This was my first (and thus far, only) Bellow novel, and I can't say I'm racing to pick up another. I had very high expectations, which were not met. Although passages of this book are quite beautiful and sensitive (most of which concern his wife and her dying mother) I was overwhelmed by how Bellow uses the main character as a megaphone through which to pontificate on contemporary race relations. He dramatizes nothing and leaves nothing for the reader to do. The setting, side by side, of a racially-inspired murder in Chicago and the death of an old woman in a communist country is certainly interesting, but way too subtle for me, especially in light of how heavy-handed Bellow is in other parts of the narrative. Still, I read this novel over two years ago and am still thinking of it; parts of it come back to me like a sepia-toned postcard, very fleeting.

The third world and Chicago have a lot in common. Not just the inner city Chicago or America but our innermost being.This is what Mr. Bellow takes on in a sometimes remarkable way.

The sometimes similar worlds of dispare and crime in Eastern Europe and Chicago meet on the soul's battle field, fighting to give people meaning to their lives.

In the end what's left? The cold dark universe or the heaven where God dwell's and ulitimately must come and save us.

Mr. Bellow puts a lot on your mind and not always perfect prose, he could have left the monkey and typwriter line out of this book, but a very enjoyable read.

Of course, there's no telling what the reception of a Nobel Prize can actually do to how a prizewinner relates to his work or material. Does he simply keep up the good work and satisfy himself with more of the same? Or does he feel compelled to stretch out a little, tackle tougher terrain, become a world spokesman, a kind of Bob Geldof of the academic world? Or does he simply pull up the stakes altogether and move to, say, Parnassus? While critics have expressed mild dissatisfaction with the post facto work of one of those Nobel winners, Saul Bellow, mainly because what some believe to be an unecessary discursiveness has crept into his later novels, Bellow's previous work is often so tongue-in-cheek and humorously numinous that it is easy to dismiss the dismissers as perhaps having read "The Dean's December" too superficially. Bellow's first novel after the Nobel watermark, in many ways, then, seems to betray the author's early attempts to keep up with the reputation he has gained: Big subjects, high blown philosophy, windy passages. But what else would you expect from Bellow, a man who hails from Chicago, the Windy City?

It's bleak and apocalyptic in the Romania where Albert Corde, a prominent Chicago university dean begins his story. The depths of an East European winter made even colder by the moribund Communist dictatorship whose presence is felt everywhere seems nearly as leaden as the sallow plum brandy he sips as if it were contraband in the decaying parlor of his wife's ailing mother, Valeria. As the old woman, once a favored Communist official, now a sweetheart of an aging underground of pale faces and flowery dresses, slips into the slow throes of an early death, Corde is emotionally consumed, not with the potent world into which he has been pulled, but with another one: Chicago, a city he seriously believes is in uproar over two scathing rants against its crime-ridden ghettoes he'd recently published in Harper's.

But, Bellow cunningly implies, such is the world of the American acadamy. A few cross words, perhaps bent towards the embarrassment of a number of pig-eyed public figures, and the next thing you know, you're a disgrace, a schmuck, a putz, the last guy anybody'd ever want to invite over for cocktails ever again. Not surprisingly, this queasy underbelly of the dissociative hyper-reality of America's upper classes is part of the price of our American comfort. It's a price of not really wanting to look, or of not quite knowing how, the cost of having willfully pulled away in both disgust and inadequacy from the often invisible reality of the downtrodden, tucked out of sight as they are in every major American city. Of course, the Romanian government has several quite neat solutions to the problems of public insolence. While Valeria's position as a political pentitent isn't beyond Corde's understanding, however, he seems beyond all that just the same.

The bottom line? Corde's protected public role as the Dean of the School of Journalism has done nothing to protect him. He's worried about his job. He sticks out like a burn victim in the faculty lounge. He's worried about who he is, who he might become. Worried most of all about what the papers are saying, especially in light of the fact he's also managed to have gotten both himself and the university ensnared in a legal fracas involving a pimp, a whore, a murdered college student and his quasi-Marxist nephew, Mason--a typically Bellowish twist as the sublime and the vulgar mingle and become the ludicrous.

Struggle as he might to find a way to meet the world in terms that actually make sense, Corde seems to know he's going to fail, and perhaps even become the embodiment of how out-of-touch public debate is from realities that are pressing in from every side. For him, poverty in a tenement, with its screaming, its dinge, its stench, its hopelessness and frustration are nothing but abstractions. While he might be in a position with enough influence to bring the bad news to the surface, still he's barely aware that the situation is as alien to his ways and means as it is astronomical.

