Ravelstein [Hardcover]

Saul Bellow (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Viking; First edition. edition (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670891312
• ISBN-13: 978-0670891313
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (117 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,879,927 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel HUMBOLDT'S GIFT in 1975, and in 1976 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 'for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.' He is the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards, for THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, HERZOG, and MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Bellow But Maybe Even Better, July 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Ravelstein (Hardcover)

Dying of AIDS, internationally renowned professor, Abe Ravelstein commissions his friend, Chick, to write his biography in the form of a memoir.

A bold and brash novel, Ravelstein is reminiscent of Humboldt's Gift; each contains an admiring narrator and each is based on actual persons in Bellow's life.

Ravelstein, however, is more of an extravert than is Humboldt, becoming almost a comic figure who lives the high life on a grand and glorious scale. He tosses his hand-tailored clothes about with abandon, orders lavish meals, and in general, has a passion for material possessions while maintaining an utter disdain for money.

Ravelstein is certainly a far cry from the dour figures that usually people Bellow's novels; in fact he is just the opposite: flamboyant, perverse, bizarre, passionate and material. Considering what fate has in store for him, perhaps his personality simply adds to the overall tragedy of the novel.

The other characters in Ravelstein are vintage Bellow. The men are removed academics, the women devouring and unreasonable.

It is Chick, however, who comes to dominate the book. A big-city, Jewish type, he is still unprepared for his disastrous marriage to Vela, a stereotypical Bellow female straight out of Herzog. His second marriage, however, to Rosamund, one of Ravelstein's former students is more successful, but since Bellow seems averse to giving us anything resembling a fulfilling relationship and a sympathetic female character, Rosamund remains little more than background music.

Fighting demons of his own, Chick decides to escape the pessimism surrounding Ravelstein and leaves the gloomy Chicago winter for the sunnier climes of the Caribbean where he comes face to face with his own mortality.

If one accepts Herzog as the benchmark against which to weigh Bellow's work, then Ravelstein succeeds. The characters are, for the most part, larger-than-life, the mood is sufficiently pessimistic and the setting depicted with meticulously accurate details. The thing Ravelstein lacks are the cast of secondary figures and the braided running subplots. This is, however, not a criticism, and Ravelstein is all the better for its clean and crisp narrative.

Ravelstein is, at its heart, vintage Bellow, and it shows us that this master writer has lost none of his power to observe life with both sympathy and cool irony. If anything, he is even better than before.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine obituary to a friend, May 19, 2000

By 

Walker E. Rowe III "Walker Elliott Rowe" (Santiago, CHILE) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ravelstein (Hardcover)

Ravelstein, or rather Bloom, is finely eulogized by Saul Bellow in this short novel. As a corporate cubicle prisoner, I myself wish I could live the literary life--the best I can hope for is to read about such people and to read all the literature I possibly can. Alan Bloom's life seems--as it was depicted in a excerpts of "Ravelstein" published in The New Yorker--seems similar to the life of Robert Hughes also eulogized in "The New Yorker". Both were gay intellectuals whose telephone rang day and night with international calls seeking a bit of well-informed analysis.

Of course, having just read "Ravelstein" I have jumped into "The Closing of the American" mind. But I am puzzled by Saul Bellow's introduction. He says that Moses Herzog, of the novel "Herzog" tries to learn about life by reading the great books. But Saul Bellow says you learn about life by living it--not by reading about it. But isn't the theme of Bloom's essays that such readin gives us a continuum of societies fables and tales and a moral foundation with which we can understand life's issues and the personalities that we meet. Seems the two ideas don't mesh.

I think the Saul Bellow must be trying to sooth his damaged heart by writing about his bitter marriage to the character Elva's real life equal, Bellow's mathematician wife. It is good that his friend Ravelstein (Bloom) is there to help Chick (Bellow) understand what a really cruel woman she is. Chick seems able to discern such matters. Martial discord and the pain thereof also is the major theme of "Herzog". In a way it is good that Bellow has had such tormenting affairs, otherwise we would not have received such wonderful literature.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Death Defying Performance, May 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Ravelstein (Hardcover)

I've been a life-long Bellow fan, so it's hard for me to be objective about Ravelstein. If you are interested in the big human issues - love, death, meaning, how to greet one's own end, mankind's humanity, lack thereof, men and women, marriage, ego, the politics of academia, the direction of culture, and some specifically Jewish questions having to do with one's place in the scheme of human and cosmic existence, then you will plow through this plotless poetic masterwork and be amazed at how square in the eye an eighty-five year old artist can look death, and life. You will come away from Ravelstein appreciating how all of us must deal with the ultimate fate. Roman a clef or no, the book goes well beyond commemoration of an intellectual hero, reasserting all of the themes Bellow has so elequently embraced for so many seekers - asking what it means to be here, on earth, human, awake, for so brief and incredible a voyage as that which a thinking, alert person is willing to experience. How do we contend with our own mortality? our sins? our omissions? the desire to quell the pain? who will remember us? what will it have meant? Bellow answers these questions, this time, in less than 235 pages, with hardly a moment's digression, in a sensational mind-boggling read. You will find yourself asking, How is it that nothing is happening and I want to know everything he has to say! How does a great story teller turn dying into a page turner? a pot boiler? He never patronizes, never compromises, always goes for the heart, and soul, of the human experience. Ravelstein is Bellow purified - deceptively simple, enlivening and heartening, tender at last. You won't forget Ravelstein, and in accomplishing this, Bellow affirms that there is something quite worthy in the human experience, no matter how painful, horrific, mindless, or pleasing the particulars may be.