More Die of Heartbreak

Rating:
Summary: On the vulnerability of the intellectual in the real world
Review: An man long devoted to intellectual pursuits comes down from his ivory tower in a final bid for love, but finds himself defenseless in the real world, where people do not understand him but are happy to harness his prestige for their own purposes. Benn Crader is a world famous botanist, but he also is a soft-hearted man, as you will know when you encounter the quotation that includes the book's title. Will the great scientist protect his special intellectual gifts, or will he allow the pressures of his new, very materialistic adopted family to destroy him? It's a great premise for a novel, and Bellow covers many, many of its implications and takes the story to a logical yet surprising ending. Bellow's narrator, Crader's admiring nephew, often takes off on tangents to ruminate on current events, the contemporary intellectual scene and various intellectual pursuits. Some of these tangents seem to fit into the story better than others, and once in a while I got frustrated and found myself paging ahead to see when he would stop ruminating and start telling the darn story again. Yet Bellow's intellectual meanderings include many interesting observations about life, and taken as a whole, they help to build a textured world around the story. "More Die of Heartbreak" is not a literary classic, but it is worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best Bellow- but every Bellow has something good
Review: I felt a certain tiredness in this work, a certain contrivance of a kind I did not feel in the most gripping Bellow works, Herzog, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King. But I also felt that old Bellow gift for inspired insight into life, a kind of reflectiveness on the everyday which makes a poetry of ' seeing'. The story here of the aging botanist in disappointed love as told by his botanist nephew does not in my judgment touch us in the deepest way .It's not the greatest Bellow but every Bellow has much to give.

Rating:
Summary: That rare novel where the execution matches inspiration
Review: Saul Bellow was the one author on the syllabus of a college course I took years ago whose work(Herzog, I think) we never got around to. I am sorry it took me so long to get back to him.

The singular impression I got as I read and continued reading was that the story line held together throughout. Most writers have great inspiration and poor execution or great execution and poor inspiration, and the fabric frays. In this magnificent and therapeutic work, however, Bellow displays an admirable/enviable ability to manage the project and keep the reader invested to the very end.

Now back to Herzog.

Rating:
Summary: Did I read the same book as the previous reveiwers?
Review: The only thing that impressed me was the number of sentences, paragraphs--pages, even--that this guy wrote without saying anything at all.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant start, the rest is boring
Review: This is the story of the relationships of a young faculty in a midwestern university with his uncle, a professor at the same university, with a sort of an ex-girlfriend, with whom he has a child, and with his parents, who live in Paris (where he grew up).

The first 70 pages or so of this novel are brilliant. Saul Bellow's gift for telling stories is depicted in them in both - plot and structure. He uses the English language and grammar as a musician uses notes to compose a beautiful and flowing piece of music.
Only after the first 70 pages the book becomes boring. The story is dragged and the beautiful usage of English turns into a demonstration of technique that doesn't really serve anything.

The verdict: Read the brilliant first 70 pages and then move to your next book...