The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

by Harold Bloom

In his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction, America's most original and controversial literary critic and legendary Yale professor writes trenchantly about fifty-two masterworks spanning the Western tradition.

Perhaps no other literary critic but Harold Bloom could--or would--undertake a project of this immensity. And certainly no other critic could bring to it the extraordinary knowledge, understanding, and insight that are the hallmark of Bloom's every book. Ranging across centuries and continents, this final book of his career, gives us the inimitable critic on Don Quixote and Book of Numbers; Wuthering Heights and Absalom, Absalom; Les Miserables and Blood Meridian; Vanity Fair and Invisible Man; The Captain's Daughter and The Reef. He writes about works by Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Wolff, Le Guin, Sebald, and many more. Whether you have already read these books, or intend to, or simply care about the importance and power of fiction, Harold Bloom serves as an unparalleled guide through the pages of these 52 masterpieces of the genre.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Literature, Books About Books, Essays, Criticism, Art

544 pages, Hardcover

First published November 3, 2020

About the author

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Reviews

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven’t read all this book, and I suspect I won’t complete it in its entirety for several years by virtue of the fact each chapter contains full spoilers for the novel under examination. I’ll probably continue to have a flick through the relevant chapters whenever I finish one of the novels on Bloom’s list.

Bloom is a fascinating character, and like the great writers he extols, he is a personality who occupies his books to as great a degree as does the subject matter of those books. Oddly enough, his value as a critic is the one thing about him that I’m actually not entirely convinced about. If you’re looking for an in-depth study of great literary works, he’s not giving you that here — or, at least, that’s only a small part of what he’s trying to write about. In this book, you’ll instead learn that Tolstoy was as good as Shakespeare at invoking infinity even if Melville was larger than Tolstoy in the field of the sublime and that it was only George Eliot who became even more rectangularly expansive than Melville (although even she couldn’t compete with Victor Hugo for cuboidal immersion); despite this, Eliot did not have the depth of cognitive power that would, in time, enable Proust to triumphantly transform himself into the inverted Shakespearean nut sack of Cervantes, and so on and so forth with sentiments to similar effect. It all ends up being kind of meaningless, yet I can’t get enough of it, and the reason for that is Bloom.

Why he fascinates as much as he does isn’t entirely clear to me. I do, however, have two working theories. Firstly, I think he and I have similar enough tastes (oh how he’d hate to have that word used in his name) for me to generally agree (or at least understand where he’s coming from) with the general layout of his obsessive hierarchies. I’ve had success with some of his most obscure recommendations in the past, Hadji Murat and Blood Meridian chief among them. Secondly, and probably more importantly, Bloom is so fanatical in his musings that he becomes like one of the literary figures he’s writing about, like a sort of literary Don Bloomote, fighting for the chivalrous right to his own opinions, so desperate to prove that he was the cleverest kid in the classroom that he devoted his life to promoting his views. If I were to invoke his language style, I’d say that he is a very large presence, even when he is trying to be invisible, and the literary intrigue I get from his writing stems from this “largeness” (whatever that means).

I’m probably being a little bit harsh because I also felt quite moved by his sensitive nature and by his comments about teaching in the closing chapter. Perhaps, like Bloom, my primal mode of expressing myself is sometimes only through hyperbole? — I’ve been enjoying this book and will continue to do so.

For the curious among you, and for my own reference, I’ve left the list of novels discussed below. It’s an interesting selection that has a lot of obvious choices, as well as a few left-of-centre curveballs. I wouldn’t take it as verbatim the books he sees as the greatest ever, but rather an attempt to tell the narrative of his personal favourites while also mapping out the development of the novelistic form itself. He, on different occasions, points to Don Quixote, Clarissa, Moby-Dick, and In Search of Lost Time, as the greatest, but then again, his opinions seem to change quite frequently, and usually come with hidden T&C’s.