Saul Bellow is famous for railing at Chicago. He's been grilled for it. And doubtless he has first-hand knowledge of how it feels to shake the dust out of the rug when company is in the room. Furthermore, as a literary icon, Bellow more than likely has an intimate understanding of how askew the academic and mundane worlds in America are from one another. Perhaps Bellow just can't help it. He's writing what he knows. And so what if a close examination of our vaunted intellectuals proves they're clowns?

This is the story of the relationships of a young faculty in a midwestern university with his uncle, a professor at the same university, with a sort of an ex-girlfriend, with whom he has a child, and with his parents, who live in Paris (where he grew up).

The first 70 pages or so of this novel are brilliant. Saul Bellow's gift for telling stories is depicted in them in both - plot and structure. He uses the English language and grammar as a musician uses notes to compose a beautiful and flowing piece of music.
Only after the first 70 pages the book becomes boring. The story is dragged and the beautiful usage of English turns into a demonstration of technique that doesn't really serve anything.

The verdict: Read the brilliant first 70 pages and then move to your next book...

An man long devoted to intellectual pursuits comes down from his ivory tower in a final bid for love, but finds himself defenseless in the real world, where people do not understand him but are happy to harness his prestige for their own purposes. Benn Crader is a world famous botanist, but he also is a soft-hearted man, as you will know when you encounter the quotation that includes the book's title. Will the great scientist protect his special intellectual gifts, or will he allow the pressures of his new, very materialistic adopted family to destroy him? It's a great premise for a novel, and Bellow covers many, many of its implications and takes the story to a logical yet surprising ending. Bellow's narrator, Crader's admiring nephew, often takes off on tangents to ruminate on current events, the contemporary intellectual scene and various intellectual pursuits. Some of these tangents seem to fit into the story better than others, and once in a while I got frustrated and found myself paging ahead to see when he would stop ruminating and start telling the darn story again. Yet Bellow's intellectual meanderings include many interesting observations about life, and taken as a whole, they help to build a textured world around the story. "More Die of Heartbreak" is not a literary classic, but it is worth reading.

Saul Bellow was the one author on the syllabus of a college course I took years ago whose work(Herzog, I think) we never got around to. I am sorry it took me so long to get back to him.

The singular impression I got as I read and continued reading was that the story line held together throughout. Most writers have great inspiration and poor execution or great execution and poor inspiration, and the fabric frays. In this magnificent and therapeutic work, however, Bellow displays an admirable/enviable ability to manage the project and keep the reader invested to the very end.

Now back to Herzog.

This is the first book I have ever read by Saul Bellow. What a book it is!! I strongly recommend it on two levels. First Mr. Bellow is a master of the language. His descriptions are so unique. I am afraid to mention them here because I don't want to spoil them for you. I will share one of my many favorite lines from the book. At one point, he describes an old man as having "a head like a blown dandelion." How on earth did he come up with such a terrific description. This book is filled with lines like that.

The book also has a great story. It in fact reminds me of another favorite book "Confederacy of Dunces." This is, in a sense, a more serious look at the same type of character as the main character in "Confederacy of Dunces." Humbolt himself is a provocative character, but then there is the reaction to him by the people around him. It is well worth the read.

I think this is Bellow's materwork. An author who has always searched for evidence of the human soul in contemporary society, the questions Bellow raised in each of the novels leading to this point (Herzog particularly), finally find a resolution in this book, his last novel before winning the Nobel Prize.

This is a story of Charlie Citrine, a sucessful author who finds himself struggling for meaning while confronting the ghosts of memory, particularly in the relationship with his friend, mentor; and, at many points, antagonist, Von Humboldt Fletcher. Curiously, the novel is thrown into action and suspense through Citrine's dealings with a minor gangster, Cantible. The relationship, though, turns out to be one that brings Citrine back to the "here and now." Just as he is on the brink of being lost in transcendental wanderings, Citrine is snapped back to his resposibility by Cantible.

And, from such an unlikely source, the novel begins its reach towards resolution: to be fully human, Citrine must be spiritual but remain part of the world. Meaning and true spirituality come through compassion, empathy, caring. Once Citrine and the reader discover this, the novel reaches a resolution that marked the end of an era in many of Bellow's themes. This novel is simply a must for anyone who has enjoyed any of Bellow's earlier works, as well as for anyone who, like Chalie Citrine, struggle to find a place for the soul, the human spirit, in a world that seems to have forgotten such a thing may exist.

