Humboldt's Gift

I mostly loved this novel, but there were indeed spots of tedium here and there.

The novel begins in a rather slow-to-read manner, but as it delves into the action of the plot, the pace gradually picks up.

The story unfolds over a relatively short period of time. However, the narrator, Charlie Citrine, frequently recalls his past, thereby adding temporal depth to the narrative.

The subject of much of his remembrance is his former mentor, Humboldt Fleisher, who is now deceased. Their relationship was tumultuous and ended poorly. Charlie seems to be grappling with his feelings of guilt, even though Humboldt was something of a crackpot and largely responsible for their falling out.

Charlie also spends a significant amount of time meditating, quite literally, on metaphysical ideas, which at times caused my eyes to glaze over.

The best part of the novel for me was undoubtedly the character Cantabile. He is a mischievous wannabe gangster who drags Citrine around Chicago on the most ridiculous of schemes. He is the complete antithesis of Charlie and is truly hysterical. I adored those moments when that irascible bully appeared on the page.

The book is filled with other bullies who take advantage of Charlie in various ways, but Cantabile is by far the most comical. (And that name, doesn't it seem to be straight out of Chaucer or Dickens?)

The titular "gift" is casually mentioned a couple of times early on, but Bellow does not reveal it until much later. "What a plot tease!" I kept thinking. I did enjoy the ending, although I would have preferred a final page with a bit more punch.

I had a professor who began her course on Contemporary American Fiction with Bellow, specifically with the novella Seize the Day. She said that his work focused on the pervasive existential crisis emerging in America post-WWII. This work was published 20 years after Seize the Day, yet I found numerous thematic similarities.

The protagonists in both are, to a certain extent, fuck-ups, paralyzed by the expectations of others. They both attempted "the American dream" and found it so unsatisfying that they dropped out (leaving their wives, kids, and jobs) and set off a cascade of problems. Concepts of mortality and death feature prominently. The difference is that I despised the protagonist in Seize the Day (perhaps it was overdone?), whereas the protagonist of this novel is more likable. The lovable fuck-up.

Anyway, eventually I'll read something else by Bellow, and I'm curious to see whether these thematic similarities are common in his work or merely a coincidence.

As a side note, I constantly thought of Fellini's 8 1/2, one of my favorite movies. There are many similarities: the famous artist who is unable to produce and is being hounded by others, the mistress (so similar in personality), the (ex)wife, and the obsession with the past (through flashbacks). Replace the sex/women in 8 1/2 with money, and all you're lacking is a Humboldt and a Gift.

Another note: I love Bellow's use of a long string of adjectives without commas between them. I don't know why an author's disregard for grammatical conventions makes me so excited, but I guess that's just the kind of nonconformist I am, haha :P

And so it went. I was there, enjoying myself, carefree about any taxonomy of narrative priorities, indulging in dispensable books and leaving my acquaintance with Bellow at a dated, pleasant but not conclusive Augie March and a recent, truly stunning, Herzog. Until one fine day, the god of reading, with some construct, titled by a virtual tournament among American novels, decided to make an honest woman of me. And by hurling down an arrow (ZOT!), he put into someone's head the idea of giving me this sublime and rascal-like, irresistible work with its protagonist Charlie Citrine, a likeable scoundrel with a tormented inner life (a sensitivity that after a while got on my nerves, as the interested party more or less said at a certain point).

And so here I am, catapulted into a novel that has the effect of a theatrical piece full of surprises and brilliant exits, where from the first to the last act one is carried away with the greatest pleasure by the velvet of the armchair, the subtly mastered conversation, and the sounds of the stage masterfully trodden. And in short, only emerging at the end - from the book, the piece, and the armchair - one realizes that in that sometimes overwhelming flow, and despite the thread of some reasoning lost in digressions (the anthroposophy of old Rudolf! the daily psychopathology of Sigmund! the blessed boredom as the start-up of contemporary society!), Bellow has brilliantly expounded on many, very many things. Of human relationships and literature, to begin with. And then of ambition, friendship, vile money, success, memory. But also of mass culture and elitism, glorious defeats («poets are loved but only because they don't know how to get on in the world») and illusions always on the doorstep of the house, like voids to be filled.

So in the end of life but also of death, which in Humboldt is, by Bellow's admission, the main refrain. And yet it must be added that one laughs (quite a bit) despite all of the above: so much so that death itself is an instrument in the unfolding of the plot, a protagonist in the most serious reflections, and a presence in findings like a love rival who plays the errand boy to survive. In short, the final stage direction is that there is a narrative code that pops like popcorn in this novel, and I have been enchanted by it. Applause on the open stage for the actors, and repeated calls to the curtain for the direction.

