This is the second time around that I have fizzled out around page 60 of this Saul Bellow masterpiece. I bought this book forty years ago when I was on a kick to read all Nobel Prize for Literature winning authors. What I have learned since is that not all Nobel authors are that accessible. Many were trying to “stretch the form” or invent a new one. Some experiments worked for me, like Hemingway, while others didn't, and Bellow is one of them.

Reading through the pages of this book, I tried to find its core premise and latch onto a narrator I could follow until the end. But I drew a blank on both counts. I had the foggy idea that Bellow was trying to conjure up an image of Depression-era Jews in Chicago, scrambling frenetically to make a living in their ghettoized sections of society, by hook or by crook. However, I was hoping for a more focused narrator. Instead, I got a frenetic one who spewed more words than necessary, floated everywhere and nowhere at once, and left me pretty much where I started 60 pages earlier. If I was going to be subjected to another 500 pages of rambling sentence gymnastics that made me skim big time, this was not the book for me.

Therefore, read this if you must read the great Bellow experimenting with yet another literary form, that of the survivalist mind of a frenetic Jew named Augie March. But I think there are other writers who have explored this turf with better economy and sharper precision, such as Malamud, Roth, and our Canadian hero Richler, among others.

Perhaps I wasn't equal to the task which this novel demanded, seeing as it comes with so much praise and equal mental baggage.

I was more than excited to try it. However, dragging more than two weeks along with this narrative says something about how I struggled with it. The fact that I read a couple of short story collections, a novel and a couple of plays meanwhile also indicates how less entrancing of a read this is.

I liked the narrative fairly well. Augie's experiences were in a tragicomic vein, and the arc of his chaotic life was sketched very well. Bellow has a great art of fleshing his characters. They appear fairly visual a short time after introduction into the plot. But there were long episodes where every paragraph seemed a crude description of simple occurrences. Bellow's style appeared so crude at times that it was crudely read by me.

It is true that I felt there were a few high points during the narrative. At those moments, my hopes soared that this might just salvage the story of Augie for me. But the magic fizzled out as instantly as it had surfaced, and I was left with a plainfaced narration of events, nothing more. Bellow has some ideas and prose-capsules made of philosophical, cerebral thinking. But that can only make so much of a novel, for me at least.

When I reached the last hundred pages, it was a foregone conclusion that this was an underwhelming read. Maybe this will strike me in a later part of my life, for I've not yet lost my hopes on Bellow. There are many of his works that await my attention, and hopefully they'll be better.

This novel is, without a doubt, one of the outstanding masterpieces of our era. Saul Bellow, like a master painter such as Rembrandt, skillfully portrays his characters. His remarkable technique allows him to not only reveal the minute physical details of his characters but also delve deep into the very essence of their souls. He has a shrewd understanding of motivation and weaves a complex story with an ease that leaves one in awe. Even the most unexpected turns of fate seem natural and genuine.

Augie is a man "in search of a worthwhile fate." Having endured the hardships at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a poor youth in Chicago, he finally realizes that aligning with the "axial lines" of his existence is the key to human fulfillment. While his brother is completely absorbed in the pursuit of financial gain and social status, Augie, through his own struggles, discovers that such a pursuit is "merely clownery hiding tragedy." Augie is a tenacious pursuer of the American dream who has an epiphany that the true riches of life lie in the secrets at the core of the heart.

If, as Sartre claims, life is the search for meaning, then Augie is the inspired advocate of this great human endeavor. The true measure of a great book is that one wishes it would never conclude. Fortunately, Saul Bellow is as productive as he is brilliant, and there is a wealth more to explore. Bellow truly deserves to be regarded as one of America's finest living novelists: he is a precious gem. His wisdom is truly astonishing.

Don't let this novel slip through your fingers!

