We are reading Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift this month. Please share your thoughts and comments in this thread.
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We are reading Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift this month. Please share your thoughts and comments in this thread.
Finally got my hands on the only library copy in this county. Will start reading tonight hopefully.
Anyone joining?
I am about 100 pages through. It is not like any book I would choose to read, and I cannot remember reading anything like it before. It is very articulate, as you might expect in a book in which the protagonist was made a chevalier de l' ordre du Mérite by the French government for his literature. I am only familiar with this time and place from American movies. I sort of imagine the characters played by actors like Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon, although I am not sure who would play the mobsters. I thought maybe Al Pacino might play one of them, but he was rather young in the 70s. The protagonist, Charlie Citrine, and his erstwhile friend, Von Humboldt Fleisher, reminded me of the sort of half-famous people I used to watch on late night arts TV shows.
I'm in as well. Got my copy friday and started today. First thirty pages gave me that feeling I get when i've started something that I think I am going to like.
I think I see Mel Brooks as Humboldt. I am not sure who I would cast as Charlie Citrine.
I am wondering about the title... "Humboldt" is a type of squid, apparently.
I am wondering about the title too. Is it gift as in present or gift as in talent?
Well at about 150 pages in I figured I would check in with the discussion. @kev67, I am sort of picturing Steve Carrell as Charlie.... and I can definitely see Mel Brooks as Humboldt.
Anyhow, I am really enjoying the book. I would call Bellow's style "Dense, but rewarding". It reminds me of Richard Ford's stuff. There is something immersive about knowing every errant thought in a character's head. All the little flights of memory, the philosophical riffs, and the scatterbrained digressions of Charlie Citrine really give you a complete picture of the person. It's one of those weird instances where you feel like you know a character in a book more thoroughly than you know any of the real people in your life. Laughs.
Anyway the whole sequence of events with Cantibile made me laugh out loud in several places. Anybody else liking or disliking the story so far?
I am about to embark on my second reading of this, and I am fully confident that this time around will open new doors. One of the more intriguing features of Bellow's work is his extraordinary ability to weave in and out of various social classes, notably that of the intelligensia (personified by the title character) and the underworld (in this case Rinaldo Cantabile.) Charlie
Citrine, the narrator, does -- and doesn't -- feel at home in both strata.
Another aspect is Bellow's modeling his characters on actual human beings, partially, that is. Strictly speaking, this novel is not really a roman à clef, yet apparently, von Humboldt was inspired by the personality of the great Delmore Schwartz, one of Bellow's friends. Another minor character, Orlando Huggins, is said to have been inspired by Dwight Macdonald. [Full disclosure: I had no inkling of this upon my first reading of the novel, and only stumbled upon the factoid when Dwight M's writings first caught my interest a couple of years ago.]
Perhaps the greatest contribution from the Bellow canon is his comprehensive world view. His philosophy, and certainly his flawless writing style as well, contributed to his Nobel status, I believe. In Humboldt's Gift especially, the reader can find herself enthralled by lengthy discursive treatises on human nature and the state of the world, or by contrast, a single pithy epigram such as "Dreaming in America is no cinch."
I sincerely hope that newcomers to Saul Bellow's work will be as captivated as I am.
Auntie
aunt shecky, ive got seize the day---would you recommend that?
Delmore Schwartz, after whom Humboldt was said to be modeled, was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. There are also real-life parallels in Humboldt's tragic end. I'm going to see if my local library has a copy of the biography of Schwartz by James Atlas.Quote:
Originally Posted by kev67
Humboldt's Gift itself won the Pulitzer Prize, and lest we forget, Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.
I would recommend anything by Saul Bellow. Someone gave me a battered paperback copy of his first novel, Dangling Man, which is on the ever-burgeoning "to read" list.Quote:
Originally Posted by bounty
well tell you what---i'll start reading it tomorrow. I am making an effort to be reading two books at once. one that's an easy read and another that's "good for me" to read...
i'll let you know (eventually, or maybe even really soon) how its going...
I thought it was brave of Bellow to have a long philosophical discussion on the subject of boredom in the middle of the book. I think I detect a slight bit of mid-book sag.
Andy Garcia as Cantabile. With a big mustache.
Favorite lines so far :
"The weak, at war, never know how hard they are hitting you."
and,
"When the judge smiled certain muscles which unsubtle people never develop at all became visible. That was interesting. What did nature originally intend such muscles for?"
My favourite passage so far:
As I was meditating on Humboldt, the hall buzzer went off. I have a dark little hall where I press the button and get muffled shouts on the intercom from below. It was Ronald Stiles, the doorman. My ways, the arrangements of my life, diverted Stiles a lot. He was a skinny witty old Negro. He was, so to speak, in the semifinals of life. In his opinion, so was I. But I didn't seem to see it that way, for some strange white man's reason, and I continued to carry on as if it weren't yet time to think of death. "Plug in your telephone, Mr. Citrine. Do you read me? Your number-one lady friend is trying to reach you." Yesterday my car was bashed. Today my beautiful mistress couldn't get in touch. To him I was as good as a circus. At night Stiles's missus liked stories about me better than television. He told me so himself.
^ I liked that too.
Well, I am down to the last 50 pages and I think I will miss old Charlie Citrine. He has sort of grown on me. So far I think Bellow did something pretty amazing with this book. I couldn't get a digital copy of it, so it feels like it has taken me forever to get through it. Now that I can see the end, I realize how much I've enjoyed it and how difficult it will be to change gears and get into something else.
Finished last night. Hopefully we will have a good discussion at some point. I liked the book. I am a sucker for a painstakingly well drawn character and Bellow delivers in spades on that front. Granted, the story isn't much of a story, as far as actual things happening goes, but there is a lot going on in the mind of Charles Citrine. The supporting cast of characters are believably ridiculous and ridiculously believable, and they certainly helped to keep me interested in the story. I loved Thaxter, and Cantabile, and Ulich, and of course Renata and the Senora. They come to life on the page and I think it is interesting that the first part of this thread prompted ideas of who might play who in a movie version of the book, which interestingly is something that the characters in the book do as well!
Anyhow, happy reading and looking forward to some discussion.
I just gave up on Augie March about half way through - definite mid-book sag there. I seem to get on better with his shorter works - Dangling Man, Seize the Day, and Ravelstein were OK.
I still have over 100 pages to read.
Although I have never watched Curb Your Enthusiasm, I can imagine Larry David as Charles Citrine, except that he is about ten years too old.
Citrine is very forbearing. I don't like that Renata woman. As for Denise, his former wife... well, Citrine is much more even tempered than I am.
Larry, at least on the show, is too mean to be Charles, although they do share a lot of the same hedonistic qualities. Larry definitely would have been more like you in the area of Denise. He wouldn't put up with that stuff. Lol.Quote:
Originally Posted by kev67
Yeah.... Renata. When I said I love the character, I meant that I appreciate her from a literary standpoint. If I met her, outside of thinking she was hot, I probably wouldn't care for her too much. She is a terribly transparent gold digger, and manipulator. And then there is her mother.... Yikes.
I am within the last fifty pages now. I am getting a little exasperated by Citrine now. It's all very well to mooch around Madrid, contemplating death, but I wish he would just declare himself bankrupt, and then get down to some work.
I finished it at last. For the first hundred-and-fifty pages, although it was not really my sort of thing, I thought it was so well written that it would be churlish not to give it 5 stars, but then I thought it glided for about another two hundred pages.