Ravelstein

by Saul Bellow

Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, American, Literary Fiction, Classics, Jewish

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2000

About the author

Novels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include Dangling Man in 1944 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.

People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.

Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.

Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.

Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.

People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.

People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ways of Dying

This is a novel about ageing; more specifically about that stage in life when death has become a persistently conscious prospect. But about whose ageing and whose death is debatable - that of the eponymous Ravelstein; or of the narrator, Chick, who is preparing to write Ravelstein’s biography; or, perhaps, of the reader who may have yet to reach that point of maturity? So I don’t concur with the conventional wisdom that Ravelstein is merely or primarily a tribute to the friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow. For me the key is the very different way in which each of Bellow’s literary characters confront the ending of his life.

Ravelstein, the man, is a biographical treasure trove: charming, eccentric, urbane, connected, clever and rich. Chick, although somewhat older, is a type Yiddish has the perfect word for - a nebbish, defined functionally as a person who upon entering a room makes it feel as if someone has just left. Compared to Ravelstein, Chick is not merely normal, he is biographically boring in his hapless normality.

Nevertheless, unlike Ravelstein, Chick develops. He has an intellectual and emotional history. Ravelstein has apparently never varied in his tastes, behaviour or attitudes since childhood. In fact his entire being seems set ab ovo. Ravelstein is mentor to the older man but his advice never varies: Be more like me, how I have always been.

So, while there is a great deal of admiring description by Chick of Ravelstein, the real ageing process is happening in Chick. It is he who, contemplating the facts of Ravelstein’s life, suddenly finds himself maturing and therefore questioning his own standards. “For seventy-odd years I had seen reality under these same signs,” he discovers to his dismay. In other words, he is learning and therefore changing through thoughts of death.

This is the kind of breakthrough (or agony) Ravelstein will never experience. Rather he has, despite his eccentricity, insisted on a fundamental type of conformity and single-minded consistency. Hence his criticism of Chick, “Mankind had first claim on our attention and I [Chick] indulged my “personal metaphysics” too much, Ravelstein thought.” Ravelstein was not one for speculation but for practical action. He could learn only about the how not the why of existence.

The result is that Ravelstein’s flamboyance, influence and wit simply fade with his declining physical state. He is quite literally less and less of what he has always been. Never experiencing self-doubt, he has no need to question this trajectory. Isn’t death the same terminus for us all? One must succumb but with valorous disregard not changes of character; or so he clearly believes.

Chick on the contrary is a man with ‘issues’. He is a mediocre writer, with immigrant parents, of unresolved Jewishness, divorced, married now to a much younger woman, and , above all, subject to the “charismatic order” exuded by Ravelstein. He too is on a trajectory into old age, but a rather more uncertain one than Ravelstein. Ravelstein, among other things, didn’t have to get over Ravelstein’s death.

It is this uncertainty and Chick’s reaction to it which is the real action of the book. He paradoxically grows or expands towards death (or near-death anyway since he’s around to write about it). Bellow handles that reaction with graceful subtlety - Bloom was his friend after all - but nonetheless decisively. His will be a different kind of death than Ravelstein’s.

The central question that Bellow is raising, therefore, is ‘how does one best go about dying?’ Ravelstein was his last work, and he was ill when he was writing it. So how could the subject of death not been on his mind? His friendship and admiration for Bloom provides just the right context for an otherwise potentially dull philosophical analysis, or, worse, a literally deadly lapse into terminal solipsism. I think his artistic problem was not the subject itself but the way to present it palatably to those of us who haven’t quite reached the same stage of old age. In this I believe he has succeeded completely.

Postscript 10Jan19 some interesting background on Ravelstein: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/james-w...

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

M-a uimit dintotdeauna confuzia dintre ficțiune și realitate. Cititorii naivi tind să gîndească narațiunea după logica realității. Uneori, e și cazul acestui roman, ei văd în ficțiune un reportaj în care doar numele personajelor au fost modificate. Și pentru că e vorba de un reportaj, pornesc în căutarea indivizilor reali. Aha, Ravelstein e Allan Bloom (cel care a redactat The Closing of the American Mind și a făcut mare zarvă în universitățile americane). Aha, profesorul Grielescu e, de fapt, Mircea Eliade (unul dintre ideologii legionarilor). Dacă străbatem un roman în modul sugerat mai sus, nu-i mai putem sesiza aspectul estetic.

În pofida mormanelor de comentarii inadecvate, care văd în Ravelstein un „roman cu cheie”, eu, unul, persist în credința că un roman, un roman bun, nu poate fi un reportaj. Refuz acest tip de lectură care se pretinde cultural și ideologic și care, pînă la urmă, nu are nici o legătură cu romanul în sine. Avem de a face cu o ficțiune - ficțiune, cu o ficțiune în sensul literal al cuvîntului, și nu cu o biografie doar superficial retușată a cutărui profesor american de Filosofie politică.

Ravelstein, de altfel, este un personaj memorabil, un „joker măcinat de suferință”, un individ tragi-comic, cinic și sentimental, ironic și pătimaș, sumbru și fragil. Naratorul care deapănă povestea lui Ravelstein se numește Chick și redactează această „biografie” - care nu este o biografie propriu-zisă! - cu devoțiunea hagiografului medieval. Sfîntul se prăbușește cu totul sub aura lui strălucitoare.

Din mulțimea frazelor subliniate pe parcursul lecturii, aleg deocamdată meditația lui Chick despre sentimentul apropierii morții:

„Îi menționam [lui Rosamund] deseori Moartea lui Ivan Ilici, ca să-i ilustrez ideea mea. În copilărie, zilele sînt extrem de lungi, dar la bătrînețe sînt repezi, 'mai iuți decît suveica țesătorului', cum spune Iov. Iar Ivan Ilici menționează și înălțarea lentă a unei pietre aruncate în aer [urmată de brusca ei coborîre]... Ești controlat de magnetismul gravitațional și întregul univers este implicat în această accelerare a propriului tău sfîrșit... Arta este una dintre posibilitățile de salvare din această haotică accelerare. Metrul în poezie, tempo-ul în muzică și culoarea în pictură. Totuși, simțim permanent că ne rostogolim vertiginos spre țărînă, ca să ne prăbușim, zdrobiți, în groapă”.

[Andrew]

For most literary Americans of my generation, Saul Bellow has largely been forgotten. It seems that when he's thought of at all, it's as a hopelessly out-of-touch white conservative, someone whose artistic ability was ultimately clouded by his stance. While Céline, Hamsun, and other reactionaries have been rehabilitated, Bellow's unsexy Republican uncle attitudes are a tough nut to swallow. And consequently, we're not likely to pick up Herzog any time soon (and frankly, I think it kind of sucked).

But hey, Henderson the Rain King was OK, if a bit silly, and Augie March was downright fun.

But Ravelstein is a different matter altogether. A slender yet complex novel of ideas, featuring a very sympathetic total dickhead at its core, a character in whom we see a lot of Bellow mocking the cultural conservatism of his milieu, this is the best sort of modernist American writing. Forget what you thought you knew about Saul Bellow-- this is the novel that makes me think the Swedish medal around his neck wasn't a waste of gold.