536 pages of extremely small type, I should mention. What a tiresome task reading this book was! I started reading it in 2008 and completed it over a year later... and this was my third try. Bellows employs every adjective in the dictionary. Have you never heard of Belshazzar or Pasiphaë? Neither had I, but Bellows has, and he inserts every historical, mythological, biblical, and classical reference, every Yiddish, Latin, and French phrase, as well as every long word in English that he knows, as if to say, “Hey, look how intelligent I am!”. Apparently, the book is written by Augie, so perhaps that's the point, since Augie is mostly self-educated. But I found myself reading entire paragraphs without grasping the meaning. And for me, that makes reading simply a waste of time. However, on the positive side, this is one more book from the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century that I can cross off.

It seems that Bellows was more interested in showing off his extensive knowledge than in creating a truly engaging and understandable story. The excessive use of arcane references and complex words made it a struggle for the average reader to follow. While I appreciate the effort that went into researching and incorporating all of these elements, it ultimately detracted from the overall reading experience.

Nevertheless, crossing this book off the list gives me a sense of accomplishment. It's one step closer to completing my goal of reading all of the novels on the Modern Library's list. And perhaps, in the process, I've learned a few new words and gained some additional knowledge about history, mythology, and literature.

This is the American epic. In the lineage of The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Argonautica, Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is a modern struggle against, or for, fate. It is a paean of life's potential, of endurance.
Augie's struggle is not to get ahead, but to take the helm of his fate, to direct it toward better waters, to live the way he wants, the way he feels is right for him, and the ways of life for other men be damned. He is often showered with opportunities, grande advantages which he shies away from and abandons. Though he wants his "better fate," he too feels ill-suited for those opportunities.

  I had looked all my life for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough, that I had opposed people in what they wanted to make of me...

Unlike Odysseus, unlike other great men, Augie is not searching for a prize, but search for a path. He is constantly at the fabled fork in the road, and he must constantly say "this road, not this road" and whether it is the better road, none can say.
The power and exuberance of life in The Adventures of Augie March is amazing, rivaling Whitman in sheer emotive power and poignancy. There is no linear plot, Augie is an American vagrant, a sort of itinerant philosopher, and his cast of strange characters and wily diversions is united by the persistence of his wild love of life, his determination and smiling face through disaster.
Augie's "fate" is not quite of the same flavor as the Greco-Roman recipe, it is a sort of trajectory rather than a woven web. Augie acknowledges his role in determining his fate, and in this his fate is "Determined" rather than "Pre-determined."
Unlike his brother Simon, who pursues and achieves monetary wealth, social power, the ostensible "American dream" - Augie's "fate good enough" is something different, which levers more heavily on the abstract, the intangible. He veers from success, whether as conscious fear of the spotlight, or a shudder of moral conviction, and in many ways seems from the outside to be a failure, a flop.
In the scheme of Augie's life the disasters outweigh the triumphs, but the story rings with the timbre of a life well-lived, a fate good enough. Disappointed in business and adventure and love, and seemingly the victor of nothing, Augie's equipoise in the face of Life is the great human victory.

  You must take a chance on what you are. And you can't sit still. I know this double poser, that if you make a move you may lose, but if you sit still you may decay.

As an American people we are torn between these opposing forces: ambition and fear, comfort or potential success. There are many risks in life, and few in our lives are likely to rival Augie's ill-concluded iguana hunts in Mexico, with a donkey-hoof to the head - so take the risks!
It is important to approach life with all it's possibilities, and so long as one maintains that open-view, one will never be trapped in a fatidic fall. In business, in love, in life: be reverent of knowledge, be strong in conviction, be right in your ambitions, and when you stray: return, and when you set down: don't sit too long. Maybe you lose one million times, but in life as in gymnastics, one must learn to fall.

  And of course I had some restlessness to be taken up into something greater than myself. I could not shine the star of great individuality that by absorbed stoking, became a sun of the world over a throng to whom it glitters - whom it doesn't necessarily warm but only showers down a Plutarch radiance. Being necessary, yes, that would be fine and wonderful; but being Phoebus's boy? I couldn't even dream of it.