1 Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
2 Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
3 Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
4 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
5 Emma - Jane Austen
6 Persuasion - Jane Austen
7 I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) - Alessandro Manzoni
8 The Red and the Black - Stendhal
9 The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
10 The Vautrin Saga: Old Goriot, Lost Illusions, The Splendor and Misery of the Courtesans - Honore De Balzac
11 The Captains Daughter - Alexander Pushkin
12 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
13 Vanity Fair William - Makepeace Thackeray
14 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
15 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
16 Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
17 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
18 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
19 A Sportsman’s Notebook - Ivan Turgenev
20 First Love - Ivan Turgenev
21 The Cossacks - Leo Tolstoy
22 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
23 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
24 Hadji Murat - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
26 The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
27 The Princess Casamassima - Henry James
28 The Ambassadors - Henry James
29 Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
30 The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
31 Under Western Eyes - Joseph Conrad
32 The Reef - Edith Wharton
33 The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
34 Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
35 Ulysses - James Joyce
36 The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
37 To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
38 In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
39 The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
40 Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
41 The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
42 Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
43 The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
44 The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
45 The Loser - Thomas Bernhard
46 Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
47 The Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald
48 Book of Numbers - Joshua Cohen

[Dovydas Pancerovas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tai paskutinioji amerikiečių literatūros kritiko Haroldo Bloomo knyga, kurioje jis apmąsto gyvenimo pabaigoje naujai perskaitytus romanus. Tai ne recenzijų rinkinys, o būtent apmąstymai. Bloomas rašo ir apie savo įspūdžius, kai romaną skaitė pirmą kartą, taip pat atpasakoja savo jausenas tą pačią knygą skaitant gyvenimo pabaigoje.

Nors mane labiausiai domino skyrius apie Don Kichotą, bet patiko visi Bloomo tekstai, net ir apie knygas, kurių nežinojau. (Beje, sąmoningai praleidau skyrių apie Josepho Conrado „Slaptąjį agentą“, nes esu nusipirkęs Rašytojų sąjungos leidyklos neseniai išleistą vertimą. Pasitaupiau.)

Kalbėdamas apie romanus, Haroldas Bloomas daugiausiai kalba apie personažų apmąstymui, jų motyvacijai ir tarpusavio santykiams. Jam svarbu suprasti, kodėl personažas pasielgė vienaip ar kitaip, ir kokią įtaką tai padarė tolimesnei istorijai. Kai kritikas apie personažus kalba lyg apie tikrus žmones, su tokiu pačiu jautrumu ir kruopštumu, tai skaityti tampa daug įdomiau.

Bloomas nemažai dėmesio skiria ir autorių biografijoms. Jis drąsiai pasitelkia žinomas rašytojo patirtis ir išgyvenimus, kad paaiškintų jo sukurtų personažų detales.

Kaip visada Bloomas daug rašo apie estetiką. Prie Bloomo pavardės dažnai prirašoma „kontraversiškasis“, o ta kontraversija kyla ir iš jo įsitikinimo, kad literatūros kritikai turi vertinti kūrinio estetiką, o ne aplink esančius socialinius-politinius kontekstus (kaip pavyzdžiui autoriaus rasė ar lytinė orientacija). Ir Bloomui estetika yra ne tiek kalba, kiek bendras kūrinio grožis. Tarkime, kaip išskirtinės estetiškos turinčią sceną Bloomas aprašė Don Kichoto ir plėšiko Gineso de Pasamontes pokalbį, kai abu personažai kalba priešingus dalykus, siekia skirtingų tikslų, bet abu įtikinti skaitytoją savo teisumu.

Nors šioje knygoje Bloomas nesiūlo jokių naujų teorijų (netgi priešingai: epiloge rašo, kad gyvenimo pabaigoje nebūtinai gintų savo ankstyvąsias tezes), tačiau ši knygą įtraukia būtent dėl Bloomo meilės literatūrai. Jis su tokia aistra, susidomėjimu, smalsumu kalba apie išgalvotų žmonių gyvenimus, kad neįmanoma tuo nesižavėti. Ir tai uždega skaityti daugiau, daugiau, daugiau :)

P. S. Nustebino, kad Bloomas geriausia visų laikų literatūros istorija (ne siužetu, bet istorija) laiko Levo Tolstojaus „Hadži Muratą“. Ta proga nusipirkau ganėtinai retą lietuvišką vertimą Juodojo šuns knygynėlyje. Ir čia vėl susisieja su Don Kichotu, nes Hadži Muratas trumpam atsiranda ir Servanteso romane.

[Paul Williams]

I'm not rating this one because I honestly don't know how I would or even could. There are a few reasons.

First, this book was published posthumously and I suspect very little editing happened. While there's no guarantee that Bloom would have made any substantial changes in the editing process (especially with his health as bad as it was – I doubt he could have recognized what things needed to be cut and what needed to be kept), the fact is that there are lots of formal issues with the book that certainly hold it back compared to others. Most egregiously, this book drops in enormous block quotes from the various texts being examined. I like me a good block quote, but I'd say they account for 30-50% of each chapter. And Bloom doesn't provide much context – he'll be talking about some concept and say the book has something to say about the matter, and then drop a 2-page block quote and then say that it's genius. No, Bloom, get back in here and give me some context!