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ravelstein And Chick

"Ravelstein" (2000) is a novel-memoir of the friendship between Allan Bloom and the author, Saul Bellow. In addition to exploring the friendship of the two men, the book's primary themes, to me, are the nature of love and the necessity of facing death, one's own and those dear to one.

In the novel, Abe Ravelstein is based upon Allan Bloom, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago and a student of Leo Strauss (called Davorr in the book). Professor Bloom became wealthy when his 1987 book, "The Closing of the American Mind" became an unexpected best-seller. Bloom's book stresses the importance of philosophy and the humanities, particularly the philosophy of Plato, if education is to meet its function of forming thoughtful, passionate, and autonomous persons. He sharply criticized higher education in the United States, together with most of pop culture, for its failure to acknowledge or to pursue these goals. Bloom grew up in a Jewish family in the midwest.

Like Bloom, Saul Bellow grew up in a Jewish family in the midwest. Unlike Bloom, recognition came to Bellow relatively early in his career as a novelist. Bellow received the Nobel Prize in 1976. He won three National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize.

The two men became fast friends relatively late in life and "Ravelstein" (2000) is a record of their friendship written by Bellow (born 1915) in his mid-80s. A painter with words, Bellow in a short space gives the reader an unforgettable picture of Ravelstein. The book disclaims an attempt to deal with Ravelstein's thought. But I think Bellow captures a great deal of it when he emphasizes how students must learn to leave home and the familiar and try to think for themselves. The picture of Ravelstein is larger than life, as Bellow gives us a passionate, expressive individual with most expensive tastes, a strong ego, a ribald sense of humor, and a passion for promiscuous homosexual sex. The book poignantly shows the reader Ravelstein's lingering death from AIDS.

We meet Bellow (Chick) in the book in the midst of an unhappy marriage to a woman named Vela. Vela is a world-renowned physicist but, to hear Chick tell it, she has little time for or interest in him. Chick and Vela are in the midst of a divorce when one of Ravelstein's young students, Rosamund,falls in love with him. Chick suffers a near-miss with death in an illness and Rosamund helps pull him through. The book presents a picture of the nature of love, I think, in the contrasts between the Chick -Vela and the Chick-Rosamund relationships. Ravelstein too has much to say about the nature of love, in his own voice and in the voice of his philosophical master, Plato, in the "Symposium" and the "Phaedrus".

Friendship for Plato and Aristotle and for Bloom is the meeting of congenial minds with a common purpose. We see such friendship in "Ravelstein" in an interest in the life of the mind but we see something much more earthy too. Ravelstein and Chick are full of the life of the American midwest, of Vaudeville, of spicy humor, and of smutty language and stories. They enjoy each other's company and are able to be honest with each other -- even when each man has something painfully unpleasant to say about the other. They also share a common American Jewish heritage, both as it deals with secular American life and as a response to the Holocaust, which gets explored in substantial detail in this book. The two men reflect on death and on immortality, given Ravelstein's awareness of his own impending death and the aging Chick's close call with death.

This is a book of Bellow's old age. I think it will be remembered. The book will also, I think, keep alive the memory and teachings of Allan Bloom, as a person and as a teacher. The accomplishments and the names of Bloom and Bellow will be inextricably linked for many readers as a result of Bellow's story of their friendship.

Robin Friedman

[SCARABOOKS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perché si legge così poco e così di rado Saul Bellow? E perché si continuano a scrivere cose tipo che Ravelstein, il suo ultimo romanzo, non è la sua opera migliore? Non perché lo sia, ma perché è uno snobismo, scriverlo. Bellow è Bellow, un grandissimo. E questo è un gran romanzo. Rappresenta l’ultimo tentativo di Bellow, estremo e vano come tutti i precedenti, di fare i conti con la morte. Ed essendo impossibile fare i conti con la propria, di morte, ha adottato l’espediente narrativo di immaginare la morte e il bisogno di essere ricordato con una biografia scritta da lui di Ravelstein, il suo amico più caro (nella vita era lo scrittore Allan Bloom). Il romanzo mentre le “osservazioni si accumulano intorno al nocciolo, escludendolo” diventa una sorta di ultima scena e di veglia funebre ironica e colta. Una scena a cui partecipa tutto quello che ha popolato la vita e i romanzi di Bellow: l’università. l’ebraismo, la vanità, le tante mogli, il desiderio, la curiosità, le idiosincrasie, i parenti, le malattie, l’America degli anni della prosperità, gli echi tristi dell’Europa del novecento.

Al di là di questo, vale leggerlo almeno per un motivo, lo stesso motivo per cui vale leggere tutti gli altri. Per la voce! La sua voce narrante, il suo entrare in confidenza col personaggio e col lettore nello stesso momento, come un Giano bifronte. Il personaggio, tu che leggi e Bellow in mezzo, a far combriccola, a provare insieme a gettare lo sguardo sull’abisso. A provare a condividere il bisogno di capire e ordinare i fatti di una vita e conciliarlo col il bisogno opposto di trasgredire e lasciarsi andare. A cercare di tenere insieme il vitalismo e la depressione di fronte all’unica prospettiva certa, l’intelligenza senza freni e il dubbio che davanti al mistero sia una povera cosa, sostanzialmente inutile. E condividendo anche un’unica certezza: quella che non arriveremo mai a sapere qual’è la verità. Stiamo scivolando tutti verso la stessa direzione che ci porta dove non si vorrebbe mai andare; dove Ravelstein non sarebbe voluto andare. Eppure, forse è solo incredulità davanti all’inaccettabile, ma una idea di luce ce l’abbiamo tutti, nonostante tutto, in testa. La sua è proprio bella:

“Mi aveva domandato, tuttavia, come sarebbe stata la morte, secondo me, e quando dissi che le immagini si sarebbero interrotte rifletté con aria grave sulla mia risposta: rimase muto e si chiese cosa intendessi veramente con queste parole. Nessuno può rinunciare alle immagini: le immagini potrebbero, sì, potrebbero continuare. Mi chiedo se qualcuno crede davvero che finisca tutto lì, nella tomba. Nessuno può rinunciare alle immagini. Le immagini devono continuare e continueranno. Se Ravelstein, il materialista ateo, aveva insinuato che prima o poi mi avrebbe rivisto, voleva dire che non accettava che la tomba fosse la fine. Nessuno può accettarlo, e nessuno lo accetta. Facciamo i duri solo a parole………Questa è la certezza segreta ed esoterica, involontaria e normale, dell’uomo in carne e ossa. La carne avvizzirà e scomparirà, il sangue si rapprenderà, le ossa andranno in polvere, ma nel fondo della sua mente, nel fondo del suo cuore, nessuno è davvero convinto che le immagini s’interromperanno.”

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Free for Audible-Plus-UK members!

Not quite a four, but better than a three-star book; somewhere in-between is the most accurate rating.