The allures of greatness, of success, of wealth and power, are revealed to be empty accomplishments which only stoke the fires of Macbethian ambition: an impotent head-hunt for the unnamed, the unimagined and undervalued.
Money is transient, it passes, as life does, but it has no fate, it is slippery and ill-won and ill-distributed: it imparts no value. Power too is illusory, a self-delusion wrapped up in one's self-appreciation and imagined reputation.
Power makes man an island: Prospero on the lonely island, defending his muck and taking revenge and enslaving his adoptive son, for the sake of maintaining his hocuspocus Power. Family, friends, love and attitude triumph.
It is a success to view the world as it is, to love it for what it is, not to bend it, to paint it over with your illusions, sweep fears under rugs, and bolster up pride to disguise your insecurities. Success in life is not what you had hoped your life would look like, but what you life does look like. It is not re-making yourself, but discovering yourself in a world which tries always to mask you.

  Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

I am done with this book. I have only read 32% of it and I get the picture. Jimmy, as he so often does, captures my sentiments completely.

Here is the link to the review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

If there weren't so many, MANY books on my To Be Read (TBR) list, I might have persevered. But I'm too old for that particular virtue (or vice, depending on how you look at it).

I have to admit that this book is a let down. It didn't meet my expectations and I don't think I will continue reading it. Maybe someone else will find it more interesting, but for me, it just didn't click.

I'll move on to the next book on my TBR list and hope for a better reading experience.

The Great American Novel? Maybe so, but it is more accurately described as the great novel about the complexity of being human. Although the setting is American, the understanding of the human spirit is applicable everywhere. Our main character is a wanderer who is seeking an identity and a proper place in the world. However, in the process, he loses precisely what he is striving to find. While trying to be independent, he is exploited by others. And when attempting to be genuine, he comes across as insincere.

The Adventures of Augie March peels away the false front to reveal the illusions we all construct to cope. It demonstrates how our intentions are undermined and our identity is lost due to our responses to others, whether those responses are of opposition or compliance. When we look into Augie March's soul, we can resonate with him and see a part of ourselves.

Consider this passage: "with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his own handsome case, can you let yourself limp in weak and feeble…No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently…You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances…And this is what mere humanity always does. It’s made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit others to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make believe…That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and flowers of a version."

The Adventures of Augie March can inspire profound reflection, but it can also be lighthearted and enjoyable. For instance, as a contrast to the above quote, Augie later shouts, "Oh, it’s very tiring to have your own opinions on everything". The text is filled with such levity as one crazy adventure follows another.

Bellow's meandering style gives the novel its vitality; yet, his style can also be challenging with long passages of convoluted thinking and embedded classical allusions. But when faced with linguistic acrobatics, don't give up. Instead, be like Augie, go with the flow, and relish the amazing journey.

The Adventures of Augie March is a novel that holds significant potential to be an outstanding read.

However, due to the author's pretentious, exaggerated, long-winded, overwrought, and verbose writing style, the reading experience is far from enjoyable.

Not only does it bore the reader to death, but after just one or two chapters, the desire to continue vanishes.

The problem lies in the fact that while I don't oppose authors being creative and distinct in their writing style, there must be an actual plot or story.

Otherwise, the "novel" appears as nothing more than a self-indulgent display of the author's attempt to flaunt their cleverness and artistic prowess.

I'm typically a huge enthusiast of bildungsroman or coming-of-age novels, such as Of Human Bondage, David Copperfield, and Tom Jones.

Unfortunately, Augie March is by far the least engaging and most uninteresting novel of this kind that I've ever encountered.

Augie himself is simply not captivating. The author places excessive emphasis on the writing and insufficient attention on the protagonist and the story as a whole.

It starts with the momentum to be something great but then drags as the author persistently tries to showcase unnecessary literary/historical references and over-the-top adjectives.

It's just overwhelming. I truly attempted to take this book seriously, but it was impossible.

Nothing occurs, there's no plot, no characterization, and the writing is simply pretentious and dull.

This novel might be one of the easiest novels you have ever read.

But after almost one hundred and fifty pages,

I found myself very attracted to the novel and was determined to finish it.

The beauty of this novel lies in its characters and its plot.