This is the very first work by Bellow that I have delved into, and I must say, I relished the entire experience. The story centers around Charlie Citrine, a 50-something writer and intellectual. He is in the midst of an ongoing divorce, has an unpredictable girlfriend, an acquaintance in the mob who has taken a liking to him, a slew of bloodsucking lawyers, friends with hare-brained schemes seeking money, and a complex relationship with his deceased old mentor, the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer.

It is an extremely erudite book, filled with a plethora of ideas in play. Bellow has a great time poking fun at all sorts of sacred cows. There are numerous comedic moments, and some pure slapstick as well, like the fate of Charlie's Mercedes. Humboldt's gift from beyond the grave poses an interesting dilemma for Charlie the intellectual, especially when his girlfriend runs off with an undertaker, who has a steady job, guaranteed income, and no shortage of customers.

At times, this was not an easy read, as Bellow toys with some rather off-the-wall ideas too, like those of Steiner et al. Nevertheless, it is both profound and funny. I truly adored Cantabile the gangster and Charlie's astute comments, even though he shows inertia in the face of Cantabile's ravings. Charlie's musings will surely stay with me for a considerable time.

Saul Bellow's novels have a strange allure for me, like a crazy-ass bee drawn to a barren flower. I seem to thrive on the disappointment, confusion, and frustration they bring. I must be a literature masochist. Bellow, sensing my eagerness and dog-like enthusiasm, lures me in closer... only to smack me on the nose. His novels are never truly satisfying; they almost make me angry. How can a man of such talent, a great writer, produce such flawed books? In truth, I'm at a loss when it comes to reviewing Humboldt's Gift. It defeats me. But in these days, one has to be okay with defeat, so I'll give it a try.

My mother taught me to always say something nice first when being critical of someone or something. But I'm not going to do that. I'll jump right in with what I don't like about the book, which, I'm sure she would agree, is more my style. There are a lot of things wrong with Humboldt's Gift. Fatally wrong. These flaws kill the book if you expect it to be a masterpiece (and why shouldn't you, given its reputation?). Some are typical Bellovian problems, while others are new and unexpected flaws. Bellow really goes all out to mess up his novel here; he doesn't hold back.
Typically, it starts well. Through Charlie Citrine, the first-person narrator, we're introduced to Humboldt Fleisher, who seems like a huge personality, a potentially classic tragicomic character. But after twenty or thirty pages, you start to realize he has no depth at all. Bellow is just listing things instead of developing him in a meaningful way. For example: "We were off: we discussed machinery, luxury, command, capitalism, technology, Mannon, Orpheus, and poetry." And: "He moved easily from the tabloids to General Rommel and from Rommel to John Donne and T.S. Eliot/and this rained down on me/the sayings of Einstein and Zsa Zsa Gabor, with references to Polish socialism and the football tactics of George Halas…" Bore off, Saul! This tells us nothing. It feels like the author is just showing off, and not even in a good way because anyone can do it. And Bellow doesn't do this kind of listing once or twice; he does it frequently. As a result, Humboldt is reduced to a kind of Uni reading list, a series of topics or themes. We're supposed to believe he's an intellectual with an encyclopedic mind, but it's a classic case of an author telling us instead of showing us. Bellow's approach is like a poet trying to convince someone he's great by listing his influences instead of reciting some poems.
Of course, Citrine is narrating sometime after the events he's describing. So, I guess it's understandable that he can only remember topics rather than content. But still, you can excuse anything if you try hard enough. I don't buy that Bellow was trying to make a point about how we remember people because Citrine's memory works fine in other parts of the book. Besides, Humboldt is supposed to be charismatic, but there's no sense of that in the book at all. In fact, it's almost unfathomable why Citrine loves or admires the man.
Humboldt isn't the only one lacking substance. Demmie is little more than a pill-popping hot chick with night terrors, and Kathleen, Humboldt's wife, is pretty much a total void. The only characters with any personality are Citrine himself and small-time hood Rinaldo Cantabile. To be fair, Cantabile is fantastic. He's the right mix of tough guy and sensitive/vulnerable schmo. I really enjoyed all his parts. As for Citrine, he's mostly charming and endearing. However, the tone of the novel is sometimes too patronizing. Bellow, like the mediocre Javier Marias, seems to think he's blowing our minds with his philosophical, cultural, and societal musings, but really, he isn't. There are no great insights to be found in the book. In fact, I studied philosophy and English, and the narration sometimes reminded me of having to listen to first-year students babbling on in seminars, without any sense of their own pretension or middle-of-the-road opinions.
As with many novels-of-ideas, the plot is pretty thin on the ground. That's not really a problem for me if the ideas are top-notch. But, as I noted earlier, Bellow doesn't bring a new or even fresh perspective to the issues he tackles in the book. This isn't to say that what he does tackle isn't interesting. It is. Humboldt's Gift is about many things – the changing face of Chicago, money, alienation, ennui – but at heart, it's a book about art and commercialization, about how hard it is to be an artist these days, how undervalued they are, etc. Coming from an artist himself, in the broadest sense of the word, there's a chance one could view Bellow's concerns as well-to-do, self-interested whining. I can't argue against that, I'm afraid, but it didn't really bother me.
I said earlier that you can excuse anything if you try hard enough, and that's true of what, for me, was the biggest issue, which are the passages of Anthroposophical nonsense that crop up intermittently in the text. I know next to nothing about Anthroposophy, other than it's attributed to Rudolf Steiner, and after reading Humboldt's Gift, I'm still none the wiser. It seems to be some kind of mystical garbage about the soul and the afterlife. Now, if you were being kind, you might want to explain away all the cringy mystical stuff as satire. Citrine is a celebrity under pressure, in need of some form of salvation, and wants to engage with the big questions in life. Looking at the celebrities around us today, we can see how they often turn to some weird form of spiritualism for answers; think of Madonna and Kabbalah, or Tom Cruise and Scientology. So, as a genuine satire, I would be impressed and amused by the Anthroposophy passages. However, that stuff is clearly not satire because it's well documented that Bellow was actually studying and well-disposed towards Steiner's work around the time he was writing the novel. Furthermore, he's clearly, to some extent, Citrine, just as Humboldt is his friend Delmore Schwartz. If you draw this conclusion, then the book kind of feels like a joke played, unintentionally, on himself.
So, what did I like about it? Why did I read all 500 pages? It always comes back to the same thing with me and Bellow: on a sentence-by-sentence basis, he's terrific, almost without peer. Yes, there's a lot of hair-tearing stuff to endure, but I still enjoy myself because at least once on each page, he'll deliver a paragraph or a line that floors me. Things like: "She’s very pretty but she’s honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won’t spread." And this: "Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones." Reading Bellow is a kind of archaeological exercise for me. One that's, just about, worth it.