The book gives an account of the friendship between Chick (Saul Bellow) and the political philosopher Ravelstein (Allan Bloom). It reads as a double memoir. Bloom died in 1992.Six years after his death, Bellow wrote this memoir which Bloom had requested he write. Bellow was in his eighties and had himself almost died.

Th story is a mix of fiction and nonfiction.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the book focuses on their friendship rather than illness. Illness is of course spoken of, but it is not what the book is about. This was a huge relief, and I liked the book all the more because what I feared didn’t occur.

Being Jewish is an important theme. This was impossible to avoid given the time and era, and the events the world had recently seen. Being Jewish is an element of Bellow’s style.

There is an easy flow to Bellow’s prose. He has a style of his own that is not hard to recognize. Some things did irritate me though—his overly abundant usage of the word esoteric and his repetition of information.

I particularly enjoyed the philosophical give and take between the two friends, their musings and their dialogues.

Richard Poe reads the audiobook well, except that his French is Americanized. The narration is clear and easy to follow. Four stars for the narration.



******************

The Victim 4 stars
Herzog 4 stars
Ravelstein 3 stars
Dangling Man 3 stars
Seize the Day 3 stars
More Die of Heartbreak 2 stars
The Actual 2 stars
The Adventures of Augie March 2 stars

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it was published critics called it one of Bellow's "minor" books. I disagree. It's softer and subtler than Augie March or Henderson the Rain King, but the narrative exuberance here is unsurpassed even by Bellow himself in earlier decades. Because the book is at its heart the story of friendship between two men who loved one another, Bellow's inability to write about women except in a misogynistic way is a minor flaw in this particular book, one that barely registered for me here, even though the same flaw made Herzog impossible going for me. Ok, I can do without women flaunting their pudenda in their ex-husband's faces as a mean way of saying goodbye, a scene that happens in Ravelstein, and in at least one other Bellow book. Augie March, I think. But even so. While reading Ravelstein I could forgive these trespasses, because I was swept along by the life force of these two main characters, Chick and Ravelstein. I was captivated by the depth of their friendship, and I was moved by this clear-headed, thoughtful, beautiful exploration of their own mortality as it played out in these pages. Only Henderson the Rain King came close for me to Ravelstein's moving and deep portrayal of friendship and mortality.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read all of Bellow, the best American novelist during my lifetime, though Updike became, in his last books, a close second--and a better reviewer.
I do not say this simply because Bellow's best friend at the U MN was my Ph.D. advisor Leonard Unger: a charming photo of them on a sofa smoking and laughing, with their wives framing it, was printed in Rolling Stone in the 50s. Go to Facebook, Alan P Bruno, to see the photo. (In the pic I think Leonard was just cracking one of his myriad jokes, probably a Jewish joke, according to his wife Sherley who was there.) Bellow and Unger together composed, over lunch at the UMN Faculty Club,a translation of the first four lines of the Wasteland by TS Eliot (Leonard's early specialty)--into Yiddish.
Ravelstein's a remarkable book partly bec Bellow wrote it in age, and partly bec it's nearly impossible to focus a gripping novel on the life of an academic, here Bloom. My line on the book: It would have been a much better, wittier book had Bellow written it about another of his friends, Leonard Unger.

[Nasim Dehghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

+++ از نظر "رَوِلِشتاین" سختگیری من نسبت به خودم نشانه ایی مطلوب بود. خودآگاهی به سختگیری نیاز دارد و من همیشه دوست داشتم با آن غول دمدمی یعنی "خود" روی تشک بروم. بنابراین امیدی وجود داشت اما من دوست داشتم فراتر از آن بروم. احساس من این بود که آدم کاملا شناخته نمی شود مگر اینکه راهی برای ارتباط با ارتباط ناپذیرها پیدا کند، یعنی با متافیزیکِ فردیِ خود. +++
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"رولشتاین" رمانی زندگینامه نوشت از سال بلو است که بر اساس سرگذشت واقعی یکی از دوستانش "آلن بلوم" فیلسوف و استاد دانشگاه نوشته شده است. نویسنده در این کتاب با نشان دادن شخصیتی خاکستری (نه خوب نه بد) از "رولشتاین" به انسانی مدرن می رسد و به این ترتیب به خوبی در کنار زندگینامه نویسی به بحران های جامعه مدرن می پردازد.
من این کتاب را با ترجمه منصوره وحدتی احمدزاده که انتشارات کتاب آمه به چاپ رسانده، خواندم.

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not a novel, but a symphony.

Words that melt into musical notes.

Think Mahler, Dvorak, Mozart.

This is a singular achievement for Bellow.

A great American writer.

His other novels are each unique and engaging.

But Ravelstein is different and beyond.

Melodic and unparalleled.

Dip your toes into this mellifluous creation.

It is his biography of a fictional character, Abe.

Or is it?

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes (perhaps quite often) we choose reading material for very personal reasons. That explains why I picked up this memoir / roman à clef. (As well, I hadn't read anything by Saul Bellow and I sort of felt like I should; so there's that.) 

The basic premise appealed to me: A study of the decades-long friendship between two now-older men; two guys who, in significant ways, were polar opposites but who also regularly met on a communication level that allowed them to share an easy, supportive, lifelong bond. 

The subject brought to mind a close friend: someone whose character was quite different from mine but who nevertheless took (mutual) solace in our unconditional closeness.

The narrator here - a writer, Chick (Bellow himself) - explains to us that his provocateur philosopher bud Abe Ravelstein has requested of Chick to take on the work of writing Abe's biography, to be published posthumously. (Unlike my friend and I, both men are intellectuals.)

Ravelstein is based on Allan Bloom - a controversial figure whose 1987 work 'The Closing of the American Mind' (to Bloom's surprise, not being a conservative) was largely embraced by The Right. Reviewing for 'Commentary', conservative Norman Podhoretz stated, "... Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."

Apparently the book - a takedown of higher education in American universities - was, at the time, both lauded and lambasted. 'Publishers Weekly' called it "a bestseller made by reviews". It seems the book had its day.

In the memory that Bellow puts forth, 'Abe' is seen as a suddenly wildly successful author who - not previously having had a whole lot of money but who had a habit of living way beyond his means - goes hog-wild with sudden success, spending as though money ran from an unchecked open faucet. 

I have relatively little feeling about Bellow's depiction of his close chum. ~ except to say that 'Abe' comes across as a rather mercurial being who, though loquacious almost to a fault, reads as somewhat impregnable. Bellow writes:

Spirited men and women, the young above all, were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death. There, in the briefest form possible, you have a sketch of Ravelstein's most important preoccupations.

He later quotes his friend:

"Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone."

Ravelstein comes off as an idealist who senses his own vision is impractical; it's as if he espouses: 'Be of the world, absorb, speak your mind, but then be insular.'

The portrait of 'Abe' left me scratching my head. (I'll put aside the fact that he was gay but publicly silent about it, even in the '80s; he was ensconced in a different era.) 