Second, this book is not good literary criticism. Granted, I'm not certain this is attempting to be criticism, except for in the few instances when it definitely is (e.g. the chapters on Moby Dick and Ulysses, definitely). You open a book from Bloom and ostensibly it's going to be literary criticism, but that's certainly not the case here. A review for an earlier book of his, The Dæmon Knows (2014), suggested that Bloom, at least in his later years, was less a critic and more a memoirist of reading, and I have found that to be the most apt way of approaching this and other writings from Bloom. I find him a mostly useless critic in my own scholarship, and really, most people invoke him for name recognition rather than for any actual erudition he might contribute.

But damnit, he loved literature deeply and honestly. I may disagree with his tastes at times. Even when we agree on a given text or author, I find his arguments suspect. His arguments tend to take Freud and gnosticism as givens rather than interpretive lenses, and that creates all sorts of weird interpretations. Furthermore, Bloom loved to praises genius writers, and while I may be prone to a similar habit, Bloom jumps straight to uncompromising idol worship. For me, I'm fond of the time Le Guin wrote about how, as a teenager, she could have excused certain items (i.e. misogyny) in Tolstoy's work as the work of a genius not to be questioned. But later in life, while her admiration for Tolstoy remained intact (frequently in adulthood she continued to praise Tolstoy as the greatest prose author ever) but also grew comfortable with the idea of critiquing Tolstoy. And she showed that her admiration didn't need to wane while she did it. Bloom seems to have never figured out how to do this.

But you know what? It's kinda fun to joust with Bloom. When he says that Don Quixote is about learning to talk to each other, I'm not certain I agree, but I can see where he's coming from. When he says that Shevek (from The Dispossessed) is Le Guin's most interesting character, I only partly agree (I'm much too closely allied to Ged from the Earthsea Cycle, personally), but it's a conversation I'm happy to have. And that's a wonderful quality to this book, and made it a pleasure to read.

There are many choices I find odd, mostly in terms of what Bloom chose to include and exclude. I don't mean this from a perspective of representation (though there's room to comment on that). No, it's the fact that Bloom knew he was dying, knew this book was a celebration of reading, and yet, he included things like a whole chapter about Tom Jones, but spends no small amount of that chapter lamenting that it's not as good as other books included. If that's the case, then why talk about Fielding's novel but then exclude, say, John Crowley's Little, Big, a novel he always said did not get enough exposure? Or, he has a super short chapter on Proust's In Search of Lost Time, but a good bit of the chapter is spent saying he doesn't want to comment much because he's already written extensively on Proust in his previous book, Possessed By Memory (2019). There just doesn't seem to be a clear system at work here. And normally I wouldn't much care, except Bloom has always cared so much about how we categorize literature, how we remember it, and so it's odd when he seems so carefree in this particular instance.

At the same time, Bloom does represent many overlooked authors and texts: Katherine Mansfield, Joshua Cohen, W. G. Sebald, and a few others I had never heard of receive no shortage of praise in this book. And including them means that Bloom did not include the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. I'm flabbergasted that Bloom did not include either of those two, but it's worth noting that he did include authors whom he has rarely--if ever--referenced before.

At the same time, I found the book personally affecting at times. Most especially was Bloom's constant references to Le Guin, a writer who means a great deal to me. I found it legitimately tender how fondly he reflected on their brief but, by all accounts, stirring correspondences. It gave me a bit more incite into Le Guin, an author I'll only ever know through the mediation of texts, both her own and those by others. She permeates this book, and it is dedicated to her; rarely do you encounter a book with this sort of subject that is so lovingly haunted by the dedicatee.

So overall, this book is interesting, if you have an appreciation for Bloom. It will not convert Bloom's skeptics and detractors, nor will it provide much of anything useful to anyone wanting to write a scholarly article about Our Mutual Friend or some such. But as a love letter to the experience of reading, I enjoyed it, and that's what this book actually, ultimately is. I know I'll return to it every now and again because it's pleasant to read about someone else enjoying literature.

And so I close with my favorite quote from the book. It's tucked away in the final pages, and it may be Bloom's single greatest comment on the subject of reading literature (well, reading novels, at least): “I go back to reread novels to find old friends still living and to make new ones.”

