Customer Reviews

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

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At first I hated this book. I mean really hated it. I thought Bloom pretentious and insufferable as well as unbelievably facile and superficial. I would have given this book one star, at best. That's because I was hopscotching around. I started with writers and thinkers I knew and liked. I picked someone at the end of the book, then the middle, then back to the end, and then to the beginning. I found the book unbearable. Then I said, the guy can't be stupid; I must be doing this wrong. So I started at the beginning, and read all the way through. Good grief! What a difference. There's a theme, continuity, sense. Everything became clear. I learned things I never would have come upon on my own. Do yourselves a favor--here is the history of the literate world splayed open for you. Start at the beginning and you will learn things you never would have imagined. There IS genius. It is wonderful to behold. You will love this book and man and his thoughts if you give this book a chance. Of course there are lapses, and of course Bloom is prejudiced, bigoted, pompous and outrageous in his own way. So what! You don't think every great writer and thinker wasn't?
If you don't think Milton, Dante, Tolstoy, plus all the reglious thinks from Paul, Augustine and Mohammed weren't, then you seriously need to read this book. I think I learned more in this book than I did in 10 college courses.

Serious readers will imagine what fun it was for Bloom, compiling this celebration of (deceased) literary genius - reading and rereading, marveling at the passions, the artistry, and the jealousy and admiration they often felt for one another. Bloom, ("The Western Canon"), says his choices were "arbitrary." "These are certainly NOT `the top one hundred' in anyone's judgment, my own included. I wanted to write about these."

And write he does, with erudition, wit and verve. The most difficult thing about this book is the introduction, with its elaborate explanation of the book's structure, based on the Kabalistic "Sefirot," attributes of God and God's image, emanating out from an infinite center. Once embarked on the essays, Bloom's enthusiasm animates his scholarship. He begins with the "crown," five masters, "each of whom dominates his genre forever." These are Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton and Tolstoy. The essays are short and tend to seize on one aspect, character or work to celebrate the whole. For Shakespeare it's Falstaff. "Does anyone else, in all of literature, enjoy what he is saying as much as Falstaff does?" And "All that Hamlet, Falstaff, and Cleopatra require of you is that you not bore them."

Bloom's writing is tart and barbed; he enjoys taking aim at his critics nearly as much as extolling his subjects. Perhaps it is partly to needle those who disdain his partiality for dead white males that he posits the Biblical writer J, or the Yahwist, (writer of parts of Genesis and Exodus) as a woman. He pokes fun at revisionists and deconstructionists, though he seldom wastes a full sentence on any of them. "In our increasingly virtual reality, three authors seem immune to the decline of authentic reading: Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens."

All three, says Bloom, share one profound gift: "personalities major and minor burst forth from the pages of these writers, in a profusion otherwise unmatched in the language." Personality is essential to Bloom, who has plenty of it himself, and his discussions of artists as varied as Milton and Hemingway, Dante and Tennessee Williams, George Eliot and Muhammad, Iris Murdoch and Mark Twain, are fired with their difficult personalities, and the personalities of their art, their place in their world, their yearnings, longings and demons. Bloom himself - enthusiastic, opinionated and authoritative - kindles the urge to read.

Here is a book to launch an exploration of literature, to heighten the appreciation of great minds of Western civilization. Academics will be aggravated as usual by Bloom, his arrogant pronouncements, and his crowd-pleasing style. It must be so: in his sunset years Bloom is unrepentantly rebirthing himself as an intellectual Sir John Falstaff. And, Reader, if you will play young Prince Hal to Bloom's Sir John, you can enjoy his idiosyncratic hoodwinks and partake of his joie de vive!

If you are among the multitudes for whom life has sometimes been at its most glorious among the dead (i.e., authors) and the never-living (their eternal characters), you will revel in this vast lyrical volume. It is truly a poetical, not an analytic work (despite Bloom's employing an organizing principle of Kabbalistic schemata). A love poem, at that -- erotically charged with both the fleshly and the mystical -- and unconcerned with superficial hobgoblins of consistency. Bloom means to inspire, to provoke, to spur you to drink from these geniuses' original springs, and for vast numbers of readers who can overlook Sir Harold's foibles (or rejoice with them), he will succeed surpassingly.