Apart from some harrowing but valuable details involving 'The Jewish Question', the main benefit I derived from the book came in its last third: in which 'Chick' experiences and details his own near-death. Without having conjecture to worry about, Bellow lays out his own tussle with mortality in a way that rings true. It's here that the book is allowed to breathe freely, with a tangible reality and understanding that seems, to a degree, to elude what went before. 

[Елвира · Rating 4 out of 5]

Много силна книга, искаше ми си обаче да приключваше както и беше започнала, защото финалът бе малко разводнен и извън същественото послание. Мимолетните приказки за еврейството ми дойдоха в повече и определено ми бе необходима малко повече интегралност в образа на Равелщайн. Но първите 3/4-ти от книгата нямат равни - голямо удоволствие от чисто интелектуален вид.

Обичам умните, ерудирани и талантливи хора, ярките личности, издигнати над обикновеността. Затова ми беше много приятно да се наслаждавам на Равелщайн и неговите мнения и отношения към живота. Но не бива да се забравя, че, за да бъде един човек своя пълнокръвен образ, той трябва да потърси и да попадне на хора, които ще го оценят истински. Трудна работа е да намериш някого, който да те обича и подкрепя и който да не те мрази, задето си най-добрият. Въпреки че съм свръхиндивидуалист и съм склонна да споря със себе си за последн��то, все пак красотата на приятелството между двама души винаги е била и ще продължава да бъде една от вечните теми на рицарството, философията и поезията.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Often the dying become extremely severe. We will still be here when they're gone and it's not easy for them to forgive us."

Finally I have begun to fill a huge gap in my Great American Literature education: I have just read my first novel by Saul Bellow - Ravelstein (2000). What a great read it has been! True, the first 20 or so pages are highly intimidating: the author assumes the reader's erudition and complete focus, and the text almost overwhelms with hyper-intellectualism. But having survived the beginning pages many readers should get accustomed to the challenges of the prose, like I did. However, I need to offer a warning: this novel may be better understood by older people, and by 'older' I mean people for whom death is no longer an abstract concept but a conspicuous event on the horizon.

The narrator, known as Chick, a seventy-something writer, is obviously an alter ego of Mr. Bellow himself (the author was in fact 85 when the novel was published). Professor Ravelstein, for whom Chick is the closest friend, is "a major figure in the highest intellectual circles," an internationally renowned professor of philosophy, and the author of a best-selling book that expounds his conservative views about the decline of American culture. The book made millions for Prof. Ravelstein and now he can afford flying to Paris to buy Lanvin jackets and custom-made silk shirts. He also happens to be gay and suffers from AIDS complications. He wants Chick to write his memoirs.

In his writings Professor Ravelstein captures "modernity in its full complexity" and the human costs of modernity. He criticizes the mass-market aspect of cultural modernity and juxtaposes it with culture of the olden days, writing about people who read "Stendhal's novels or Thomas Hardy's poems", instead of sucking garbage flowing from TV, Facebook or Twitter. He recommends interest in Plato and Thucidides rather than current celebrities:

"I like to say when I am asked about Finnegan[s Wake], that I am saving him for the nursing home. Better to enter eternity with Anna Livia Plurabelle than with the Simpsons jittering on the TV screen."

Particularly sharp is Ravelstein's critique of the modern education system and the fact that the "liberal education had shrunk to the vanishing point." The universities are excellent in sciences and engineering but a failure at liberal arts. At this point I realized that Mr. Bellow's Ravelstein is modeled on the real-life philosopher and classicist, Allan Bloom. And indeed I have found out that the author and Dr. Bloom were friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago. The life story of Ravelstein and that of Dr. Bloom are in fact parallel. Yet let us remember: this is a novel, not any kind of Dr. Bloom's biography. By it being beautifully written fiction I find the novel much more realistic than any non-fiction biography could be.

Scattered throughout the novel are wonderful morsels of truth about human life and especially death. We the geezers will appreciate the mention of one of the main problems of aging - "speeding up of time." We the geezers may also be able to understand the sentence I quoted in the epigraph above. It's a hard truth to swallow and very painful. Ravelstein is a great novel. My "to read" shelves will now gather other Bellow's works.

Four and three quarter stars.

[Northpapers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Allan Bloom wrote a bestseller titled The Closing of the American Mind. I had not read this book when I began to read Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. Nor did I really know who Allan Bloom was, or even that the lead character in Bellow's novel was based on the real and famous professor Allan Bloom.

Nor did I know what Bellow was talking about in a good half of his allusions during the course of the book.

As I read it, I pondered the following questions: Is a novel without a plot still a novel? Or is it a character sketch? How many intellectual, sociological, academic, philosophical, religious, and literary allusions am I really interested in reading? How important is my comprehension of these allusions to my enjoyment of the novel?

And, perhaps most urgently, How much background should you need to know beforehand in order to enjoy a story? To this question, I would answer, a lot more background than I had before I began reading Ravelstein.

So you could blame me for most of this, but I found this novel to be a bit unrewarding and, to be blunt, boring.

Perhaps I'll return to Ravelstein in a few years after my brain grows a few sizes and I read several more books, and I'll slap my forehead and wonder how I missed the brilliance the first time.

Or perhaps by that point I won't be interested in reading a bunch of references and anecdotes about stuff I've already thought through and wrestled with. It's hard to know what the future Ian North will think about a younger Ian North's somewhat fierce and impulsive interaction with books.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slowly getting through the oeuvre of the great Saul Bellow. This late work is up there with his best. Love and friendship. Loved.

4.5 ⭐️

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Bellow remains one of my favourite writers. See also this review.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Toni Morrison publishes a novel, she gets her face on the cover of Time magazine. When Saul Bellow, America's other Nobel Prize-winning writer, publishes a novel, he gets his face on a wanted poster.

"Ravelstein," Bellow's latest roman clef, is a memorial to his late friend Alan Bloom and an essay on the challenges of biography. It's a masterly piece of writing and his first full-length work in more than a decade, but it will have trouble finding an audience - or forgiveness.

Bellow and Bloom became friends in the late 1970s when Bloom joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. After team-teaching with the classical scholar, Bellow encouraged him to write a critique of higher education. If nothing else, the book might raise a little money to pay for the expensive suits and Persian rugs that Bloom loved.

"The Closing of the American Mind" (1987) bloomed into the most unlikely bestseller of the decade. (Bellow wrote the introduction.) Until this time, Bloom was known - to the extent he was known at all - as a brilliant translator of Rousseau and Plato. With "The Closing" he positioned himself at ground zero of the culture wars.

Bloom argued that America was in the midst of a spiritual crisis brought about by the weak intellectual rigor of its universities. In prose at once passionate and learned, he claimed that uncritical enthusiasm for pop culture, deconstruction, and relativism had so infected liberal arts education that it was essentially worthless. The great need, as he saw it, was to acknowledge that certain values (i.e. classical values) are better than others (e.g. feminism, Afrocentrism, and the sexual revolution).

Oddly, Bloom's homosexuality never entered the fiery debate his book incited between liberals and conservatives. He would not find his private life so politely ignored if the book were published today.

