Ravelstein (Penguin Classics) by Saul Bellow (PDF)

Description

Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein’s own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow’s new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.

User’s Reviews

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

⭐Book arrived in very good shape, as advertised, and in a timely manner, also as advertised.

⭐Ravelstein, a brilliant, blunt speaking and humorous professor at a midwestern university, having stretched himself beyond his teacher’s salary, is persuaded by his friend, Chick, to write a book expounding his political and philosophical ideas. The success of Ravelstein’s book has made him wealthy and famous – enough so that Ravelstein would now like Chick to write a biography or memoir of his life.Chick and Ravelstein spend much time together, sharing memories, ideas and thoughts. Realizing that Chick is the fictional counterpart of Saul Bellow, and Ravelstein the counterpart of Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, it seems apparent to the reader that many of those ideas belong to Bellow himself.Although Chick finds himself unable to write a memoir of his friend, he reveals enough of Ravelstein’s history, his personality and character, his philosophical and political ideas, his sexual identity, and finally his death by Aids, so that the reader must conclude that while the fictional Chick failed to write the fictional Ravelstein’s memoir, the real Bellow did indeed write a memoir of his real life friend, Bloom.Some readers may feel that Bellow’s book is “anti-gay.” I believe Bellow presents a non-judgmental view. Whenever Chick speaks of Ravelstein’s sexual “irregular behavior,” it is without censure or judgment. Bellow credits mythology in explaining the yearning of one person for another as he writes: “He (Ravelstein) rated longing very highly. Looking for love, falling in love, you were pining for the other half you had lost, as Aristophanes had said. Only it wasn’t Aristophanes at all, but Plato in a speech attributed to Aristophanes. In the beginning men and women were round like the sun and moon, they were both male and female and had two sets of sexual organs. In some cases both the organs were male. So the myth went. These were proud, self-sufficient beings. They defied the Olympian Gods who punished them by splitting them in half. This is the mutilation that mankind suffered. So that generation after generation we seek the missing half, longing to be whole again.” That, of course, explains man yearning for man but not woman for woman. However, in this case, it seems irrelevant as only the “gay” is at issue.Bellow is always interesting and worth reading.

⭐This is not a novel in any conventional sense of the word. It is something else. Yes, there is a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end; and something in the way of a structure–one, however, that more often than not resembles an old-fashioned rambling memoir, or even a long scholarly philosophical essay in a learned academic journal.Bellow is too shrewd a writer ever to bore as, and he certainly knows how to make us laugh. Over many pages he chooses to download a highly desultory accumulation of incidents and insights, often repetitive. Entertaining as it all is, what, the reader keeping asking rather impatiently, is Bellow getting it? Does he know, does he care?Bellow reminds us, again and again, that no writer can attempt to examine a life in the modern world, Ravelstein being prime example, without ultimately dealing with the Jewish question in the 20th Century. If so many Jews died, then what is the meaning of death? What was the meaning if any of Ravelstein’s and the author’s life?In the last part of the book, Bellow, in his guise as philosopher in novelist’s clothing, attempts to answer his own questions. Many strange unexpected insights occur: the Holocaust is compared to fish poisoning of all things, and the secret of human survival revealed–as Tennessee Williams has also told us—to our being dependent on the kindness of strangers, and, if you are lucky, to a loving and understanding wife. That’s only half of it. Much more is put on the table. It is a sumptuous meal. At the final page, readers of this book will certainly have a lot to digest, and perhaps that was Bellow’s main intention in writing such a discursive novel.

⭐Bellow’s latest immediately hearkens back to his earlier, masterful HUMBOLDT’S GIFT. RAVELSTEIN misses the mark of that masterpiece but shares some of the same enduring qualities: the indelible characterizations, the delicious wit, the irrestible narrative flow.Bellow dispenses with linear plot to retell, in fictional form, the life of Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago intellectual who won fame and fortune late in his life with THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, a critique of American intellectual malaise which became a surprisingly huge bestseller. In the novel Bloom is Ravelstein, dying of AIDS and requesting his friend-novelist-narrator Chick write his memoirs. Ravelstein is an intellectual gargantuan, having read everything of any import to Western Civilization and bemoaning the decline of standards. His life is a contradiction, however – he is an incurable materialist, buying lavishly expensive clothes and stereo equipment, and he is an inveterate homosexual who nevertheless despises the “gay lifestyle” (whatever that is). Consequently one comes away both liking and disliking the man who seems to have lived by a creed that went something like “Do as I say not as I do.” Also interesting are peripheral portraits of other Bellow-Bloom intimates, most notably Edward A. Shils,the celebrated sociologist also affliated with the University of Chicago, who, here, is called Rakheim Kogon. If this is an accurate limning of Shils, who at best could be called belligerent, then no wonder he and Bellow parted ways.If the novel displays any suspense at all, it is in Bellow/Chick’s recounting of his ill-fated marriage to a beautiful, brilliant and high-strung intellectual who humiliates him at every turn until their inevitable divorce. There’s a happy ending, however. Bellow/Chick finds true love in the winter of his life in the form of one of Bloom/Ravelstein’s former graduate students, who nurses him from near-death.

⭐It was a pleasure to peak in the life of the great Allan Bloom, but it was a frustrating experience to read nothing but flattened clichés. From Bellows two wives, one was a stuck up bitch, the other an angel, both ridiculous absolutes. Bloom’s boyfriend is a perfect speciment of the “noble savage,” and Bellows himself a 70 year old Duggar daddy, albeit unconscious of the fact.

⭐Truly engagingHard to put downBased on Alan Bloom

⭐It’s a very good but I am not sure why so much time was spent on Bellow’s illness. The focal point is / should be Bloom. I am sure someone can make an interesting esoteric argument but I found this section misplaced and dragging.

⭐i love Saul Bellow, not only for the atmospheric sense of place, his lifelong dedication to learning and understanding, but the sheer beauty of his sensitivity to language and communication and its rootedness in place and culture and society. i think the best writer in the world.

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