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are books that have to be read chapter by chapter and this is one of them. It would also be great, if possible, to reread the books to which each chapter refers because, as well as discovering information that has been ignored up to now, as far as I am concerned, now I feel like I would love to reread some of them and getting to know others. Moreover, I did not know that Ursula K. Le Guin, to whom this book is also dedicated, is to be considered a "great writer" like Mann, Cervantes, Proust and Tolstoy. Not that it's a problem for me, I've always liked her, but I was wondering what is the opinion about that of the contemporary literary critics...

Ci sono libri che vanno letti capitolo per capitolo e questo é uno di quelli. Possibilmente sarebbe anche il caso di rileggersi i libri a cui ogni capitolo fa riferimento perché, oltre a scoprire informazioni fino ad ora ignorate, per quanto mi riguarda mi é tornata la voglia di rileggerne alcuni e di conoscerne altri. Oltretutto non sapevo che Ursula K. Le Guin, a cui questo libro é inoltre dedicato, é da considerare una scrittrice al parti di Mann, Cervantes, Proust e Tolstoy. Non che sia un problema per me, a me piace da sempre, ma mi chiesto cosa ne pensano i critici letterari contemporanei di Bloom...

THANKS EDELWEISS FOR THE PREVIEW!

[Kristine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been reading Harold Bloom now for almost two decades, ever since I found Shakespeare: the invention of the human. This being his penultimate book, I enjoyed learning about the books that mattered to him most. I must say I found the last chapters, difficult, since I have not read them nor do his description entice me to do so. However, I found that his biographical connections to these books, especially his long friendship with Ralph Ellison, the most enjoyable part the book.

[Kasper · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one has read a lot of these books then this is a great book, but maybe even more important than that is having read a lot of Harold Bloom books; and I have read more than my fair share of books by Bloom. Its been interesting seeing how his opinion changed over the years. He finally came around and realized Ulysses is in the same class as In Search of Lost Time/Finnegans Wake, and it was great finally seeing his in-depth thoughts on War and Peace and Pride and Prejudice.

[Bruna Oliveira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ótimo ❤

[Alison Shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Echos from Elysium

The music of language remains alive, waning and waxing like the light of brighter stars, holding form to the mind of the soul, the psyche of curious lives. Open the Bright Book of Life. Herein, the final words of one life whose breath is spent. Hands no longer to grasp the sides of a well-worn novel. Harold Bloom, steadfast, till the end of his own time, remained a foremost son of the school of literature. Over his vast body of work, there is not a single moment in which the spirit is disentangled from reading, both as an action and a philosophy of life. In his final work of criticism, Bloom stalls his final breath, sharing with the fortunate few fifty of his favourite novels across forty-eight essays, some brief, others which breathe with the wisdom of a bright mind raging against the sea of troubles.

Throughout his intellectual life Harold Bloom remained steadfast in his conviction that Oscar Wilde's infamous dictum, "All art is quite useless," was essentially true. He rebelled against reading as a socio-political act, against an inert exegesis which reduced literature to a mere element of sociology rather than a distinct artistic endeavour. In doing so he often said beastly words volleyed against feminists, multiculturalists, and postmodernists of varying degrees. This element of Bloom's life is inescapable, though it appears very little in The Bright Book of Life. One snarl against feminism here or there is not egregious enough to ruin what is otherwise a fascinating voyage throughout the history of imaginative prose. Of particular note is the essay on Ulsysses, which is exquisite, and the chapter on Blood Meridian, one of the neglected masterpieces of American prose, rivaled only by its antecedents in Moby-Dick and the Iliad.

The world Bloom departed is one of desolation, though he was fortunate enough to avoid the cataclysms of succeeding years. It is a desolation not only of literature, but of spirit, world without form, without order. Bloom, part mystic and part psychoanalyst, found no place for himself in this orderless world. His Bright Book of Life is titled perhaps in irony, as he had made the final departure before its publication. There are moments of sloppiness in the book, moments of unfinished thoughts and unclear judgements cloaked in orotund prose. Doubtless this owes itself to the fact that the book lacked its most important editor during publication -- Bloom himself. Certain essays appear truncated or overlong, in need of revision. The essay on In Search of Lost Time was especially brief, his mature thoughts on the novel reserved for his memoir Possessed by Memory, though it contains one of the most poignant passages in the entire book:

...I pause to remember the beloved dead. There are so many of them. My mother and father, my four older siblings, former students who died far too young, friends of my youth who died in battle, and almost all of my peers in my own generation: poets, novelists, scholars now gone forever. Teaching, reading, and writing have become ghost-haunted. Proust helps to heal me.... What Proust does is to lead me from dark inertia through passion to his lucidity, which I can only barely share. However good a reader, how shall she surmount all the obstacles on the winding path to lucidity?