Indeed, with friends like Bellow, who needs outing? In "Ravelstein" the names have been changed, but the details of this "novel" so closely reflect those of real life that the friends Bellow praises can't help but feel honored, and the enemies he savages can't help but feel attacked. (One of his ex-wives endures such a nasty portrayal in these pages that Bellow would have to reassemble O.J.'s jurors to avoid a conviction for defamation.)

Between the early drafts sent to reviewers and the final copies appearing in bookstores this month, Bellow tempered his references to Bloom's homosexuality. And last Sunday in The New York Times magazine, he expressed regret about his frank portrayal of Bloom's private life. As the narrator of "Ravelstein," he laments that "there are no acceptable modern terms for the discussion of friendship."

For those who know Bloom's work, these private details fill out the picture of a complex scholar full of curiosity and wisdom. But for readers coming to this book as a novel on its own terms, Ravelstein seems a self-destructive, manipulative gossip, driven by consumerist fantasies. (In one typically comic scene, Ravelstein is chain-smoking in the intensive care unit, while ordering an $80,000 BMW over the phone for his Chinese lover.)

I couldn't help thinking of "The Great Gatsby." Both novels involve a narrator of questionable loyalty describing a larger-than-life, ludicrously opulent friend in the final months of his life. Both Gatsby and Ravelstein create themselves through the power of imagination, and both pursue a lost love of mythic proportions that can't be reclaimed.

Bellow writes, "In my trade you have to make more allowances, taking all sorts of ambiguities into account - to avoid hard-edged judgments. All this refraining may resemble navet. But it isn't quite that. In art you become familiar with due process. You can't simply write people off or send them to hell."

There's no denying the engaging quality of Bellow's reflections on the power and mystery of friendship. Ravelstein insists, "I want you to show me as you see me, without softeners or sweeteners." Mission accomplished.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2000/0420/p2...

[Bob Wake · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Reviewed in 2000]

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Saul Bellow at 84 has written a novel as graceful and funny as Ravelstein. But who could have predicted that he would also stir up a hornets’ nest of controversy? The character of Abe Ravelstein is based on Bellow’s late friend and colleague, Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, the 1987 bestseller that became a lightning rod for the culture wars of the Reagan era. What hasn’t heretofore been public knowledge is that Bloom, who died in 1992, was homosexual. By outing his friend and asserting that his death resulted from AIDS, Bellow is facing accusations of betrayal and exploitation.

Some have gone as far as to suggest that Ravelstein is a sort of jealous revenge enacted against Bloom, who wrote The Closing of the American Mind at Bellow’s urging. Bloom’s book championed the Greek classics and condemned modern college campuses as lax and ineffectual (with much of the blame placed on the 1960s counterculture and the burgeoning climate of political correctness). It made Bloom a millionaire and an unlikely egghead celebrity welcomed at White House dinners and invited on Oprah. He was vilified by left-wing critics to such a degree that potential detractors were just as anxious to read his book as were enthusiastic supporters. Not even Bellow’s 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature could equal the attention that was lavished on Bloom and his enormously successful jeremiad, which had the throat-clenching subtitle of “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.”

Let the pundits have their field day with Ravelstein. Let them again dredge up the old charges that Bellow lacks the skills of a first-rate novelist, that he writes chit-chatty essays in the guise of fiction, that his characters are crudely cribbed from friends and family members and ex-wives, and that his own outsized ego is the star of the show. When the bickering dies down and the smoke of recrimination clears, Ravelstein should emerge as the heartfelt masterpiece it assuredly is. Regardless of who Abe Ravelstein is modeled after, he is a fully realized character that lives on the page with the élan of a modern-day Dickens eccentric. As with Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s other great roman à clef (based on his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz), Ravelstein evokes with detail and precision the map of a mind, the outline of a soul. While the earlier novel showed us the dark and punishing slide of a failed literary career, Ravelstein presents a tale of outrageous good fortune—it’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” with smarter questions and a French beret for Regis.

We first meet the sixtyish bald-pated Ravelstein attired in a Japanese kimono and ensconced on the seventh floor of the Hotel Crillon in Paris (two floors below is pop star Michael Jackson and his entourage). “He had written a book,” we’re told by Ravelstein’s visiting friend, Chick, who is also the novel’s narrator (and Bellow’s surrogate), “a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator.” Asleep in the next room is Ravelstein’s gay Asian lover, Nikki (“layers of black hair reaching his glossy shoulders”). Chick and Ravelstein dawdle over a tray of wild strawberries and hot coffee and begin an in-depth discussion of—what else?—the economic policies of John Maynard Keynes at the close of the First World War. It turns out that Chick has written a brief biographical sketch of Keynes at Ravelstein’s request, with the understanding that Chick might next attempt a memoir about Ravelstein.

Bellow has always enjoyed capturing the exuberance of intellectuals talking, thinking, and dazzling one another with high culture and low jokes:

Ravelstein, with his bald powerful head, was at ease with large statements, big issues, and famous men, with decades, eras, centuries. He was, however, just as familiar with entertainers like Mel Brooks as with the classics and could go from Thucydides’ huge tragedy to Moses as played by Brooks. “He comes down from Mount Sinai with the commandments. God had handed down twenty but ten fall from Mel Brooks’s arms when he sees the children of Israel rioting around the Golden Calf.” Ravelstein loved these Catskill entertainments; he had a natural gift for them.

The refined Ravelstein chain-smokes Marlboros and laughs uproariously at bad puns. He thinks nothing of buying a $4,500 Lanvin sports jacket on impulse before lunch and then absentmindedly soiling the lapels with spilled espresso. Back home in Chicago, his apartment on Lake Shore Drive is stuffed with silver and crystal, pricey paintings, $10,000 stereo speakers, and—the holy of holies—an industrial-size espresso machine in the kitchen. Like the hero of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Ravelstein embodies the rapacious American spirit of “I want, I want, I want, oh, I want…”

But there is no implied criticism of Yankee materialism in Ravelstein’s nouveau riche lifestyle. Indeed, we come to accept his insatiable hunger for luxury as indistinguishable from his mind’s thirst for philosophical truth. (Of course, it is this linkage between wealth, privilege, and intellectual refinement that often gets Bellow pegged—with some justification—as an elitist and a cultural conservative.) Ravelstein sees all human desire in lofty terms reflecting the Socratic pursuit of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. Philosophy and art are not sublimated sexuality, as Freud would have us believe. Rather, they are the very soul of eroticism. The thrust of Ravelstein’s (and Bloom’s) critique of academia isn’t simply that the free-love hippies and leftists had taken over the universities in the Sixties. Ravelstein/Bloom insists that the hippies and leftists destroyed the free-love that had always been a natural component of education and replaced it with slogans and political noise.