Transcendental. Profound. Scholarly. Challenging. Invigorating. Agile. A literary treasure. Citrine lives and breathes with the perspective of a real writer surging against great existential issues like Walt Whitman's ultimate question. Humboldt is brilliant, pitiful, hilarious and, ultimately, victorious from the grave. The gangster, Cantabile, is Citrine's cosmic foil: the Dionysius of Nietzsche to Citrine's Apollo. This is potentially a life-altering work: it can change your outlook on life and death. Bellow redeems late 20th century American literature with writing so rich it has bestowed upon him a mantle of immortality. He will be long remembered as one of America's most brilliant 20th century writers. This novel confirms Bellow's consistent gift for writing as evidenced by his prolific virtuosity in Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King. What a masterful literary legacy Bellow has left us! Bag the NY Times Best Seller List and Oprah's mind numbing, witless wonders and read Bellow. Hardly anything this substantive is likely to be created hereafter.

"The Adventures of Augie March" is a coming-of-age story about a young man who grows up in a working-class Jewish neighborhood of Chicago in the first half of the 20th century. Augie is intelligent and articulate, but he seems to wander through life passively with no definite goals and not many interests. As the Depression hits, he is forced to postpone his academic pursuits in order to make a living, taking a wide variety of odd jobs, including stealing books, organizing labor unions, and working as a research assistant to an eccentric wealthy man writing a book about wealthy people. Eventually he decides to become a schoolteacher, but even this profession is relatively short-lived. The novel culminates in Augie's discovery that he must align himself with the "axial lines" of his life.

Augie's "adventures" consist mainly of his getting entangled in various affairs of his relatives, friends, girlfriends, and employers. These episodes range dramatically from his nearly getting caught by the police in a stolen car, to his accompaniment of his friend Mimi to an abortionist and her subsequent grave illness (probably a bold thing to write about at the time), to helping his girlfriend Thea train an eagle to hunt lizards in Mexico. (Thea finds, to her frustration, that she can train neither the eagle nor Augie.) This is a bizarre assortment of events, but the depiction of each is strangely realistic and unique.

The narration is masterfully constructed with Bellow's erudite prose and penchant for rich description. Reading this novel is challenging but ultimately rewarding.

This novel is unquestionably one of the great masterpieces of our time.

Saul Bellow paints portraits of characters like Rembrandt. He has a brilliant technique for divulging not only the physical nuances of his characters but also gets deep into the essence of their souls.

He has an astute grasp of motivation and spins a complex tale with an ease that astounds. Even the most unusual twists of fate seem natural and authentic.

Augie is a man "in search of a worthwhile fate." After struggling at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a penniless youth in Chicago, he ultimately discovers that alignment with the "axial lines" of his existence is the secret to human fulfillment.

While his brother is engrossed in chasing after financial enrichment and social esteem, Augie learns through his own striving that such pursuit is "merely clownery hiding tragedy."

Augie is a man dogged in his pursuit of the American dream who has an epiphany that the riches that life has to offer lie in the secrets at the heart's core. If, as Sarte says, life is the search for meaning, then Augie is the inspired champion of this great human quest.

The true test of a great book is that you wish it would never end. Fortunately, Saul Bellow is as prolific as he is brilliant and there is much more to explore.

Bellow is worthy of the characterization of one of America's best living novelists: he is a treasure. His wisdom staggers the imagination.

Don't let this novel pass you by!

Anyone who has ever wondered where life is taking them will appreciate Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March." Bellow takes readers on a colorful journey through Depression-era Chicago, incorporating numerous characters, all of whom are memorable. But the strength of "March" lies in it's message. Simply, "the only possessing is of the moment. If you're able." Augie fails a lot in this book, but Bellow is proud of his protagonist, for it is through these failures that Augie eventually succeeds. It is through these failures that he ultimately gains possession of the moment. This book is a wonderful commentary on human nature and the forces which drive us to succeed. Anyone reading this book will gain a new appreciation for Bellow's interpretation of meaningful success. I can't recommend this book enough.

This review is to refute some of the negative customer reviews. Anyone who is reading only for plot is reading on a very superficial level. I had never read Bellow and didnt know what to expect. After a few pages, I wasnt sure I wanted to continue, but I'm glad I did. I felt this book was, among other things, like opening a time capsule from the late 1960s. I did not at all feel the author was preaching his own views or that the characters were not developed. The author delves deep into the mind of a well-educated man who is a Holocaust survivor, living in New York when the city was decidedly at a low point and confronted with hippie-era social and political attitudes. I don't know if this story is autobiographical, but it is not plotless, dull or stupid. I urge potential readers to ignore those comments.

