to be his downfall, as does a freewheeling love of the picaresque, the larger-than-life (hence his fatal weakness for such dubious characters as the small-time hoodlum Rinaldo Cantabile and hopelessly unreliable Pierre Thaxter.) When not being menaced by Cantabile, let down by Thaxter and eaten alive by the divorce lawyers feeding off his acrimonious split with his second wife Denise, Citrine shows that if there’s nothing worse than an old fool it is an old fool in love. From the moment we meet the buxom Renata and her shrivelled crone of a mother, the self-styled ‘Senora’ (actually more Hungarian than Spanish), we can see Citrine is going to be taken for a ride that would make Space Mountain look like a slip in a sandbox. And so it proves. Although Citrine has many endearing qualities, throughout much of this novel I was hoping Cantabile would reappear and, like Robert De Niro in ‘The Untouchables’, whack him over the head with a baseball bat for being so stupid with women.Which leads me to Citrine’s less endearing qualities – namely, his infuriating habit of expounding on his ‘anthroposophy’ (in Greek it means ‘human wisdom’, in reality exactly the opposite). The level of this is flailingly sophomoric – Philosophy 101 – and I had a hard time wondering whether Bellow was sending Citrine up, or whether Bellow’s Citrine really bought into these drooling fatuities, or whether just Bellow himself subscribed to them. At any rate they make for tedious reading. Whenever Bellow describes action (Cantabile’s trashing of Charlie’s Mercedes, the scenes with the divorce lawyers, Citrine’s being dumped by Renata in Madrid) the writing zings into life: whenever he analyses and philosophises the writing becomes as flaccid as Hugh Hefner fumbling for his Viagra jar. Some tolerance is required on the reader’s part but in the end the journey is well worth these lapses.Penguin, whose editorial team could do with a reshuffle, advertise an Introduction ‘by Martin Amis’. There isn’t one.

⭐This was the first Bellow I read. I loved the style and the narrative perspective of neurotic over-earnest Charlie Citrine but the structure is a bit patchy and the concept of “Humboldt’s Gift” feels like a bolted-on mechanism to make the book work. Worth reading for the total assuredness of style and the imaginative sparks.

⭐Around the time Bellow received the Nobel for this novel, he was the subject of my college dissertation. It was to be almost thirty years before I revisited Humboldt’s Gift again as my inflight reading on a trip to the US, and when I did the experience was somewhat different.First I noted the humour. I remembered its being an amusing book, but never as hilarious as I found it so many years on. I reflected on whether I had truly understood some of the references, and on how much more I identified with the book having travelled to some of the places mentioned – Texas, Chicago, New York, Madrid. The whole thing was so much less abstract, so I felt more able to immerse myself in the characterisation, without the need to expend energy trying to imagine what these places looked like.It was the characterisation that really stood out, from the outwardly bullish but inwardly sheepish Charlie Citrine, and his scheming girlfriend Renata and her conspiratorial mother; the minor hoodlum Cantabile and his academic girlfriend Polly; and on to the tragic Humboldt himself, long deceased by the time of the book’s opening but a constant, spectral presence throughout. Finally, the roguish Thaxter, Citrine’s “business partner”, a man who may well have inspired the leadership of Enron.In addition, some of the vocabulary surprised me. For example, “leveraged”. Had I registered the word back in the seventies? I guessed not. It’s a word I’d associated with management consultants, financial derivatives and the eighties.Much of the book is a study in pain, from Citrine’s guilt at avoiding the down-and-out, soon-to-die Humboldt on the street in New York, his anguish over his vandalised Mercedes, the wrangles with his ex-wife and his abandonment in Madrid with Renata’s son, as she stays in Chicago to marry Citrine’s rival in love, Flonzaley the undertaker. However, although it is easy to empathise with the suffering, and the abandonment in particular left me feeling trapped, claustrophobic and betrayed on Citrine’s behalf, he himself sustains an air of detachment throughout, even going so far as to observe that he could probably put a stop to Cantabile’s nonsense immediately, but just can’t be bothered.Cantabile himself is the low-life’s low-life. From the incident where he insists Citrine shares the cubicle with him while he takes a crap, through to his offer of a threesome with Polly, there is plenty to dislike about him.But still there is the humour – even the abandonment has its comic moments – just in case we should take things too seriously. Thaxter’s fascination with Cantabile, for instance, which not only leads to rather more contact with the guttersnipe than Citrine cares for but also ultimately to his arrest as Cantabile presents him as a hitman at a meeting which turns out to be a sting set up by the cops.As with other Bellow works, the erudition is stupendous, with references to a galaxy of writers, politicians, philosophers and World Historical Figures. Their lives and works are constantly analysed by the inner dialogue continually raging in Citrine’s head – it’s no surprise to learn Bellow was heavily influenced by Joyce, though to get a better flavour of that read Bellow’s earlier novel, Herzog.However, sad to say that, contrary to other reviews, there is no sinister Master, and no plot in the White House; nor does Dr Who make an appearance at any point in the book.Humboldt’s Gift seems to get by all right without these essentials, nevertheless. As with any classic literature, it has stood the test of time, so although the setting is now a few decades past, the dilemmas and responses of the characters are as relevant now as they were then.

⭐Brilliant and funny, this is only the 2nd book I’ve read by Bellow,I don’t think any writer I have read covers so much history and so many ideas so gently and with such rich mixture of pathos and hope.

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