The novel tells the story of Augie, a young man who grew up in Chicago, had a childhood, and then went through many stages in his life, between good and evil.

The beauty of this novel is the fluctuations of Augie's emotions and personality, and the change of his thoughts over time.

And the variety of characters in the novel is very diverse. The author's ideas about the characters are beautiful and profound.

The novel takes you beyond the limits of emotions and thoughts.

The only drawback is the small font of the book. The novel is almost 600 pages long,

but the font is small. If the font were larger, it might have reached 1000 pages.

However, I recommend this novel.

It is a bit heavy to hold, but it will leave an impression on your heart.

A book that is intense and rich in the great tradition of the initiatory story, with its roots in the great American novels. We think of Melville and Moby Dick, with Ahab's personal and spiritual quest. We think of Steinbeck and his colorful and somewhat borderline characters from Cannery Row. We think of Dos Passos and his portrait of America. And we dive breathlessly into these 900 pages of life.

Told in the form of a fictionalized autobiography, the novel is of a density that could be off-putting but which grabs the reader and drags them into the middle of this organized chaos, this rich Chicago where everything seems possible, from improbable encounters to the madness and disorder of the world. It is a dense and thick novel with many descriptions that can give the impression of a certain slowness, but it is quite the opposite. This novel is in perpetual motion: whether it's Augie, his encounters, his odd jobs, his social status at the moment, everything is constantly advancing. And this book, which could be frozen in endless descriptions, is actually quite the opposite: a world in perpetual evolution...

The style may seem uneven as we go from rather classic descriptions to vivid dialogues, to questions that seem to come out of nowhere as if Augie were taking 5 minutes to reflect on his condition, and then we start again with new descriptions as in a perpetual whirlwind of ideas and twists. I admit that I had a hard time at the beginning feeling concerned by the character of Augie. I really couldn't attach myself to him: too inconsistent for me, too immature in his way of apprehending life, his family... I really struggled through the first 100 pages because, despite really very well-developed and interesting characters, I had the impression of being in a kind of perpetual headlong flight. Going from one job to another, the character of Augie is always in motion as if he were advancing at all costs towards the unknown without taking the time to stop. It is this very strange mixture between the constant movement of the characters and the very descriptive and detailed literary style that destabilized me the most.

"When he told us these stories at the table, he emitted the hope that, in a certain way, greatness would eventually englobe him, since it was already touching him, that he would seduce someone, that he would catch the eye of Insull and that the magnate would hand him his card asking him to come to his office the next morning." In this sentence, we can see quite clearly the classic style and the multitude of actions in progress and to come. Finally, I really liked this novel. I was finally caught up in the wake left by Augie. Little by little, the magic worked and I became attached to this perpetual adolescent, unstable, resourceful, who always aims to move forward. I liked the secondary characters, colorful, who help Augie to grow and become an adult, particularly the women who help him to stop and build himself, contrary to the male characters, whom I found more superficial. Of course, there are longueurs, it's difficult to do otherwise on 900 pages, but finally it allows the reader to stop and slow down the rhythm of the story a little. In summary, I am very happy to have plunged into this intimidating novel that I had wanted to read for a long time.

It is often said that Chicago might currently possess the most dynamic literary community in the entire United States. And if this is indeed the case, it can be attributed in part to the highly popular "One Book One Chicago" (OBOC) program run by the Chicago Public Library (CPL). This is just one of the many aspects that make being a book lover in this city such a delight. Inspired by similar initiatives in smaller towns, the CPL essentially selects an interesting book twice a year, stocks up on a significantly larger number of copies than usual (often achieved through a promotional partnership with a particular publisher), and then endeavors to persuade as many people in the city as possible to read the book within the same thirty-day period. This is accomplished through various means, such as providing an informative study guide, organizing a series of events around the city, establishing discussion groups in each of the 150 branches of the CPL system, encouraging local bookstores to offer the book on sale and create their own front-room displays, and in many cases, even inviting the author to visit the city and participate in a number of events if they are still alive.