“El legado de Humboldt” is an overly long and rather exasperating joke written by Saul Bellow in the form of a novel that I imagine parodies the author's life.

A young poet travels to the big city to meet the greatest promise of North American letters and achieves success in the entertainment world at the expense of a character inspired by the personality of his master, who repudiates him for the betrayal he feels he has suffered.

Is it a betrayal of poetry for money? Or vice versa!

I tried to read this book with a critical eye towards the construction of North American identity, towards that utilitarianism disguised as pragmatism that turns feelings into an obstacle to making money.

Its protagonist goes from being a reflective man, a victim of the deception of the social system that takes all his money by taking advantage of his generosity and lack of business acumen or embezzlement.

His friends, his ex-wife, and even the woman he falls in love with use him to make money.

There even appears a little character who drags him into the world of the underworld in a pitiful way because it results from an implausible stupidity.

Therefore, it should be said from the beginning to avoid more than six hundred pages of reading: the legacy that Humboldt leaves to his friend Charles Citrine is money.

Humboldt's blessing for his loved ones is dollars; thousands of them.

One would think that there would be something deeper, more transcendental, when the protagonist sees his life laid out in a ridiculous script written in revenge by that poet friend with megalomaniac airs.

But no. Just money.

A masterful rendition of the narrator emerges, being passive, studious, and deeply entangled in an intellectuality that isolates him from life and experience.

How can one maintain the reader's engagement throughout an entire novel through such a perspective? Yet, Bellow accomplishes this feat. He depicts the narrator being ensnared in his own web, trapped and at times enduring suffering. Intellectuality serves as a costly shield against the aggressive turmoil of life and unmitigated experience.

Simultaneously, Bellow fashions this man as embodying the life of imagination, juxtaposed against a world filled with willfulness, tawdry pushing, and conniving to achieve one's goals. The pursuit of success leads to the realization of the emptiness of money and weightless awards. And, as always, time, the great scavenger, consumes a fading generation while the new one is already emerging. It is a time for mourning amid the gaiety of youths.

One star is deducted for a section where the narration flagged, but Bellow was there to salvage it. I wasn't aware he was such a proficient wordsmith.

Now, let's turn to the short stories of Delmore Schwartz, specifically "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," whose life is intertwined with the character of Humboldt, evoking a plethora of diverse emotions in this significant novel.

A Difficult Book Case, The Gift of Hampolnt to the Miserable, to the Discouraged, to the Disdained and to the Rewarded. The author hero, tortured by a divorce (even more economically burdensome than mine -keeping in mind the analogies) and burdened by the loss of his friend Hampolnt (whom he saw in a miserable state before his death but didn't stop to talk to him), stumbles as he has to face lawyers, gangsters, ex-wives, lovers and whatever else Bellow throws in his way. He often shows himself to be incompetent or deliberately reluctant to take action or even to react, while the developments seem to have a tendency to overtake him, expressing elsewhere more indirectly and elsewhere more directly the feeling that life is a game and you choose when and how much you will play.

