Customer Reviews

Humboldt's Gift

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As in Bellow's "Herzog" and "Seize the Day," the protagonist of "Humboldt's Gift" is a highly educated late-middle-aged man who's made a minor mess of his life but weathers the storm with any resources of which he can avail himself. Charlie Citrine, an Appleton, Wisconsin, native transplanted to Chicago, is an author and a briefly successful playwright who spends the novel reminiscing about his longtime friendship with the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, an eccentric genius and self-diagnosed manic depressive, and describing the people and events in his life that somehow seem to shape themselves around his relationship with Humboldt.

Humboldt once had a goal to raise the esteem of the poet's role in American society. In 1952 he believed an Adlai Stevenson presidency would allow the involvement of more intellectuals in government; when this hope crumbled, he sought and won an ephemeral poetry chair at Princeton, where he and Citrine concocted a strangely Sophoclean movie treatment about a doomed Arctic expedition and a man who became a cannibal. This was not the last of their show business aspirations; Citrine's play, "Von Trenck," based loosely on Humboldt's life and therefore vexatious to Humboldt, was a hit on the theater circuit and was made into a movie.

Citrine's dubious fortune attracts all kinds of problems with love and money. His ex-wife Denise is straining him over an uncomfortable divorce settlement; his new girlfriend, a much younger woman named Renata, takes advantage of him and leaves him stranded in Madrid to babysit her son. A simple poker night results in an undesirable association with a small-time gangster named Rinaldo Cantabile from which he can't seem to extricate himself.

Character creation is where Bellow really excels; he seeks the individual in every person he invents and never exploits stereotypes or resorts to caricatures for the sake of broad humor. Observe the swaggering confidence of Citrine's friend George Swiebel, an actor turned construction contractor; the smug demeanor of the dapper, cosmopolitan Thaxter, whom Citrine hires as an editor for a magazine yet (and probably never) to be published; the affectionate gruffness of Citrine's older brother Julius, a wealthy, sickly businessman who never shed his working-class sensibilities. These are people you'd be no more surprised to meet in reality than on the pages of a book.

A criticism against Bellow is that he has a tendency to sacrifice cohesive plots for the random portrayal of human hysteria, a collection of disparate people thrown together haphazardly. The problem is not that his novels lack believability; rather, they are often too believable, and sometimes I think they would benefit from just a little more artifice. In that regard, "Humboldt's Gift" strikes me as one of his better novels along with "Henderson the Rain King," built upon a substantial story that achieves a certain amount of closure because the protagonist is finally entrusted with a responsibility (the "gift") that, handled properly, could change his life for the better.

I think this is Bellow's materwork. An author who has always searched for evidence of the human soul in contemporary society, the questions Bellow raised in each of the novels leading to this point (Herzog particularly), finally find a resolution in this book, his last novel before winning the Nobel Prize.

This is a story of Charlie Citrine, a sucessful author who finds himself struggling for meaning while confronting the ghosts of memory, particularly in the relationship with his friend, mentor; and, at many points, antagonist, Von Humboldt Fletcher. Curiously, the novel is thrown into action and suspense through Citrine's dealings with a minor gangster, Cantible. The relationship, though, turns out to be one that brings Citrine back to the "here and now." Just as he is on the brink of being lost in transcendental wanderings, Citrine is snapped back to his resposibility by Cantible.

And, from such an unlikely source, the novel begins its reach towards resolution: to be fully human, Citrine must be spiritual but remain part of the world. Meaning and true spirituality come through compassion, empathy, caring. Once Citrine and the reader discover this, the novel reaches a resolution that marked the end of an era in many of Bellow's themes. This novel is simply a must for anyone who has enjoyed any of Bellow's earlier works, as well as for anyone who, like Chalie Citrine, struggle to find a place for the soul, the human spirit, in a world that seems to have forgotten such a thing may exist.

Transcendental. Profound. Scholarly. Challenging. Invigorating. Agile. A literary treasure. Citrine lives and breathes with the perspective of a real writer surging against great existential issues like Walt Whitman's ultimate question. Humboldt is brilliant, pitiful, hilarious and, ultimately, victorious from the grave. The gangster, Cantabile, is Citrine's cosmic foil: the Dionysius of Nietzsche to Citrine's Apollo. This is potentially a life-altering work: it can change your outlook on life and death. Bellow redeems late 20th century American literature with writing so rich it has bestowed upon him a mantle of immortality. He will be long remembered as one of America's most brilliant 20th century writers. This novel confirms Bellow's consistent gift for writing as evidenced by his prolific virtuosity in Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King. What a masterful literary legacy Bellow has left us! Bag the NY Times Best Seller List and Oprah's mind numbing, witless wonders and read Bellow. Hardly anything this substantive is likely to be created hereafter.

I have a hard time understanding what there is not to like about this novel. The only thing that I can think of is that it is a book very uncontemporary in its style, but I find this to be one of its greatest strengths. I find that so many contemporary fiction writers have been overwhelmed by the presence of movies and TV that they are no longer able to write novels, but instead are forced to create what amounts to screenplays without stage directions.