Ravelstein is diagnosed with HIV and his weakened immune system becomes increasingly susceptible to illness and infection. Yet, this is a remarkably unsentimental story. Ravelstein refuses to indulge in self-pity. He continues to chain-smoke and hold court from a hospital bed. He’s on the telephone to Germany debating the upholstery color and CD player for a new BMW he’s having shipped to the states for Nikki. Former students come to visit, many of whom are well-placed in their fields as “historians, teachers, journalists, experts, civil servants, think-tankers.” (There’s a marvelous party scene earlier with Ravelstein receiving top-level Gulf War reports via phone calls from a former student working in the State Department.)

Grief seems to overtake Chick a few years after Ravelstein’s death. Bellow beautifully portrays the subtle ache of absence that occurs when the dead seem to reach out and touch us in silence and memory: “I shan’t pretend that he didn’t come in obliquely from wherever it was that he continued to exist.” On a quotidian level, the aging Chick feels “the persistence of Ravelstein” in his life because “it had become my habit to tell him what had happened to me since we last met.” And then, as if to better prepare him to write a book about his friend, Chick experiences “a rehearsal of my own with death” when he nearly dies from food poisoning while vacationing in the Caribbean. His young wife Rosamund—one of Ravelstein’s stellar graduates—manages to get him on a plane back to the U.S., where he survives heart failure and pneumonia in an intensive care unit. Once healthy again, Chick finds the clarity and inspiration to write the memoir that Ravelstein had asked him to undertake in the novel’s opening scene.

As Ravelstein makes its way up the best-seller list this summer, it will be interesting to observe what effect Bellow’s portrait has on Allan Bloom’s perceived reputation as an icon among the kind of hard-core conservatives who would frankly exclude him on the basis of his sexuality. At the height of his fame, Bloom argued that his cultural concerns were of a more radical nature than any party affiliation could satisfy, whether conservative or liberal. In a sense, this is the service Bellow has rendered unto his old friend: he’s rescued Bloom from the province of political hacks and axe-grinders by allowing us the full measure of his humanity. Bellow’s novel is an eloquent defense of Eros as unifying and inclusive.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

After reading some of the other reviews here, I now know this is based on an actual person. I suspected it was, but couldn't get myself to care enough about the characters or the story to find out. I tried hard to finish the book, but then realized I was just waiting for my next requested books be become available at the library.

I guess if I knew about Allen Bloom or his work, maybe this would help support some interest. The author seems to want us to take on faith that Ravelstein is a riveting, complex chunk of humanity. So he spends 150 pages telling you how smart this guy was, what an intellectual giant, and how his super spendy lifestyle was just a character quirk, not that he was a snob, he was really really smart. AND he and the author (or author's character) had such SMART conversations, with lot's of references IN OTHER LANGUAGES. Let's just say I didn't connect with either of the main characters.

Outside of Ravelstein dying, a big portion of the book is basically the author gazing at his bellybutton wondering why he doesn't get the biography written, then getting gravely sick. I think I felt the same way about Chick (Bellow), as I did about Ravelstein. Maybe if I had already read his other books, maybe I would care about the character at the outset, but there wasn't anything within the story to capture my interest.

So, I'm struggling with the ground rules of what a Roman a clef is. I'm trying not to be disrespectful of the two accomplished people. So, I'm trying to parse out what's meant to be historical reference and what's just fiction using known people as main characters. As a historical piece that fills in some understanding of either of these two men, I could see the value. But, as a story, I don't get it.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a loving and moving account - barely fictionalized - of Bellow's friendship to Allan Bloom and his fulfillment of a deathbed promise he made to write his memoirs. As such, there is not really a plot or any significant action in the plot, but rather with the typical Bellowesque surgical precision, descriptions of how they met, what Ravelstein-Bloom were like, how Ravelstein-Bloom died and how Chick-Bellow nearly died himself before finally committing the story to paper. The world indeed lost great thinker with Bloom and later a great writer with Bellow and this is a fitting and worthy testament to the humanity (and ultimate frailty) of both.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think I could really get a wholistic sense of the protagonist. But that’s just because Saul Bellow writes such exquisitely mesmerizing sentences. This happens to me with Virginia Woolf. I don’t always understand what the forest looks like because the trees are so damned beautiful.

[Evandro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antes de tudo, quero dar um conselho: Não leia esse livro nesta tradução (Rocco, 2001). A língua portuguesa no Brasil está em franco processo de auto-destruição por analfabetismo funcional, e essa tradução é um sintoma quase perfeito disso.

Ravelstein é muitas coisas: autobiografia ficcional (provavelmente baseada, ao menos em parte, em experiências reais), biografia ficcional, romance narrado em primeira pessoa, filosofia, sociologia etc. Dizer isso é ser redundante, claro, mas ressalta um aspecto peculiar do livro: o estilo de crônica.

O título é o sobrenome de um professor de filosofia política, uma figura “excêntrica”, mas entre aspas porque trata-se de uma legitimidade e não de uma excentricidade. Em tempos de falsificação e mentira generalizada nos meios acadêmicos, quem busca a verdade e vive uma vida inteira com sinceridade torna-se um excêntrico. Em terra de loucos, os normais é que são socialmente reconhecidos como loucos. E o mundo hoje é, acima de tudo, terra de loucos - loucos burgueses politicamente engajados em qualquer merda que surja na frente e que esteja a serviço da destruição da civilização ocidental e, ao mesmo tempo, loucos com medo de tudo e de todos e da morte enfim. Presas fáceis de inimigos como o Islã, o comunismo russo renovado em putinismo e a Nova Era. E, acima de tudo (no caso desta obra em particular) o anti-semitismo.

São reflexões como essas que povoam o livro de Saul Bellow, um Nobel que merece ser Nobel, ao contrário de um Modiano e de um Saramago, dois insossos, este mais ainda que aquele.

As reflexões, dentro de um romance, parecem sempre mais interessantes, mais verossímeis, obviamente porque estão entremeadas com a narrativa, que nos dá esse contato com a realidade que a filosofia em geral não dá diretamente (mas deveria e, de fato, dá quando é verdadeira e boa). E neste romance aqui, escrito em tom de bate-papo, de história que bem poderia estar sendo contada em uma sala de estar por um amigo íntimo, reflexão é sinônimo de auto-análise existencial. O narrador se analisa enquanto analisa o “biografado” Ravelstein e os outros personagens, também parcialmente biografados e, acima de tudo, psicologicamente sondados.

Não sei bem por que não lhe dei cinco estrelas. Talvez porque falte algo, talvez porque eu gostaria que o autor fosse mais poético, o que é mais uma expectativa minha do que qualquer outra coisa. A verdade é que temos aqui um ótimo livro, que nos faz pensar em nossa própria vida, nossos próprios problemas, defeitos, imbecilidades, em como somos burgueses ávidos por uma segurança material e psicológica que corrói a legitimidade e reduz a nada o sentido da vida. E quando digo “burgueses”, e quando o autor o diz, não é como um socialista o diria, não é como um ambientalista diria ao se referir a um yuppie; pois socialista e yuppie são papéis sociais, não são pessoas. Ravelstein, sob esse aspecto, é um yuppie em seus hábitos, na maneira como se veste e nas coisas que compra. Aqui está a melhor característica do livro, o que lhe confere sua profundidade: Ravelstein é uma pessoa que não pode ser “lida” pelo que veste ou compra. Ele é muito mais que isso, embora também seja vítima de seu tempo em vários aspectos - afinal quem o não é?