One could wish the grace of more helpful editing had befallen the professor's final work and caught some of his contradictions and carelessnesses; he deserved to have an editor require better explication of his "definitions" and more follow-through on his arguments. But my sadness over the omission of such polishing strokes does not diminish my enthusiasm in recommending this volume to friends.

Contrary to impressions given by some introductory statements, Bloom's analytical arguments about Genius and its roles in the spiritual and intellectual evolution of humanity are NOT the life force of this work. As in his other best-sellers (Shakespeare; Western Canon) it is Bloom's real passion to play the pelican and feed us literary children the life-blood of his love for literature and its creators. The very wildness of Sir Harold will aggravate the Prince Johns and Lord Chief Justices of the academies, but the Prince Hal within us will be positively infected with the need to pursue further intoxication among the Geniuses.

Almost everybody will find *something* to be offended over somewhere in "Genius" -- since Sir Harold's extraordinary breadth of reading enables him to range over such a wide range of topics and his seniority has earned his personable-but-opinionated style a pronounced arrogance. I suggest the reader savor a little humility and overlook those idiosyncracies -- while resting uncompelled to accept every unexplicated conclusion Bloom offers -- and focus instead on draining this work for all the inspiration and insights that are pleasurably scattered throughout it. "Genius" passes the test that the professor in his introduction sets for any written work: "...has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified?" Yes: Enjoy!

At times this book is amusing, entertaining, sometimes even enlightening but most of all exasperating. Harold Bloom has spent half a century digging deep into the best that our literary culture has to offer, but all he has given us, once again, is another 800 pages of unedited notes. Each Genius is regrettably reduced to a few pages of off-hand comments and we have seen many of these comments too many times before in his books on the Western Canon and Shakespeare.

There is some humor and insight but for every insight we get thirty pages of unexplained marginalia like the following: "Negation of seeming realities in an ostensibly Christian society is the essence of Kierkegaard's genius, but this was an anxiety for him, since Kierkegaard had to be post-Hegelian, even as we have to be post-Freudian." This might make a great thesis statement for a long article (or even a book) but Bloom tosses it off like it is a self-evident truth that needs no further elaboration. I suspect it meant something interesting to Bloom, but it is lost on those mortals among us who cannot read his mind (and he complains about the obfuscation of the French!)

I guess if you are as well-established and respected as Harold Bloom then you no longer need to write books, you can merely publish them.

Ignore the titles of Bloom's recent publications, whether they promise to explicate Shakespeare, examine the act of reading, or illuminate the mysteries of genius. They're essentially the same book--a continuing proclamation of likes and dislikes and list-making exercises by the great American oracle whose sins are too numerous to mention, or too easy to enumerate. On the whole, he's a useful authority figure whose judicious selections are well-served by his arrogance. If he's going to throw his weight around, we can be grateful he's championed worthy causes. Where he frequently comes up most short, it strikes me, is as a "close" reader of the texts to which he pledges his and our allegiance. And it is this lack of persistent proximity with his chosen texts that unavoidably raises doubt about the depth of his readings.

Bloom likes "characters"--the Falstaffs, Hamlets, Ahabs--and he pleasures himself in being one. Like his favorite characters, he uses language less to dissect, analyze, and interpret experience than to portray his competencies, appetites, and judgements. An author such as Joseph Conrad passes his character test--until Kurtz. Unlike Marlowe, Bloom cannot be impressed by a "horror" that seems to elude its own author's comprehension. Similarly, he can credit Faulkner with creating memorable characters who embody racial relations in the old South but seems oblivious to the self-recognition that Faulkner's characters--the son of an octoroon, for example--are capable of awakening in the present-day reader. But it would take both a close and humble reader to see that Faulkner's "blackness" is the humanness that resides within us all and that Faulkner's incest is the pride that isolates us from our humanity, a commonness that must seem antithetical to the project of self-characterization.

Exclusivity has its place. Call Bloom a genius at picking geniuses and let him fill your bookshelves. It's still the ordinary reader's job to discover why they belong there.

