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Title: Ravelstein (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Saul Bellow ISBN: 0-14-100176-3 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.77 (96 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Another Bellow masterpiece
Comment: Once again, Bellow hits a home run with his main character - Ravelstein, based on the real life philosopher and U of Chicago professor Allen Bloom. The book, like most of Bellow's other novels is a philosophical treatise and pseudo-biography disguised as a novel. The Bellow-like narrator, named Chick, old friend and colleague, has been annointed by Ravelstein to be his biographer. The writing is strong, the characters, even minor ones fully realized.
The story operates in flashbacks and anecdotes as Ravelstein has died six years earlier of AIDS. We come to gradually know Ravelstein as Chick struggles to write the biography, define Ravelstein's character, and his contributions. We learn that of his lament for the loss of liberal arts appreciation in America, his reliance on the principles of Plato and the Greek classics, and his preference for all things French. We see his love of antiques, silk shirts and sheets, as well as the Chicago Bulls basketball team, and we meet the admiring friends and students that he surrounds himself with, some also based on real life figures. We also see him struggle with illness - first with Guillain-Barre syndrome, later with HIV and AIDS.
While much of the book is dominated by the Ravelstein character, a brilliant political thinker and philosopher, it is as much a book about Chick, who is no slouch himself, also a gifted teacher and scholar, although at times overshadowed by the loud, opinionated, ever charming Ravelstein. There is an obvious symbiotic cast to the relationship, which both are aware of, and which informs the developing biography. The last fifty pages focus mainly on Chick as he contracts a rare disease and has to fight for his life a la Ravelstein. And Ravelstein is not entirely gone. He comes back to Chick in visions and imaginary conversations.
Yet Chick has something that Ravelstein seems not to have found: true love and a happy marriage. For above all, he admits to Chick that love and longing top the list of life's priorities, and although in an ambiguous (to Ravelstein's friends, that is) homosexual relationship, he claims that love has eluded him.
There is another important thread that runs through the story, in fact a continuing Bellow theme. Ravelstein and Chick both American Jews, grapple with the effects of the holocaust and near extermination of the Jewish people on surviving generations, and what a Jew's role in the world ought to be.
This is the warning that Ravelstein gives to Chick when he befriends a former Nazi sympathizer turned historian and lover of mythology: "The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth. Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them...".
At the beginning of the new century, Bellow's literature continues to stand above the pack as an advocate of the search for truth and pursuing humanity's highest moral values.
Rating: 4
Summary: Ravelstein and Chick
Comment: "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 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 has 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 thim 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.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not Bellow's Best
Comment: Near the end of this novel the narrator, Chick, life-long friend of Ravelstein (presumably Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago), describes a serious episode of heart failure. These pages are remarkably well-done, but like much of this novel, it's hard to find much on Ravelstein in these pages. Mr. Bellow somewhere in effect admits that his medical problems may be a bit of a departure from the main story line. Fair enough. Unfortunately, the story is a rambling set of recollections; it is difficult to discard anything, and just about everything is fair game in this novel that manages, despite its inclusiveness, to give short shirft to its central character, Ravelstein. When we do meet him, we find precious little exceptional. His materialism is right out of the GQ "central casting" department. We're assured he studied the classics, but when is beyond me, given his propensity to shop. If you want to know about Professor Bloom, you would do much better going directly to the source, particularly his translation of Plato's Republic. You won't learn much about Bloom's apparent weakness for tailored, crisply laundered (wrapped, not on hangers, Bellow assures us) shirts, but you'll get much closer than Ravelstein can bring you to understanding his exceptional mind.
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Title: CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Alan Bloom ISBN: 0671657151 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 May, 1988 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Herzog (Penguin Classics) by Saul Bellow ISBN: 0142437298 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss ISBN: 0226776948 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.29 |
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Title: The Dean's December (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Saul Bellow ISBN: 0140189130 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Saul Bellow ISBN: 0140189416 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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