As the villains destroy his meticulous Mercedes and then take his phone to explain the reason to him, as his ex-wife plays an endless legal game with him that economically disdains him, he himself has hesitations in marrying his much younger girl, not because of the aforementioned conditions, but because a meandering thought process delays him, until when he has really run out of money and is ready to make the move, already sure that she will not be with him because of his financial appearance, she has already left him for a millionaire undertaker. But even this development is not enough to get him out of his eternal position as a passive player in the game of life. Even Hampolnt (who is still alive for a little while at that time) gives him a final moral and economic blow by cashing in a white check that the author has given him, nor does this sufficiently disturb him to become active. And the explanation of "moral attack" on Hampolnt's part seems to cover him.

The solution comes only thanks to the deus ex machina Kantabile, the thug who burned his car for a debt on paper (which money he had just received and burned demonstratively to prove that it was a matter of principle and not economic). He discovers that a film work that has been written jointly by the author and Hampolnt (formerly a poet, with a "big putz" -his words, not mine) is being shown in cinemas all over the world without their knowledge and the door to the exercise of rights opens.

Sitrin (our hero, I didn't introduce you, sorry), is half out of the "real world". He lives more breathing literature and poetry and in such a world he wants to live, even if reality knocks on his door and his bank account (and once even his car, represented by a touched mafioso). The events that mark his life, even being stuck in traffic, are translated for him into analogies from works of world significance. Shakespeare, Eliot and others find their updated rendition in Sitrin's every "drama".

As the work progresses, the reader often feels dissatisfied, tries to understand Sitrin, gets angry with him, sometimes justifies him, sometimes wants to get into the pages and give him a wooden hand for the pathos that distinguishes him, but as he approaches the end, as the conditions ripen, the narration becomes tighter, he begins to "feel" if not to "understand" the hero. It is a creative mind enclosed in a universe where everything is defined based on productivity, numbers, percentages. There is poetry in his mind and on his table there are legal decisions that call on him to pay (ok, not exactly, but you get the idea). How possible is it to maintain such a stance against the "uniform" reality? How much can you accept blows and answer with verses? Judging from the end of the book, Bellow's irony is obvious. You can't. They won't let you. Even your own creativity, others will try to exploit (even for your own benefit). If you are to remain a creator, a poet, this will happen through your acceptance as a productive and profitable unit. Even if your initial success was the one that pushed your mentor and friend to the extremes. The same one that Bellow ironically has save your tomato after death with his gift. So that it too can become an object of exploitation. Vice, cycles, money.

The humor, the irony, the sarcasm, season almost every page of the work, often with archaic forms, not that this has any particular significance, it's just that some ironies that emerge later are impressive. Equally seasoned is the book with Bellow's knowledge, but interestingly this is not as annoying as in other works. The most interesting element of it (for me, for others such a thing may not even be conceivable) is the merging of the two characters, Hampolnt and Sitrin, two creators, two poets, who are intertwined in one essentially voice, but by chance have a different outcome. One lives the absolute (and more suitable for the mindless society) death of the departing artist, dies alone, poor and slightly forgotten, tragic. The other knows salvation and escape from the dead end that he has pursued or hunted.

I haven't yet decided whether this satire on American social prototypes and mores, on hyperconsumerism, the hunt for money and the worthlessness of art -as an end in itself and an autonomous form of culture, not as an investment field, for God's sake- is hopeful or gloomy. I tend towards the second view, but perhaps it's better that I can't decide...

P.S. Why 3 stars? The fact that it is a well-written work with good prose does not mean that it is necessarily also my favorite. I recognize its inherent value, but I can't quite "worship" it...

It's truly fascinating to observe just how passionate I become when I have a strong aversion to a book. Perhaps it's the feeling of being cheated or misled? My initial expectations were sky-high, and that surely has an impact on my perception.

The premise of the story is indeed interesting and holds great promise. A man embarks on a journey to find meaning in his life within a world that has seemingly lost its direction. The theme explores how culture, the arts, advanced learning, and thinking - the very raisons-d'être for human existence, as we all know - are being suppressed by modern society and its trappings. Right from the start, there are numerous quotes and mentions of countless philosophers, musicians, artists, and other intellectuals of their kind. So far, everything seems to be going well.

However, as the story progresses, nothing substantial materializes. The philosophical musings devolve into trite, empty rants, and we find ourselves spending our time following the dull life of a pretentious rebel who lacks any real understanding. (Darn it, I'm getting rather critical here, but I just can't help it.)

The characters are vividly描绘, but that's actually part of the problem. There is no depth or complexity to the characters, and they all come across as one-dimensional, mainstream props.

I was deeply disappointed by this, my first encounter with a Bellow novel. Nevertheless, I am willing to give another one a try, considering he is such a prolific writer and also has Canadian roots.