This was my introduction to Saul Bellow and I probably shouldn't have started with this one, because all the others probably pale in comparsion to this. They have to. Anyone this good would have to be some inhuman writing machine. Wow.

Sammler is a human being like the rest of us tackling questions that we all have given passing thought to at least once in our lives. He may come to a firm conclusion about them, but he gives it his best shot, even as he deals with his family, including his dying nephew.

The best part about this novel are the stream of consciousness narratives that show us the ebb and flow of Sammler's thoughts, where most of his thinking takes place. Here are the best scenes in the novel, and Bellow does it with ease, showing that he is influenced by Joyce but not mastered by him, taking his techinques and refining them to the next level.

Anyone interested in reading about the sixties should try this book, or just anyone who has ever stood and watched something happen and wonder why they didn't do anything, and wonder why. So does Artur Sammler.

Mr. Sammler is a Polish Jew who escaped death at the hands of the Nazis at the cost of sight in one eye.

He is a survivor. He now lives in New York City in the 1960's, supported by his nephew who is but a few years younger.

Sammler, a intellectual with that gentlemanly old world manner, is now trying to come to terms with the culture he sees in NYC at the time, including how most of relatives have taken to it, the Holocaust and WWII in general. And, what the meaning of being a survivor is, both for himself and for the world he now finds himself in.

But just as his physical vision, thanks to the Nazis, is but half and distorted, so is his sight and vision into his soul. (Anyway, that's my metaphorical take on the bad eye.) He is emotionally removed.

As for Bellow's writing, it was great! This was my first Bellow book and I read it only because friends I highly respect so recommended him. I was flabbergasted that the writing was so good. Not at all heavy but yet trenchant in content and to the point. The scene where Sammler gives his talk is classic. His inability to understand the 60's culture and those in it, including his relations, yet having to deal with them, is often simultaneously riotous and deadly serious.

It's easy to see why this book won the National Book Award.

Note: Kosinski's _The Painted Bird_ has a complementary and sometimes similar subject matter. Imo, each books adds greater depth and meaning to the other.

This was the first work I've read by Bellow. Frankly, it was disappointing simply because his fame has so elevated my expectations in the first place. Reading all the formal and informal reviews after finishing the book myself was quite a revelation, too. For example, regarding how Harry finally came to be reunited with Amy, I had come to a very different conclusion from that of the authors of all the major reviews. I fount it quite strange that the reviewers all wrote that Harry got together with Amy through his association with the billionaire, Adletsky. But from page eighty-five, I clearly got the impression that Harry has been in touch with Amy and her family through the years and later recommended her to Adletsky, thus establishing her in the business of interior decorating.

This is just an example of how the relationships among the characters seem underdeveloped and ambiguous to me. I simply failed to perceive any depth of the story. And I agree with one of the reader-reviewers that the ending came as an unpleasant shock to me!

To be sure, the novella has a very distinct voice of its own. And its inventiveness would probably rank it above average on my scale. Maybe it just wasn't the ideal introductory work to appreciate Bellow's genius?

Bellow's protagonist is a staid, somewhat mysterious Asian-looking character who may be based in part on Allan Bloom's travelling companion, described in Bellow's Ravelstein. Morally distanced from the characters with whom he becomes reluctantly involved, the protagonist, during a graveyard scene, risks new love with his highschool sweetheart who has eluded him in a life of successful business. The better-late-than-never involvement of the protagonist by book's may mirror Bellows' own dialectic between the writerly distance needed for objective observation and the deeper involvement in life which renders detached observation both more suspect and more difficult.

"The Actual" is a novella (104 pages long) by distinguished Nobel Prize winning writer Saul Bellow. The story is told in the first person by Harry Trellman, a semiretired Jewish businessman living in Chicago. His life is impacted by his relationships with two key characters: super-rich Sigmund Adletsky, a businessman who recruits Harry to be a sort of consultant, and Amy Wustrin, a divorcee with whom Harry shares a personal history that goes back a long time.

"The Actual" is a quirky look at Jewish life in Chicago. It's a tender, sad, but hopeful story about love, sex, loss, shame, marriage, divorce, death, and Jewishness.

Harry is a curious, but oddly likeable character--he's very much a self-conscious outsider with a secretive side. Bellow surrounds Harry with some colorful supporting characters. Bellow writes with a smooth, engaging prose style and ultimately brings this short tale to a very satisfying conclusion.

For most of this novella, Bellow tells a story that appears to be going nowhere. The narrator, the child of Jewish immigrants who has become ionospherically wealthy selling memory-enhancement techniques, recalls two friends he last saw thirty years ago.