Harold Bloom is the closest thing we have to an Oxford Don in this country. But he's much more. He's America's Samuel Johnson, a literary critic whose influence shall haunt us in times to come. He's also a "pariah" by his own admission, which makes him all the more fascinating. If the rumors are true he has the daemonic spark of a Shakespearean character -- brilliant, flawed, and "all too human." This would be fitting, as Shakespeare is his true hero. But he has a Goethean cast of mind as well -- Falstaff as Faust -- with one foot in heaven and the other in hell. Which gives him a glittering edge that most academicians lack.

If it takes a village to raise a child then I'm glad we have this pariah in our righteous little hamlet of a nation. Few of us will ever have an opportunity to crack a book at Yale. But we do have Harold Bloom's books, and they can lift us up to higher standards of erudition. The least of us can benefit from his protean virtuosity, though he may shock and bewilder us, and we can do so in short order. He offers us something that we seem to need most in these trying times: a shortcut to worldly sophistication.

If you want to know more about Muhammad, Saint Paul, or even Yahweh, read what Harold Bloom has to say about them. The critical "gnosis" that he brings to bear upon the most influential personalities is, in and of itself, the chief value of this man's much-maligned genius. Our nation would be the poorer without him.

The book I am struggling to review is "Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds." It is both Bloom's self-portrait and his "Book of Splendor" as he takes us through the ten Sefirot of the Kabbalah, beginning with Keter, the crown, and ending with our "descent" into Malkhut, the kingdom, i.e., the Shekhinah, or the female radiance of God.

Each Sefirot contains ten exemplary literary geniuses, and so he begins with Shakespeare (of course) and ends with Ralph Ellison, the last and hundredth name. Along the way we get to hear what he has to say about everyone from Saint Augustine to Virginia Woolf, with rare insights into Nietzsche, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others as well.

If you are looking for a Portable Bloom, "Genius" is your book.

Harold Bloom loves--LOVES--reading, books, the written word. That comes through in all of his recent books and adds an extra something to them. And this work has that something, which is enough to recommend reading it, despite its flaws and pretensions.

Bloom assembles his 100 geniuses according to Kabbalah, the old Jewish form of speculation, which is difficult to penetrate. Still, while I was initially put off by this method, it did occasionally bear fruit in the juxtaposition of not often compared geniuses: John Donne and Lady Murasaki, for example. Bloom's obsessions come through, as well, for better or worse (depending on one's own): the Gnosticism surely familiar to Bloom fans; his Bardolatry; his loathing for T.S. Eliot (although he does include him, justifiably, as a genius). This is a very personal book, in which Bloom offers his own reflections on these writers and on the world. We find out, for example, that Bloom does not accept the legitimacy of George W. Bush and (twice) that he laments the fact that an atheist can't be "elected dogcatcher" in the US (both times with the same phrase). He puts forth interesting thoughts on each writer, but his readings (misreadings?) of Flannery O'Connor and Dostoevsky are particularly grating: he understates the Christian faith of both, and even goes so far as to suggest that Dostoevsky was at his worst when writing about spiritual matters.

All that aside, the book still has its merits. These geniuses are lovingly and passionately collected, and their words are frequently excerpted. Many--probably most--of these quotations are absolutely fascinating, riveting; more than a few of which are worth copying down for future reference. A published review somewhere, I now forget where, suggested that this is not a book to read straight through, and it is not, indeed. Rather, it yields the most pleasure when jumping from person to person, from one's favorite writers to those one doesn't know so well--and back again. Despite its flaws and Bloom's obsessions, it is still a book to be savored.

I never would have picked up 'Genius' but for a friend pushing a copy on me. I mostly read contemporary fiction for relaxation or history for a little mind-stretching. I sure wouldn't think of reading Shakespeare or Dante or other dead poets! Anyway, Bloom sure hooked me on the idea of daring some of the classics. I don't know if I can buy all his conclusions about these guys' motivations and achievements but he sure has sold me on the value of checkin them out. At least the more readable ones.

