Rating: 
Summary: very good indeed
Review: A deep and intelligent novel deftly written despite some draggy passages.
Rating:
Summary: One of the great novels. I've read it 8 times. My favorite
Review: A novel as rich as this does not come around every year, or every century, for that matter. Do not deprive yourself of this great treat.Yes, there are many references, but Bellow is child of culture, and what can a writer write about except about his experience, the time he lives in, and the people and books that influenced him along the way? Bellow has great experiences to write about, and knows a great deal about the culture in which he grew up. Phenomenal amount.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the biggest over-rated bores in 20th c. American lit
Review: A warning to anyone thinking of buying this book: stiftle the urge, borrow it from a library, if you must. I agree with three out of seven reviewers here who have panned the book. This deserves the word "bloviated," if it exists. Having spent some time this year reading some "classics" of 20th c. American lit, I can say this is the worst. A huge bore.
Rating:
Summary: Odyssey of an American poet
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Odyssey of an American poet
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but irritating in places!
Review: Based on his encounters with the brilliant but doomed poet Delmore Schwartz, Humbold's Gift is like much of Saul Bellow's novels in that it's well-written and flows nicely. However, what makes it different from earlier works like "The Adventures of Augie March" is that the narrator is such a drip - a man who squanders his good fortune on bad gambling tips and dubious concubines. Bellow's characterization of the narrator Charlie Citrine is almost too convincing. Citrine becomes absolutely insufferable at times, and this makes sometimes it difficult to continue reading without wanting to slam the book down in disgust instead of reading on.
However, for those with a penchant for flawed personalities - and for fans of Delmore Schwartz, there is much here to entertain.
Rating:
Summary: i'm so glad it won a pulitzer
Review: Before I knew that it had won a pulitzer I thought thaT IT DEFINITLY SHOULD. i LOVED THIS BOOK. eVEN THOUGH i READ T SO LONG AGO AS TO NOT HAVE A WORKING MEMORY OF ALL OF IT'S HIGHLIGHTS. i REMEMBER SNUGGLING UP AND TRYING TO HIGHLIGHT ALL OF THE THINGS THAT INSPIRED ME. iT WAS SO MUCH! IT SCARED ME THAT THE ARTIST WITH THE YOUNG GIRLFRIEN WAS CONSIDERED TO HAVE WASTED HIS LIFE. i HAD ALWAYS YEARNED FOR A NON-ATTACHED ROAMING BOHEMIAN LIFESTYLE(PROBABLY STILL DO) BUT THAT CHARACTER MADE ME REALIZE THAT THERE MUST BE A BALANCE BETWEEN ART AND LIFE.
Rating: 
Summary: A brainy moron
Review: Charles Citrine is an author. The man isn't stupid. Yet, like other leading characters in Saul Bellow's books, he lives his life in a foolish way. He has the kind of friends who eliminate the need for enemies. If he had a dog it would bite him daily, and he'd feed it. The title character, Humboldt, is another writer, suffering from manic depression at a time when lithium wasn't widely prescribed. His gift to Citrine is a manuscript, and is left to Citrine after Humboldt's death. The manuscript turns out to be valuable, but I doubt that it will straighten out Citrine's life. He can be counted on to insure himself a complicated and unsatisfying life. It's frustrating to read about this intelligent dope.
Rating: 
Summary: A Delicate Weave of Exposition and Storytelling
Review: Charles Citrine's fascination with death (although not his) seemed to pre-occupy him to the point where he was unable to understand his own living. If this is part of the main theme, Bellow succeeded in crafting ingenius moments of narrative that enlightened the reader and developed an unpredictable (somewhat meandering) plot. To many readers, this book will come off as very showy- an exercise in exhibiting how well read and studied Bellow is. In this book, if the narratives are Bellow's strength, the dialogue is his weakness. It seemed to suffer from the same malaise as the ending- it was too compact and forced - especially for a book focusing on someone that is desperately searching to lift the weight of the dead off of his shoulders. Nothing in real life (or death) is as tidy as the ending of this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Spiritual Crisis of a Shallow Main Character
Review: Humbolt's Gift is a disappointing foray into what could have been a deeply moving meditation on The Big Issues. But it fails, primarily due to the laughably narcissistic and irritating nature of the faux-intellectual narrator, Charlie Citrine.
So ridiculous and UNintellectual is Citrine (unless regurgitating, in vastly dumbed-down fashion, the theories, thoughts and theses of great Western minds qualifies as intellectual) that I wasn't at all certain Bellow intended Citrine to be taken seriously. Except that he's neither comical nor satirized. Charlie and Humbolt are both classically well-educated, but neither manages to move beyond the syllabus and into the realm of truly creative thought. The fact that both consider themselves artists is simulatneously amusing and infuriating.
Citrine is nothing more than a shallow, pseudo-intellectual in the midst of a spiritual crisis. Okay, even shallow, pseudo-intellectuals are entitled to their crises, but dressing them up in existential stoles and passing them off as profound doesn't work.
Bellow's prose, however, is lovely as always.
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