This book is a ghost-haunted work, elegiac more often than insightful. Bloom conveys most often his wishes to read again the works which have given him most comfort in life. He laments the death of his friend Ursula Le Guin to whom this book is dedicated. He laments his lack of Russian, his father's native tongue, and he speaks often of his physical health and its continual degeneration, allowing him only one trip to his upstairs study every day. Death is an especial tragedy to those who are always in combat with the tides of the infinite, against which no effort can defeat the final shuffle away from mortal thought, mortal breath, mortal life. The ephemeral haunts us at every turn, sparkling with sinister invention, perpetually aware of our uncomfortable ignorance in the face of annihilation, seducing us from the immortal. There are higher glories yet undiscovered by the mind, always new revelations at hand. Harold Bloom's final work of criticism is itself a peak into the glories attainable through imagination and language, the first breath, for most, of the Word itself. The sage is dead, his mind vanished. Let his words survive, if not forever, then for a moment, as a guiding star to the sublime light of the universal.

[Daryl Mather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection of literary reviews by Bloom. As I read the great books he talks about I refer to it to get his take and see what I’ve missed.

This book is likely to be with me for a very long time.

[Brenden Gallagher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a lot fewer novels than I would like. This is an occupational hazard of being a screen and television writer and director because you are not only obligated to write films and television pilots but you are also expected to see everything that is "relevant" in addition to the things that you actually want to see. Our most recent short film, which will likely run under ten minutes, consumed every spare moment of my and my wife's life for six months.

Because I don't have as much time to "actually" read, I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but through a particular quirk of my reading habits, I can't listen to fiction. I feel like I would crash my car or drop a weight on my foot getting too wrapped up in the plot. I have to actually "read" fiction with my eyes. And so, sometimes I indulge in literary criticism to remind me what I'm missing out on and pare down my "to read" list.

With this goal in mind, it is hard to imagine finding a better book for this purpose than "The Bright Book of Life." Written a year before his death, "The Bright Book of Life" was Bloom's last book, and it was a kind of reflection on a career spent reading, in which he recommends 52 novels that he deems indispensable.

I have not and will not read most of them, let alone the innumerable books the man references along the way. But that doesn't really matter. I honestly never tire of hearing people talk about "Ulysses" though at this point in my life, I am nearly certain I will not read it. Same goes for the D.H. Lawrence, the Henry James, and the Stendhal. Then there are the ones I hope to read someday: "Moby Dick," "Remembrance of Things Past," the two-thirds of "Les Miserables" I haven't gotten to, and so much Dickens. And even the ones that I have read: "Blood Meridian," "The Dispossessed," "The Left Hand of Darkness," "Invisible Man," and "Absalom, Absalom!," I will never appreciate on the level Bloom did because there is little chance I will re-read them (aside from the McCarthy and the Faulkner, who I count as deep influences on my work), because I have so much else to read.

There are two very stupid ideas that run amok on Twitter and other social media, and probably even more deeply than that, in modern society. One is that critics have no value, that they are mere failed artists, and the other is that the great novels are not all they are cracked up to be.

Critics have value because they have all that time to consume and think about art (or as we say these days, content) because they don't have to worry about creating their own. This is why I pretty much always count a critic's opinion above an artist's. As a case in point, my own tastes run idiosyncratic and I bet the average person would be better served by the opinion of any working film and television critic than my own. Most people would rather watch this week's 75% Metacritic release than dig into a lesser Sturges or Almodovar or binge some obscure British dramedy cooked up by some lesser disciple of Monty Python, and I would say most people are reasonable in that position.

It is this dismissal of critics that has led to this second stupid idea that the classics are dull and boring and whatever else went viral on Twitter today. No, in fact, those books have endured for hundreds of years and will endure for hundreds more. The far more likely case is that it is you who are dull and boring, and reading just one sparkling reflection of Harold Bloom's wonderous life, spent playing chess with Nabokov and corresponding with Ursula K. LeGuin and arguing with rival critics over pasta in Roma, all while reading every fucking book ever written, to confirm that you are in fact, the problem.