I must admit that there is something almost不可思议 and magical about boarding a random el one day with one of these OBOC books and observing ten or fifteen other strangers in the same car who are also reading it. This is one of the things that the various artistic government agencies here excel at, adding a touch of magic to everyone's lives.

This fall's selection is Saul Bellow's 1953 rough-and-tumble masterpiece, "The Adventures of Augie March," one of the first great novels about Chicago ever written. This is especially fitting, as this fall also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of the OBOC program. The CPL is putting a particular energy into this cycle that they often do not with others. In fact, this pick is a great example of another significant benefit that stems from the OBOC program, which is simply learning more about books that were once important but have started to fade into obscurity. As someone without an academic background in literature (I studied photography instead), I have to admit that Bellow was one of the many important writers in history about whom I knew almost nothing before founding CCLaP. And in fact, it seems that he is rapidly disappearing from the cultural radar in general these days. This is a shame, because as I have discovered in the past year (not only from reading this novel but also "Humboldt's Gift" for the CCLaP 100), Bellow was far more important to the 20th-century arts than many of us realize. He was a smart and funny blue-collar intellectual who not only helped define Late Modernism and Postmodernism but was also one of the first Jewish authors in history to gain a global following, paving the way for the post-Holocaust "mainstreaming" of Judaism and eventually leading to Mel Brooks, Philip Roth, and Jerry Seinfeld.

The irony, of course, is that this "most American" of American writers was an immigrant twice removed. A first-generation Ukrainian, his upper-middle-class family was forced to flee in the early 1900s. He grew up in Canada under a mother who could never let go of the losses they had suffered due to their forced relocation. He was a scrounging day laborer who was ironically raised with a fine appreciation for classic literature and philosophical thought. It was only after moving to America, attending college, being drafted into World War Two, and then holding a series of odd jobs in various neighborhoods of Chicago that Bellow first had the idea of combining the high- and low-brow elements of his life into complex works of fiction. After a couple of overly serious and not very popular novels in the late 1940s, it was "Augie" at the dawn of Late Modernism that established the meandering tone and almost absurdist humor that would mark the rest of his extremely long and productive career. (Bellow lived until his nineties, dying just a few years ago. He was still publishing award-winning new fiction into his eighties, won both the Nobel and the Pulitzer at various points in his life, is the only person in history to win the National Book Award three times, and is also the only person in history to be nominated for it six times.)

When I first sat down a few weeks ago to read "Augie" myself, I quickly found myself completely entranced and addicted to the loose, anecdotal, and causally connected style that Bellow establishes right away. This book is just as famous as everything else for being one of the first great odes to the American immigrant experience. It is not a wish-fulfillment morality tale about assimilation and becoming a good little docile citizen (like virtually all stories about immigrants had been before then). Instead, it is a loud, messy celebration of the chaos and shady dealings that marked most immigrants' real experiences. It is a full-armed embrace of the idea that a man can literally define himself in the US using any criteria he wants, as opposed to the pre-ordained class, caste, and serf systems that still existed in many other parts of the world at the time.

This is really the main thing to know about "Augie" before reading it. It does not follow a traditional three-act structure at all. It is a Modernist academic experiment that made its explosive commercial success such a huge surprise to nearly everyone involved. Instead, it is written as if Augie were simply sitting at an older age and reminiscing about his youth, moving organically from story to story without a big beginning, middle, and end to his tale. Instead, Augie lives a life of random starts and stops that is much like ours, albeit much more bizarre and exciting than most of ours will ever be. This autobiographical element was the single most important reason for its initial bestseller status. Tackling the same mesmerizing 1930s Great Depression events as were being examined by actual 1930s Social Realist authors like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren (two of Bellow's co-workers at the Chicago WPA office during the New Deal years), but written twenty years later when a more even-handed look could be taken, "Augie" is full of such derring-do as riding the rails hobo-style, getting involved with bootleggers and gangsters, sneaking around high society under false pretenses, and more. However, it has a kind of rascal/scamp humor that the dour, politically motivated Social Realists of the '30s were never able to bring to their work. It is a textbook example of the "picaresque" novel that both exposes the injustices and hard-scrabble lives that so many Americans were living back then but also gleefully celebrates this life, arguing that it at least made them feel really alive and in charge of their own destinies.