The narrator begins to tell the tale of Harry Fonstein, a Jew smuggled out of Fascist Italy by an underground organization financed by the Broadway producer Billy Rose. Rose refuses to hear Fonstein's thanks, and so his life is overshadowed by a cloud of gratitude he is not allowed to express. Until his wife Sorella decides to avenge Rose's treatment of her husband...

and then the narrator stops telling his story, because he hadn't seen the Fonsteins since. The final third of the novella raises difficult questions about memory and the duty to remember. Has the narrator's eidetic memory replaced actual relationship with the people he remembers? Is that memory even accurate? Has he in fact, failed to fulfill the whole point of memory, despite near-perfect recall of the actual facts?

This story lulls you in with an almost colloquial style and simple plot, and then ends that plot to force you to confront how easy it is to fail duties to friends and cultural identity. After its unsophisticated beginning, the final revelation is very disconcerting.

If Bellow could've just cut his endless surmisings and jokings about how fat one of the characters was by maybe half, I would have greatly enjoyed this story of a spoiled rich American-born WASP-marrying Jewish man, who is the head of a mnemonics group, looking back over his life and realizing what a profound impact two friends of the family really had on him.

I picked this book up at a second hand sale without any real expectations, but feel I have now discovered a classic author for our times. The style is witty and conversational with a biting edge, but moves forwards at a relentless pace. At times the writing seems 'throw-away', but by the next sentence one realises this is only a deliberate trick on Bellow's part. Saul Bellow (what an incredible name for a Jewish author - a Biblical character with a booming voice!) somehow squeezes a gripping narrative into one hundred and two pages. It is laced with dark and morbid humour, but seems to retain an essentially humane quality.

The novella is told in the first person by a rich American Jew who has made his money via a gift for memory. He (I don't think he is ever named) is trying to recall figures from his past who remain elusive and in the process finds out something new about his memory. At the heart of the novella is his own guilt feelings for his success as a first generation American Jew as opposed to the suffereings of the previous generation.

In some ways I regretted that thwe novrella was not longer, but this might have destroyed its fleeting quality. There is something about a short and sharp shock to the system...

The first work I've read by the 1976 Nobel Laureate, and quite disappointing. Characters are self-absorbed and psuedo-intellectual, Bellow spends all his time describing people through conversation rather than through their actions, and nothing much seems to happen: sort of "My Dinner With Clara," except with bad food. The book ultimately is a character study of boring, unsympathetic characters, and a chore for the reader. I'll have to read Bellow's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Humboldt's Gift" before passing judgment on him as an author, but he's lucky that this work is currently out of print.

"A Theft" is kind of a throwaway in Bellow's mighty cannon. Just over one hundred pages long, the book drops you into the High Society world of Clara, who has married four times and is still fond of her first love, who gave her an emerald ring. She gets her strength from this ring, which she loses once, but then recovers, only to have it stolen. Unfortunately, it takes 60 pages to get to the theft, and that first section is little more than monotonous pining over how bad life is for Clara, whom you never feel much for, anyway. But the theft introduces you further to the nanny, Gina, who is a brilliant character. Whenever Bellow concentrates on her deep and interesting problems, the book picks up pace. The final confrontation between Gina and Clara, (Clara believes that Gina's boyfriend, Frederic stole the ring) is so good it makes you wonder just what Bellow could have done if he'd applied this kind of passion to the rest of the book. Not bad, but really for Bellow-collectors only

This novella is so beautifully written, I stopped after about twenty pages and re-read from the start to savor the writing. Bellow is so good at describing everyday people and things while subtly showing the bigger picture simultaneously...

Of these six short stories - written between 1951 and 1968 - it is easy to find things to praise, difficult to find things to criticise. They are, all of them, dense, substantial, well-crafted, (highly?) intellectual, richly satisfying. Why should one want to say anything against them? Well: 'satisfying' - more, perhaps, in the manner of a cross-country run than a raspberry souffle. 'Intellectual': perhaps too intellectual to avoid the charge of monotonousness. All Bellow's characters are assiduously introspective and intensely aware. In consequence, Bellow has perfected a prose style based upon the agglomeration of clauses rather than the sequencing of fully-formed sentences; a type of stream-of-consciousness. This can be as tiring as it is effective. More than this, Bellow's characters are always radically isolated people. They think, think, think and hardly do any interacting with other people (although they often think about doing so). One never hesitates to say that Bellow, in these stories, is telling us the truth about man; one does hesitate to say that he entertains us with that truth.