[superawesomekt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounding up 3.5 stars because the context of Bloom aging and dreaming vivid dreams nightly of literary symbols, fragments of poetry and long dead friends is so profound. (I also loved his tribute to Ursula K Le Guin to whom this volume is dedicated. If you are more than a casual Le Guin fan, then this volume might be worth checking out from the library for that essay.)

Generally, however, this is a strangely assembled collection of literary essays. They are unevenly selected and written though that's not necessarily a problem since there is no theme or objective to this book except as Bloom's farewell (in spite of its poorly selected subtitle, "52 novels to read and reread." Very misleading.) I don't think it's as strong as How to Read and Why in its selection, but if you are well versed in Bloom and his opinions then you will enjoy seeing how the experience of age influences those opinions—for example, he came to value Pride and Prejudice as much as Emma and Persuasion (previously he considered it lesser), he grew to hardly tolerate Dostoevsky. He gives full expression to his literary friendships and biographical connections, which is also more restrained in prior works.

Overall a pleasurable perusal for a classics / literary criticism reader, but I would not recommend this as an introduction to Bloom. This is meant for long-time Bloom readers.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harold Bloom in The Bright Book of Life dusts off his opinions and tells what you should be reading. I'm actually quite allergic to this canon-based dogma, but I'll give him some space to speak and weigh up what he's saying.

This was Harold Bloom’s last major book in his lifetime and his only one devoted entirely to the novel: forty-eight works, from Don Quixote to Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, each given a short, free-wheeling essay. The title comes from D. H. Lawrence’s line “The novel is the one bright book of life,” and Bloom takes that quite literally. Where his earlier criticism often treated poems as arenas for agon and influence, here he reads fiction less combatively, more as a series of life-rafts he has clung to over eight decades of reading.

The organising principle is simple: novels to read and reread. Bloom is explicit that this is not a democratic survey but a personal canon, “a reflection of a lifetime of reading from a great, deep, exhaustive reader of novels.” So we shimmy from Cervantes, Richardson and Fielding all the way across to Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, James, Conrad, Lawrence and Woolf, and then on to the thornier cousins Ellison, McCarthy, Sebald, Le Guin and others. The emphasis is squarely on the West, overwhelmingly European and American, and far more male-dominated than any syllabus designed this century would dare to be. If you want global fiction or radical revision of the canon, this is most definitely not your book.

What it is, though, is a kind of late-style reading diary. Bloom was 88 when he wrote it, dictating large portions, and he keeps reminding you of that fact. Illness, the deaths of friends and the sense of being “a battered survivor” after ninety years of reading hover in the background throughout. He returns again and again to a handful of touchstones – Moby-Dick, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Blood Meridian – and you can feel him weighing, one last time, the relative claims of Melville, Tolstoy, Joyce and Proust for the title of Greatest of All. (For the record, in Bloom's eyes Moby-Dick and Ulysses seem to share the crown).

The best chapters aren’t plot summaries – Bloom assumes you know enough about these books already – but miniature memoirs of reading. On Vanity Fair he recalls discovering Thackeray just before going to Cornell; on Clarissa he notes that he rereads Richardson’s leviathan “every other year” (which sounds like an act of penitence if ever there was one); on The Magic Mountain he broods on illness and time. Everywhere we come across odd, revealing asides about teachers, lost lovers, long-gone New York bookstores. The essays become little crossroads where novel, criticism and life intersect.

He can still produce the old Bloomian zingers. Austen’s Persuasion, Emma and Pride and Prejudice “seem equally grand”; Stendhal’s world is “a masked ball or a carnival performance”; Le Guin is a “major imaginative strength” who finally pulled him into fantasy and science fiction late in life. His praise for the Russian-to-English translators Pevear and Volokhonsky – he calls himself “among their thousands of grateful debtors” – will delight some and appal those critics who consider their prose wooden. Either way, you never doubt the depth of his attachments.

At the same time, this is not the sharp, polemical Bloom of The Anxiety of Influence or The Western Canon. Several reviewers have noted that the tone is lighter, the insights often cursory, more “reflections of a lifetime of reading” than sustained acts of interpretation. He’ll sometimes spend half a chapter retelling a novel and then drop in a single, arresting claim – that Invisible Man remains the great American novel of identity, say, or that Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s darkest attempt to rewrite King Lear – before moving on. If you’re hoping for line-by-line explication, you may feel slightly underfed.