His kabalah stuff doesn't work for me but i just skim over that. It's the people that he makes intersting. And their ideas. He reminds me a of crotchety old english prof i had in college - not somebody I could ever figure out - let alone figure out what he wanted to ace his class - but a great provocateur. He and Bloom really love their stuff, and I think i'm going to too.

This thick book is Harold Bloom's meditation on literary genius, by which he means not exactly an extraordinary intelligence but a communication with the "God within," an internal source of world-expanding creative inspiration, that only few people manage to achieve. He selects one hundred authors -- the list, he stresses, is by no means hermetic -- in the literary canon who in his estimation have done this, subdividing them into ten groups of ten, each group represented by a concept from the Kabbalah called a Sefirah. For example, under Hesed, or "God's covenant love for men and women," he locates Donne, Pope, Swift, Austen, and others who he feels manifest various aspects (especially irony, one of his favorite topics) of such love.

Which authors have genius? Shakespeare, obviously, and all the classical poets whose works have survived for a number of centuries, and Bloom's personal hero of literary criticism, Samuel Johnson, and even T.S. Eliot, towards whom Bloom displays a dichotomous attitude of admiration mixed with hostility. What evidence of genius is offered that elevates these authors above the merely talented? For Renaissance historian and prose stylist extraordinaire Walter Pater, it is his "secularization of the religious epiphany"; for Balzac, it is his mercurial comic criminal Vautrin; for Robert Browning, it is his perfected development of the dramatic monologue.

I regard Bloom's opinions very highly and respect his efforts to rescue the best literature of the ages from forced obsolescence by the authorities of ephemeral ideologies in what he considers to be the intellectually decadent academic institutions, but I'm not blind to his idiosyncrasies as a critic (call them "Bloomisms") for which he surely would not apologize and which anybody approaching his criticism for the first time has to keep in mind. The most notable is his insistence on putting just about everything literary in relation to Shakespeare's major characters: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, and Lear. Next is his tendency to make thunderous declarations and magisterial assertions of canonical rank ("Proust is the last of the great novelists") which will hardly persuade an unimpressionable reader who isn't looking for a lecture.

Past this, you will find that Bloom is so enthusiastic about the world's greatest literature and writes so well about his passion that it is immediately infectious. His desire is to motivate his readers to become better readers by demanding the highest standards, and so he isn't reticent about using superlatives to make his points. His dedication to literary quality highlights the book's greatest usefulness, which is to introduce or uncover important authors that are overlooked by or unknown to a large portion of readers; Montaigne, Saint Augustine, Carpentier, and Hart Crane are not widely read today, but Bloom argues cogently that they should be because their work is substantial and still relevant. Also, those authors whose works are of considerable cognitive difficulty are made more accessible to the common reader by Bloom's helpful clarifications of their themes.

"Genius" is indeed bloated, but its bloat is of mostly informative commentary and more than a few entertaining quips. Bloom can be provocative: "Emma Bovary is Gustave Flaubert, and almost all the rest of us as well." Or humorous: "Dante, like the rest of us, suffered a great deal, but many of us would be hesitant before we peopled Hell with our personal enemies," he says about the "Inferno." Or incisive: "Freud, who wanted to be a third with Copernicus and Darwin, became a third with Montaigne and Goethe," he says about Freud's success as a mythmaking essayist despite, or perhaps as a result of, his (failed) aspirations to be a scientific revolutionary. He can also be pedantic and often acrimonious when mentioning his academic opponents; but most importantly he, more than any other current critic, is gracious enough to put up the signposts on the long, winding highway of Western literature, and for that reason I'm willing to take his side. After all, what have the ideological cheerleaders ever done for me?

Here's a fun, kind of humiliating, game to play along with friends: open the book to any page and read one sentence out loud; the first person to know something about one of the words or one of the people gets a point/drink/gold star, etc. Which makes Bloom's book sound slightly comical and merely a toy to be used during party games. It is an intense book and like Pound's "Cantos," you'll find yourself following an endless and exhausting maze of leads, references, languages, and what-not, all in the hopes of learning just a bit more about some of the thinkers showcased here. You may not read it cover to cover, and that's ok; it's a book to be savored and slightly scared of at the same time. Recommended, with caution.