Além de ser o perfil de um biografado ficcional, o livro é o perfil do biógrafo e de algumas outras personagens, como a ex-mulher deste e sua atual mulher. O mais importante, porém, é que é o perfil de uma época, é o retrato do mal do século ocidental. E tudo isso sem deixar de ser literatura, muito boa literatura.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this book is a thinly veiled account of Bellow’s relationship with fellow academic Allan Bloom, I wonder why Bellow did not write it as such, and instead relied on the novel form. The novel disappoints, for it flatlines on story and character (even though Ravelstein is a multifaceted personality), whereas a biography or memoir of the real duo would have been more impactful.

Ravelstein and Chick (Bloom and Bellow respectively, as I made out) are a modern day Socrates and Plato. Ravelstein is a flamboyant philosopher king who hit the jackpot with one bestseller and is now dying of AIDS. He urges his protégée Chick, an accomplished writer, to write his memoir. The protégée resists, believing that once he has written the book, there will be no more reason to live. Chick, who is older than his mentor, has a young wife, Rosamund, one of Ravelstein’s former student’s, and is therefore reluctant to give up the ghost yet.

And so we are entertained to a series of Socratic dialogues in which the two academics debate every topical subject under the sun while in Paris and later in Chicago. Brush up on your understanding of Keynes, Greek Philosophy, Jewish history and the Classics (art, literature and music) if you want a deeper appreciation of this book. Ravelstein not only dominates his students in thought, he dissects their personal lives and relationships. The lengthy discussion where the master disassembles Chick’s first marriage to the beautiful and talented Vela, starts to get rather uncomfortable for Chick, and for this reader too.

The philosophical nuggets are the best parts of the book. Lines like, “artists fall in love, but love is not their primary gift,” and “nature and solitude are depressing to educated people getting old,” are priceless. But I take issue with Chick’s literary prowess when he arbitrarily introduces a character as “Rakhmiel was neither a large man nor a healthy one, but he was physically conspicuous just the same – compact and dense, high handed, tyrannical, fixated and opinionated.” Wow, “show don’t tell” does not apply to this master, it seems!

And then, as to be expected, Ravelstein dies, but only past the midpoint of the book, and the story veers over to Chick’s brush with death by accidentally eating toxic fish while on holiday in the Caribbean. There are oodles of hospital scenes and hallucinations that follow, and sleepless nights suffered by the loyal Rosamund, until Chick is well again but never to regain his former self. Chick also never completes Ravelstein’s memoir and the novel fades away into nothingness leaving only the parallel with Socrates and Plato who also succumbed to the poisons of their age.

I think only someone of Bellow’s stature would attempt a book like this, but stature notwithstanding, in not sticking to the rudimentary structure of a novel, it fails to hold. The final image of a weakened Chick day-dreaming of his erstwhile colleague in full flight left me wondering whether Ravelstein and Chick and their two incomplete story segments were like the severed human looking eternally for his other half, ostensibly the subject of Ravelstein’s bestseller, which we also did not get a chance to sample.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es la última novela que escribió Saul Bellow (1915-2005). Brillante. Creo esta novela es un buen ejemplo de la hipótesis que atribuye el talento literario a la narración misma, a esa voz de la ficción que tiene autonomía estética. Ni los personajes, ni el argumento necesitan ser brillantes para que la obra literaria sea brillante. Abe Ravelstein, personaje protagónico, es un viejo profesor de ciencias políticas, un erudito, un intelecto agudo, un inigualable artista, una especie de influyente provocador a favor del imperialismo sangriento de los Estados Unidos. Ravelstein es un personaje desagradable. No importa cuántas ni cuales virtudes le atribuya Chick, su amigo y confidente, opino que se necesita una importante dosis de masoquismo para idolatrar a Ravelstein, al menos desde la proximidad de una amistad cómplice. En sus últimos meses de vida, Ravelstein le encarga a Chick que escriba su biografía, pero no su biografía intelectual -para ello están los libros de Ravelstein que hablan por sí solos- sino su biografía como ser humano, como personalidad vista desde la perspectiva de sus amigos, de sus afectos cercanos. El peculiar Ravelstein, extravertido, homosexual, HIV positivo, sibarita, arbitrario, chismoso y genial, se volvió rico gracias a un libro que publicó por iniciativa de su amigo Chick. En este contexto se desarrollan conversaciones tanto dialógicas, como introspectivas, de una intensidad literaria superior. En mi opinión, la intensidad estética se aproxima a lo mejor de Dostoievski, de Faulkner, de Flaubert, de Joyce, de Broch. La fuerza introspectiva de Bellow es extraordinaria. Creo que conviene leer esta novela como música. En ese caso, el protagonista no es Ravelstein, ni lo es Chick, sino el narrador, que va cambiando de voces, de ritmos, de mundos. El registro que tiene lugar hacia el final de la novela -un flujo de introspección deslumbrante del moribundo Chick lleno de delirios, de alucinaciones, de viajes por la memoria, por los afectos- creo que se acerca a esa descomposición ebria del lenguaje que se impone como una fatalidad en el Ulises de Joyce, también en su Finnegan’s Wake, en tantos pasajes de Faulkner y en La Muerte de Virgilio de Hermann Broch. Opino que la lectura de esta novela es muy recomendable, un verdadero deleite musical que gana intensidad por la contraparte dialéctica que aporta su desagradable protagonista y el clima opulento del imperialismo intelectual norteamericano.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Second reading years apart.)

Saul Bellow inhabits his books, his peep constellation and in particular those close to him usually get his treatments up close and personal. That's da rub so say many a peep &/or critic. Yet and so, as "JR" (Gaddis punk peep) 'it's what you do' in creating nonetheless a fictive world in search of reality. So it goes here with Bellow's octogenarian delivery "Ravelstein" another of his larger than life characters like Humbolt & Herzog who is or is not NOT ambiguously embodied in one of those targeted close-bys. UofChicago fellow committee/social/thought profs., and other chums propagate the story. Well the story or faux memoir or bio/auto-bio or whatever syncretistic amalgam follows two Jewish dons immersed in the academic/political philosophy/classics/aesthetic ongoing conversation though it's mostly one-sided as Ravelstein rains down his dictums for pure enlightenment based ultimately on Eros infused being, the soul at large in quest of wholeness. "Chick" the bellows man narrates this encomium from an obsequious angle - he's a knowledge hunter and Ravelstein a leonine prey. Id'd say Allan Bloom came out rosey all in all outing aside. Bellow mellows with time, his voyeuristic novels capture the frenzied freaks of stark raving personality and cosset them lovingly home to their inevitable deracination's, much to our gathered gaze of readerly mirrored minds.

