Rating: 
Summary: Big Themes - A One of a Kind.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A pretentious collection of allusions to great writers.
Review: I finally forced myself to attend to Bellow! I listened to the tapes!!! I had a difficult time trying to determine whether Bellow was pulling our legs or whether he meant this work to be taken seriously. He mentions every person who wrote something that would fit into the "great books," but never clarifies any meaningful concept that would be found in any of those works. Bellow had to be kidding us when he describes his sexual fantasies. These are the fantasies of a 50+ character who is supposed to be a great intellectual?? No wonder they have come up with Viagra!!! And what is all that stuff about communicating with spirits??? Is that supposed to be serious, as well. No -- Bellow was trying to do for novels what Stravinsky and Picasso did for music and painting.... One big put on!!! It must be!!!
Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest works of American literature
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: cries out to be taught in a classroom
Review: I loved Bellow's two short novels, Dangling Man and Seize the Day; tightly packed, concentrated thrilling accounts of alienation. But while Humboldt's Gift begins as well, it quickly tapers off into a diffuse mass of self-indulgent, theory- dropping nonsense. I think Jame's Atlas's comment in the brand new bio of Bellow is very apt here, that Bellows, like many people from an impoverished, immigrant background, is trying too hard here to make up for the deficiencies of his youth. Detached readers have a legitimate complaint about Bellow's penchant for self-indulgence, which repeatedly pads a potentially excellent 200-pager into 300-plus page behemoth of tedium and name-dropping. A real shame, because Dangling Man and Seize the Day are American classics. The uncommitted reader may wish to start with those.
Rating:
Summary: Bellow's Resolution
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Poetry, business, life and the dead
Review: If you ever doubt about why you decided to devote your life to business, law or any other money-making but potentially mind-killing job, why you disregared your love for poetry, then read this book, and compare Humboldt to Charlie Citrine..
Rating:
Summary: Stunning, brilliant, timeless classic
Review: Many of the reviewers in this space are out of their minds! This is one of the finest works of literature ever written. Brilliant in its insight, sprawling masterpiece. Not an easy read -- you actually have to slow down and dig in to get the depth. Brings large worldviews into focus. Painful but uplifting. A must-read for 20th century literature.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the cursory reader
Review: Saul Bellow writes not only about what takes place in the story, but about what takes place in his mind. An excellent introspective work, but requires time and energy to fully grasp the deep thoughts, theories, and theologies detailed. A perfect Nobel book for its probing insight of the human consciousness and distanced realisation of mankind's motives.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed, but frequently astonishing
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Meandering
Review: They should have given Bellow his Nobel Prize a couple of years earlier, to avoid the aspersion this novel throws upon it. While this novel displays as well as any Bellow's stylistic fluency, the story really has no serious moral or intellectual interest, and thus the ornaments of style are wasted. The protagonist is capricious to the point of carelessness and free of the burden of any serious commitments, ethical or otherwise. He is so narcissistic that the reader is forced to doubt either his intelligence or his humanity. It would be comforting if the novel meant to expose a pathological frame of mind - albeit not of the most malignant kind - but the character's picaresque adventures, inconsequential struggles, ephemeral desires, and his shallow reflections upon them, are given far too much space for such a purpose to obtain. It is a matter of genuine puzzlement to me why Bellow chose to give such a generous platform to this impoverished character, whose moral substance is nothing beside, for instance, the much more weighty Mr. Sammler, through whom Bellow successfully accomplishes the only purpose this novel could have been meant for (and fails in), which is to examine the pressures which modern American society forces upon the articulate mind, evaluate the resulting changes in relations with others and oneself, and to convey the pathos of our failures to repair what is damaged thereby.
In a word, don't waste your time.
|