Of course, as mentioned before, do not underestimate how profoundly important this work has been to the development of 20th-century Jewish-American culture as well, and specifically how the sometimes exotic ins and outs of daily Yiddish life have been acknowledged and dealt with by the much larger Christian population around these people since the end of World War Two. As regular readers know, this is an endlessly interesting subject to me, and I have dealt with it in much more detail in my essays on Philip Roth's "Zuckerman" series that I am currently reading. It is important to remember, for example, just how anti-Semitic the US in general was before the rise of Nazism (as was the rest of the world), and how it was the shocking events of the Holocaust that first began to change millions of Americans' attitudes towards Jews for the first time. The easing of discrimination that many weary post-war Jews wanted to encourage by never reminding Christian-Americans of their Jewishness again made it a scandal when someone like Bellow delved so matter-of-factly into it in a national bestseller like "Augie." He not only acknowledged the strange-sounding Yiddish parts of his culture but also dared to admit that the Jewish community sometimes sees dysfunction, dark humor over its own foibles, and yes, sometimes even voluntary reinforcements of lazy Jewish stereotypes. Many assimilation-oriented, Holocaust-surviving Jews did not like Bellow at all for doing this. But for people like Roth, Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon, who were all in their teens and twenties when "Augie" first came out, it showed them that it was possible to address the details of their Jewish lives with candor, humor, and self-deprecation, and that it was even possible to win over Gentile audiences with such work, without the usual Shylockian "they're laughing AT you, not WITH you" worries of pre-war Jews. And thus, a novel like "Augie" in the '50s begat something like Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" in the '60s, which begat "Annie Hall" in the '70s, and all eventually led to a sitcom in the '90s about seder, Hanukkah, the Catskills, and rye loaves becoming one of the most beloved artistic projects in American history.

"The Adventures of Augie March" is all of these things and more. For example, it is also a meditation on extended families, additions and losses to such families, truth, beauty, and all kinds of other deep subjects. It is a shame that Bellow's reputation is starting to wane a bit among the general population, because after reading him, it is easy to see why so many people consider him one of the top three influential writers of the entire 20th century. And as I said, the CPL's embrace and promotion of Bellow is just one of the things that makes it so great to be both a writer and a heavy reader in Chicago in the 2000s, and why I would be willing to compare this city's literary community against almost any other in the world and bet that ours will at least match it if not come out on top. I will be attending many of the related events taking place this month for this book's promotion and writing up little field reports for the blog. But for now, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of this remarkable novel and give it a read yourself. And of course, I congratulate the Chicago Public Library for ten fantastic years of bringing the city's book lovers together in the unique and powerful way they have.

The Adventures of Augie March was once a truly remarkable novel, but unfortunately, its once-shining quality seems to be gradually eroding away.

At the conclusion of World War II, a remarkable wave of outstanding Jewish writers emerged in America. This group encompassed names such as Herman Wouk, Leon Uris, Isaac Asimov, Ayn Rand, Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and finally, Saul Bellow, the recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature. These authors vividly depicted an America that was predominantly urban rather than rural and had moved beyond being solely Anglo-Protestant. Among the works they created, none had as much energy or dazzle as The Adventures of Augie March.

Today, however, Augie March presents a rather different picture. It is a novel consisting of 536 pages that, despite being brilliantly crafted in many respects, are together tediously long. There are an overwhelming number of characters, which can be quite confusing. The sequence of events seems almost mind-numbing, and there is a distinct lack of a clear plot. In essence, the book is little more than a collection of atmosphere. If you are already well-versed in the era, then reading this novel might offer you some fine moments. However, if you are not, I would highly suggest that you start to familiarize yourself with the Jewish tradition in American literature by reading other works such as Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Good-bye Columbus by Philip Roth, and Howl by Allen Ginsburg.

These books provide a more accessible and engaging introduction to this rich and diverse literary tradition.