Humboldt's Gift is not this. It takes the time to revel in the sheer joy of words. The characters are developed in depth. Bellow prevents them from becoming interchangeable, and this is as it should be, for people are not interchangeable. Bellow is obsessed with bringing every nuance and quirk of his characters to your doorstep. You could probably even pick them out on the street. What's more, Bellow has succeeded in bridging the amorphous world of high-minded ideas and the tangible world of reality with a prose style that is conversational and wise. You are learning something about what it means to be alive here. You are learning something about the breadth of the human condition. You are learning something about what it means to be American and what that means given the backdrop of the rest of history. If you would find such a journey tedious, don't bother reading this book. If you are anxious to take such a trip, take this book with you as a map.

Some of Bellow's books -- Sammler's Planet and Henderson the Rain King, in parts -- can be overly pendantic and essay-ish. But not this one. This one is a masterpiece of English literature. You are missing an American experience -- love it or leave -- if you are not reading this book.

Saul Bellow's HUMBOLDT'S GIFT is one of his last major novels. It's narrated by Charlie Citrine, a writer (playwright, biographer, essayist), who's tormented by a Chicago hood, a financially-draining divorce, an unfaithful girlfriend, and the memories of his recently deceased one-time mentor and close friend Von Humboldt Fleisher (loosely based on Delmore Schwartz).

There's not much action in HUMOBLDT'S GIFT. Much of the book is taken up by long passages of reminiscences, hyperactive philosophizing about the artist's--and any human's--place in modern society, and more general existential angst. These are written in furiously paced and often hilarious prose. The cadences of Bellow's sentences have unique rhythm and momentum.

At the same time, this is often a deeply moving novel. Charlie is haunted throughout the book by his memories of Humboldt, and in particular the moment when he saw Humboldt--down and out--on a NYC street and avoided him. It was the last time he would see Humboldt before his death. The many emotionally-charged and elegiac reflections on Humboldt and his ambition and his friendship and his manic depression and his eventual break-up, make up the heart of the book.

The first half of the novel is extremely strong. Then it tends to get a bit indulgent; the contrivences -- the character of Cantabile, for example -- begin to wear, and the penultimate change of setting to Spain seems to take the energy out of the book. Bellow's prose is often awesomely brilliant -- the language seems to jump off the page -- but it too has its moments of carelessness and self-indulgence.

Ultimately, I don't think this novel is entirely successful, but it is often magical, often moving, and continually thought-provoking.

I read several other of Bellow's novels and frankly found none of them very memorable. I was disappointed and a bit surprised; I'd enjoyed virtually all of Roth's work and couldn't understand why Bellow left me cold. I'd started Humboldt's Gift and given it up after a hundred pages. I finally thought I'd give it another try, and I'm very glad I did. Maybe it was that I had to be in my 50's to fully appreciate a novel about a man in his 50's, facing issues that are much more remote and theoretical only ten years earlier. His use of language, which I'd never found remarkable before, is extraordinary. He grapples with psychological realities and ultimate issues with both great humor and true profundity. The characters are fully realized, and at least to me, easily recognizable among the people I've known in my own life--most certainly myself included. While it's not a short book, if you give it a chance and can relate to the main character, you won't be able to put it down.

Humbolt's Gift is a wonderful story about themes of individuality and creativity, American society in the 1940's and 50's, and about alienation. The characters are wild and eccentric. Charlie, Humbolt's hero, escapes the dominations of society through personal transcedence, but can he really? I ask. HG also brings up questions about how we are influenced by our mentors, and that sometimes we must go beyond their influence to become ourselves. I think the ending is a trick. You get the impression that Bellow wants us to think transcedence is the way, but also he puts some doubt in our minds about Charlie, can Charlie really transcend when he's filled with so much love for his fellow man. An interesting, thought provoking read.

This is one of the funniest books I've ever read. Charlie Citrine's many troubles involving friends hoodlums women and the meaning of life will appeal to readers who have realized that they were more or less idiots until about the age of 40. Even if you're still something of an idiot you'll like, and laugh at, this book. Humboldt's Gift proves that Great Literature can be fun to read.

This is the first Bellow book I've read and I finished feeling ambivalent about his talents.

Humboldt's Gift is the story of a successful writer, Charlie Citrine and his fascination with his friend the poet, Von Humboldt Fleisher. Woven within the text are his relationships with a mobster, several women, and an unreliable literary friend.

Citrine is an intellectual and a thinker. Interspersed throughout the story are philosophical thoughts and conjectures about life. Sometimes these further the story or provide more depth to a character, other times they seem like extraneous rambling.

The strength of the book is Citrine's strong and unique narrative voice and the portrait of literary and mob life in Chicago, New York and Europe of the 1970s.

What disappointed me about the book was that the lack of a strong story line made it difficult to continue reading. I felt the same story could have been told in a few hundred fewer pages.

Overall, not a terrible book, but not especially memorable.

Clearly Bellow wrote beautiful prose and some of his passages in this are excellent. My problem with the novel is that I felt that I was wading through endless digressions and pretentious ruminations of the main character Charlie Citrine to get to the hidden gems. I struggled to finish this and frankly wouldn't recommend it. Citrine in the end is neither a believable or sympathetic character and his inner dialogue becomes a study in boredom. Since at one point he goes into great detail to discuss boredom in modern life maybe that was the point. I almost felt like the author was intentionally testing the readers ability to endure the pacing of this book.