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I adore Bellow, I didn't like this at all. Bellow here is aging, and playing Boswell to Alan Bloom's Johnson. But Bloom, a well known Straussian and epicure, though he must have been charismatic and high-IQ , was an intellectual hack, imo..., and so Bellow's hagiography falls flat. Plus, Ravelstein spends as much time and effort on conspicuous consumption as he spends on the life of the mind...and comes off as rather vain, self-centered, and with an inflated sense of his own self-importance. A big disappointment.

The Dean's December, on the other hand... Now there's a book!

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to this on audio on a car trip. I really enjoyed the story. The title character is compelling and contradictory in a way that kept my interest. Later, I found out he was based on Allan Bloom, who wrote "The Closing of the American Mind." Which is a problem. In my politically correct youth of the early '90s, Bloom was universally reviled for being some kind of conservative apologist. Now I suppose I have to go back and revisit his book and possibly revise my prejudices. How tiresome!

[Lobstergirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is Saul Bellow the best novelist of the 20th century? I don't know, but I loved this fictionalized account of his friendship with fellow academic Allan Bloom.

Bellow describes his fictionalized wife Vela: “She had to be seen as a beautiful woman. But it was beauty-parade beauty, and required preparation at a West Point or Hapsburg hussar level.”

[Sean Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ravelstein alternates between the beautifully philosophical and humorous to the achingly boring and mundane. However when it was at its best, Saul Bellow's writing is devastatingly good. This was my first Bellow and certainly not my last.

[Katrin Kirilova · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Не може лесно да предадеш смъртта на създание като Равелщайн.” – Така едноименната книга на Сол Белоу обобщава себе си към финала и слага точка след едно дълго и откровено обяснение във Филия (Philia, гр.: приятелска любов).
„Равелщайн” е последната книга на автора (2000 г.) и освен наниза от вече приети за модерна класика произведения, каквито са „Херцог”, „Приключенията на Оги Марч” и „Дарът на Хумболт” има зад гърба си спечелени две от най-важните литературни награди – „Нобел” и „Пулицър”. Тези успехи и безспорният му талант го превръщат в един от ключовите писатели на XX век, на чиято сцена той майсторски разплита сложни теми, които не засягат само индивидуалната съдба, а съдбата на цели нации и народи, като не на последно място търси определение за еврейския си произход.

Докато за останалите книги на Сол Белоу може да се мисли от гледна точка на мястото им в северноамериканския/световен канон и да се съпоставят с творбите на други автори, то „Равелщайн” не се открива в този контекст, защото книгата е интимно откровение и черпи образите си от реалния живот. Зад героя на Равелщайн стои американският философ Алън Блум – близък приятел на писателя, а по-късно в книгата се появява известният културолог Мирча Елиаде. В крайна сметка четем мемоар, който си позволява художествената волност да не бъде изцяло достоверен. Всъщност да напише мемоар е мисията на разказвача Чик (вероятно самият Белоу), дадена му от умиращия от СПИН Равелщайн като завет, който обезателно трябва да бъде изпълнен.

“Може да направиш много хубав мемоар. Това не е само молба – добави той. – Възлагам ти го като задължение. Направи го с твоя маниер на размисли след вечеря, когато си изпил няколко чаши вино, отпуснал си се и говориш за разни неща.”

На пръв поглед книгата е за приятелството, за опита да разкажеш на себе си и на останалите историята на онзи, с когото си споделил голяма част от живота си, но при едно по-внимателно вглеждане откриваме, че Белоу използва горната идея, за да медитира върху характера на паметта – каква е нейната продължителност и дали изобщо може да съществува отвъд колективното съпреживяване на събитията. Чик не търси единствено начини да предаде образа на своя скъп приятел Равелщайн, но осмисля историята на цяло едно следвоенно поколение евреи, което опитва да се справи със спомена за европейския нацизъм/фашизъм, за да открие себе си сред американската мечта, в която всеки обръща внимание на индивидуалните си потребности извън общността, на която принадлежи по рождение.


Да бъде представена хроника на близък човек е като да бъде изложена собствена хроника, защото нищо не е откъснато от останалото, дори човешкият живот. За Чик личността на Равелщайн е структура, която на моменти се препокрива с неговата собствена и която му помага да запази баланс в неспокойните води на случващото се. Съдбата е определена не само от събитията, но и от дискурсите, които те провокират. Чик не би успял да осмисли миналото и да разреши „еврейския въпрос“ без разговорите му на тази тема с Равелщайн. Освобождаването от колективната травма може да се осъществи единствено чрез споделянето с другите, така че да се открият механизми за справяне с действителността. Равелщайн е субект, движен от идеите, оформили се в него благодарение на литературата и философията. Неговите сетива са обективни сетива, той може да изкара човек от състоянието на страх и несигурност, като му покаже, че е възможно да се съди за нещата от различна позиция – на онзи, който успява да анализира историята, без да става нейна жертва.

“Не трябва да бъдеш погълнат от историята на собственото си време, казваше често Равелщайн. Цитираше и Шилер: „Живей в своя век, но не се превръщай в негово творение.“”

На моменти Белоу сякаш поставя в ръцете на читателя ръководство за приятелството. В него няма по-важно от това двама души да бъдат откровени помежду си. Нищо не стои над истината, която трябва да бъде казвана, дори с риск да нараниш другия. Приятелството е непрекъсната грижа, но трябва да има свобода да бъдат назовани негативните аспекти, за които човек остава сляп от положението на първо лице, единствено число. Чик описва Равелщайн с онази любов, която се е примирила с несъвършенствата на другия и ги е издигнала до нивото на сакралното, до онази линия, която разграничава човека от ближния му и го превръща в специален и вечен. Това се опитва да направи Чик – да намери начин да съхрани Равелщайн, не само като самостоятелен образ, но и като действащо лице във взаимоотношенията между двама души; да победи смъртта, но не само личната или чуждата, а дори общочовешката смърт, с всички инструменти, които му предлага литературата. Но първо трябва да намери сили да започне разказа, защото това означава да се примири с факта, че се поставя началото на една история, на която Равелщайн няма как да бъде свидетел.

Нелека е задачата на Белоу да предаде с думи значението, което Блум има за него, а най-вероятно и за творчеството му, както не е лесно да се компресира времето и да се синтезира същината. С помощта на огромния си талант Белоу я осъществява напук на ограниченията на езика и подарява вечен живот на едно дългогодишно приятелство. Точно колкото трае една добра книга.

“Ние бяхме близки приятели – какво повече може да се каже? В чекмеджетата на бюрото си намирам папки с изписан�� страници за Равелщайн. Но тази информация само привидно се отнася за него. Няма приемливи съвременни понятия, с които да разкажеш едно приятелство или другите по-висши форми на взаимна зависимост. А човекът е създание, което има какво да каже под слънцето.”

гост съм в блога на Мартин Касабов - https://izumen.blogspot.com/2023/06/blog-post.html?fbclid=IwAR0Yq9fw_Bjhc91WMM7f4_VOA7A_4YgtOKuLAcIBv-LZf9mpUckreKzA32E