The old boy has earned a measure of caprice, it seems, and in the manner of many a cantankerously fascinating grandparent, is not averse to using it.

There are also the familiar blind spots. Bloom’s faith in "the canon" means he spends very little time actually interrogating it or making it speak for itself. He knows the old charges – Eurocentrism, sexism, indifference to politics – and acknowledges them only to wave them away. The inclusion of Ursula Le Guin and W. G. Sebald feels, in this context, almost radical; the absence of most of the 20th-century women and non-Western novelists many readers would now consider indispensable is also striking. Some will take this as proof that Bloom never left the 1950s; my own response would be to shrug and say that the point of a personal canon is precisely its stubbornness. Who wants to be told what to like? When he breaks out into supposed objectivity he can come up short, but while he stays on what the novels have meant to him, he's on solid ground, however Eurocentric or old white male his taste may be.

Indeed, the book works best if you treat it less as a set text and more as an invitation. The chronological march from Don Quixote to Book of Numbers gives it the air of a syllabus, but the content is closer to a long, digressive office-hour with a professor who keeps looking at tyhe gold watch gifted to him by his institution. He is candid about which judgments he has revised (the “anxiety of influence” now looks to him more like “literary love tempered by ambivalence”), about novels he misread when young, about the way rereading at eighty produces a different book than rereading at forty. This is all interesting and useful stuff.

That, I think, is where The Bright Book of Life earns its title. It’s not that Bloom persuades you that novels matter more than poetry or philosophy – that’s a D. H. Lawrence provocation he enjoys quoting rather than fully proving. It’s that he demonstrates how a life can be arranged around rereading: how returning to Middlemarch or Les Misérables or To the Lighthouse at each stage of your own story gives you a running commentary on who you have been. Beneath the rankings and the grand claims, there’s a quieter lesson about the way books age with us, or refuse to.
It is both the comfort of the known and the openness to see how their comfort may have changed.

As a last notebook from a long, eccentric apprenticeship to the reading of novels, it’s actually quite moving. You come away wanting to argue with his choices, maybe to scribble your own counter-canon in the margins, and above all to go back to some of these books and see what they have to say to you now. As epitaphs go for a critic who believed, fanatically, in the sustaining power of difficult reading, The Bright Book of Life is both modest and fitting: an old man’s list of indispensable companions for anyone else still willing to keep turning pages.

[Ron Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a cottage industry of sorts in academia devoted to the fine art of Bloom-hating. Fortunately, I’m not an academic so I am free to read what I like and react as I please.

In any case, I find myself agreeing with some of what he says (“I admire Hemingway’s short stories, but all his novels are failures”), impressed by some of his insights (“Shakespeare teaches us how to talk to ourselves whereas Cervantes instructs us how to talk to one another”), and disagreeing with some of his assessments altogether (I’ll never believe Stendhal was a great writer).

There are odd inclusions, e.g., the only Hardy novel discussed is The Return of the Native even though he describes it as “far from being the best of his fiction.” He also polishes off some books in a few paragraphs but writes veritable sub-books for Joyce’s Ulysses and Mann’s The Magic Mountain. He has an old man’s proclivity to constantly mention the author’s age at death.

But he also recommends books I’ve not read and now look forward to, such as Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook, and Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. (For that matter, possibly, Pater’s The Renaissance, and Lessing’s Laocoön.)

I think he sometimes over-personalizes his judgments, and at eighty-eight years of age, he had no patience for traversing territory within a country mile of the culture wars (“In my exhausted old age, I do not know whether the School of Resentment or the orthodox oxen are more unmannerly”). This doesn’t detract fatally from everything he says and, in any case, one can make up one’s own mind about the content.

[Paul Bard · Rating 1 out of 5]

It took an hour and a half to read the last two chapters on Sebald and Joshua Cohen, then Bloom’s stupid essay on Dostoyevsky.

Baffled - the reviews here of Sebald revealed that the topic of his book is simply a grossly morbid digression on decay and evil. And it would seem that Cohen is writing some kind of Kabbalistic magic in the form of novel.

Bloom talks about aesthetic power. And they are beautiful, but they’re just words.

It seems like words for Bloom are fighting, sex, God, religion, and a kind of aristocracy. But they are just words.

An earlier version of me admired and valued these things, and uncritically submitted to the judgement of the Jewish critic.

Reading the chapter of Dostoyevsky and Bloom’s 2 thoughts on Karamazov are that he wishes he could murder Dostoyevsky for criticising Jewish influence in banking and that he finds the sublime Grand Inquisitor dreary.

So this book is more about what Harold Bloom feels that great writers think of Jewish people than about great writers.

Words were Bloom’s weapons and he uses them to fight imaginary fights, and in the end of the day what harm is there in letting him? They are just words.

[SaltBattery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This definitely has one of the strangest and eeriest introductions to any literary guides I've ever read. The disjointed dream sequence was spooky, it was interesting to peer into Bloom's personal friendships with authors like Cormac McCarthy, his interpretation of Ibn Arabi's conception of Hurqalya and intersubjectivity, and his views on Emerson and Cervantes and Homer, and I've never seen an introduction of this sort that takes on an almost narrative form.

Beyond that though, the reviews of novels is quintessential Bloom. Often times they require a prior knowledge of the novels themselves, but if read following the novels they always are deeply insightful. A fantastic literary guide and companion to more classic novels than I could reasonably read in half a decade.

[Ramanqu · Rating 2 out of 5]

The books that come back again to give solace and the comfort to the confused old gnostic Jew. The author is greatly controlled by is jewish origin's influence upon him as we come nearer to contemporary times.
The appropriate title ought to be: Some Novels to..... To The Jew Reader.
It's a shame that he let his denounced background control his aesthetic judgement. I say it again, he shouldn't have published anything than The Western Canon.
However, there is something beautiful about an old man finding comfort in his old age in the limits reached by human language and the depths of human psyche and sentiments it had uncovered.

[Lisa Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rarely agreed with Bloom's evaluation of a story, but I always appreciated the depth of study he made. The book covers 48 works of art- most you have already read, but Bloom's brings extraordinary scholarship in his analysis.
Note: This is not a book one sets and reads for pleasure, like reading a novel. It is a study of Western literature and is 544 pages long.

It took me several weeks to work my way through it. Meanwhile, I read other things.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Bloom, at the end of his life, discoursing on literature. Be warned about the audiobook, however. It is riddled with mispronunciations through and through. The author would be very dismayed, but——alas!——he’s beyond such cares now.

[Ilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Self-indulgent, repetitive, occasionally bizarre, and seemingly unfinished, and yet I can't get enough of Bloom and his bottomless enthusiasm for the books he writes about. An encouragement to read and re-read and read some more – which can't be a bad thing.

[Jono Grondel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. He quotes far less poetry in this one which makes it more accessible to new readers of all levels. There are a surprising number of antisemitic reviews of this book like Bloom's having been Jewish is somehow a terrible thing. 2022 is weird.

[Elizabeth Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfinished - enjoyed the chapters on Don Quixote and Moby Dick

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Brittany Pearce · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times, brilliant, at others, boring and a bit pedantic.

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Opinionated but unconvincing. Bloom loves a number of classic novels that I’ve hated. YMMV. Quit at 20%.

[Steph Wylie · Rating 2 out of 5]

04/04/2024
I'm going to put a pause on reading this for the time being. While I'm enjoying the critical essays on classic novels contained within, as one Goodreads reviewer has noted, it is full of spoilers for every book discussed. This hasn't been an issue for me up until this point, because the books covered thus far fit into one of the following categories for me:
a) I've already read it.
b) I'm not very likely to read it in the future.
c) I am interested in reading it in the future, but in all probability it will be quite some time before I get around to reading it, so I'm unlikely to remember much about any spoilers contained in this book.

But Chapter 12, which is the point I'm at, is on Wuthering Heights, a book I've never read, but have purchased and is sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for me to start in the near future. I don't want my reading of it spoiled, by, well, spoilers.

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Famous literary critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom compiled these reviews ahead of his death in October 2019. It’s worth noting that it’s been done ultimately for his own self-reflection and gratification at the end of his life, so you can excuse the sometime obscure references and hard-to-follow recounts of conversations with fellow literary friends which clearly you, as the reader, weren’t there for. It’s interesting to read his take on things, and his reflections gave me a lot of references to other books and authors, many generally lesser-known, which I’ll use into the future.

This is not a hard book to read, per se, but to get anything out of it you have to be an avid literary reader with a good knowledge of classics to follow Bloom’s trains of thought.

[Nathanael Booth · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is always a pleasure to sit and read with Bloom.