Ravelstein

Rating:
Summary: Good sketch of a very interesting person
Review: When I first read "Ravelstein", as a short story in The New Yorker, I couldn't wait for more, having found the thoughts and ideas of Ravelstein, the professor and part central character of the novel, insightful and very original. In fact they are not often Ravelstein's; they are borrowed from classical Greek philosophy, but the way in which he expresses and uses them to reveal the spiritual perils that comtemporary western civilization faces is revealing.

The problem with the book is that there are only so many ideas that Ravelstein (based on the late philosopher Alan Bloom) has to offer, or that Chick (Saul Bellow himself, of course) remembers. So that nearly the entire latter half of the book hardly deals with Ravelstein; it focuses on Bellow's personal troubles, which at first have to do with his latest exwife, then with his health.

In fact, while the first part of the book is written in a nice, easy going way that goes from quotation to episode to funny sketch (those of Rakhmiel Kogon (supposedly the real-life sociologist Edward Shills) would stand up to the best caricatures of I. B. Singer, whose work Bellow has translated), the last often feels like a series of journal entries and tributes to Bellow's present wife (which in the book is Rosamund). Though the tributes read like something transcribed from a polite everyday conversation, some of the journal entries involve very good travel writing (about the Caribbean).

The tributes to Rosamund are baffling. If the book is an elegy to his old friend, why does Bellow frequently throw in praise for his current wife? Is he in some way pointing to Ravelstein's high regard for 'real' love by noting the love his wife feels for him? Or is he just filling in more pseudo-autobiographical detail for a book that feels quite short?

But the sketch at the end of the book reminds you that for all its faults, Bellow's book renders a very convincing and entertaining potrait of a complex and very deep character, rounding him out without being too detailed.

Rating:
Summary: Great Writing Put to Poor Use
Review: This book is probably the last word from one of the century's better writers, which is unfortunate. Bellow could have done much better than this. I am not the one to be making speculations, since Bellow is not one of my favorite authors, but I wonder if Ravelstein is supposed to be a portrait of his good friend, Alan Bloom, the "quintessential American professor of politics," with an admixture of fiction of course. The book is long and dry, but contains many great one-liners, as well as a description of Bellow's personal epistemology - or the "metaphysical lenses he was born with." Do yourself a favor. Don't buy this book. Just visit your local book store and turn to page 95 of the paper back edition. From there, scroll down to the second full paragraph, where it reads "My feeling was that you couldn't be known completely unless you found a way to communicate certain 'incommunicables' - your private metaphysics." Read the following three pages and you've got Bellow's entire metaphysics of raw perception as well as the only good section of the book. There, I just saved you ten bucks and a lot of time. Now do me a favor. Write a review that will save me some time.

Rating:
Summary: Simply As A Book
Review: Other than this novel I have read only the recent collection of stories by Mr. Bellow. After reading many other reviews I felt as though if one were not aware of all the parallels of fact and metaphor that this book contains, a person would feel left out of the circle. I hope no one feels this way for even though I read this as a stand alone work without detailed knowledge of the author, his real life friends and their philosophical tilts, the book is a great piece of writing. Saul Bellow is considered one of the great writers on most people's list of favorites, so while knowing all the background may make the book a richer experience; on its own it stands beautifully.

This memoir about a writer who cannot write a memoir is full of philosophy, condemnation of anything other than the elevated thoughts of the day, and centers on a character who you will loathe, struggle to empathize with, or perhaps even like. Abe Ravelstein is a man who has made the ends of his life meet by constantly borrowing from one Peter to pay another Paul. When he does comes into substantial funds whatever joy the money gives him is limited as he is terminally ill.

There are a few ways a person can use their wealth especially when they know their time is severely limited. Abe becomes a modern day Bacchus; everything he does is to excess. And everyone around him either sits at his knee, loathes him, or manipulates him into a demonstrable token of his affection, like a 75,000 BMW. The exception is of course the would be biographer who sees all of his friends excess and stands by him until the end. This does not stop him from occasionally describing behavior that goes beyond the extravagant to become plain ugly. In Paris he will spend 4,500 dollars on a new sport coat walk to the nearest café and proceed to dribble coffee down the front. He barely notices and when he does is unmoved.

Whether this is your first book by Mr. Bellow or not, have no fear. The book is wonderful stuff compared to much of what is on offer even is aficionados of his work may not find it his best.

Rating:
Summary: a Boswell unequal to his Johnson
Review: Saul Bellow's affectionate roman a clef about the renowned professor Allan Bloom, author of the surprise bestseller The Closing of the
American Mind : How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987) (Allan Bloom
1930-1992), stirred up quite a ruckus, because it revealed to the public (it was apparently well known to his friends, students, and
colleagues) that Bloom was a homosexual who had died of AIDs, not liver failure has had been pronounced the cause of death. Yet in the
novel, Bloom (Abe Ravelstein) specifically requires of Bellow (Chick) that he write a memoir of him when he is gone and since Ravelstein
is honest to a fault, especially with his friends, it's hard to imagine that Bloom would have objected to Bellow merely being truthful. More
importantly, Bloom's homosexuality--well, really the early and unnecessary death that his homosexuality caused, ''destroyed by his reckless
sex habits", is how Chick puts it--is the mystery that lies at the core of the book. There would be no tension to the book without it and
without our expectation that Bellow will eventually unravel the mystery, and the ultimate failure of the book is that he never does, perhaps
can not.

The Ravelstein who emerges in these pages is a fascinating figure : a physically large man; a mesmerizing pedagogue; a brilliant
conversationalist; mentor to many powerful political and academic players; and, like Bellow's character Henderson, The Rain King, he is a
creature of wants, a man of enormous appetite for luxury.

He took you from antiquity to the Enlightenment, and then-by way of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau onward to Nietzsche,
Heidegger-to the present moment, to corporate, high-tech America, its culture and its entertainments, its press, its educational system, its
think tanks, its politics. He gave you a picture of this mass democracy and its characteristic-woeful-human product. In his classroom,
and the lectures were always packed, he coughed, stammered, he smoked, bawled, laughed, he brought his students to their feet and
debated, provoked them to single combat, examined, hammered them. He didn't ask, "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious
the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?"

His conversations with Chick are much the best thing in the book, which loses steam whenever Ravelstein is not on scene. The two share a
marvelous friendship, engaging each other on an elevated intellectual plane, much as Bloom described in his posthumous book, Love &
Friendship, a plane upon which Ravelstein manifestly does not meet his soap opera addicted lover. As the novel ends, Chick says, "You
don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death." The reader is likely to agree.

What are we to make then of this man who was so in love with life, who rejected the idea of eternity and so had nothing to hold on to but
life and thought and friendship, yet who in his personal behavior chose a self-destructive course, sacrificing all three to mere pleasures of the
flesh? Bloom became famous, and quite rich, by telling us that American education, indeed the American mind, was being diminished by
the failure to study and engage with the great philosophers of the Western tradition. The book made him a hero to conservatives and
anathema to the Left. But what did he himself believe; what was his personal philosophy, or was his philosophy just that it was good to
study philosophy?

Here Bellow gives us a clue to the problem :

Though I was his senior by some years he saw himself as my teacher. Well, that was his trade--he was an educator. He never presented
himself as a philosopher--professors of philosophy were not philosophers. He had had a philosophical training and had learned how a
philosophical life should be lived. That was what philosophy was about, and this was why one read Plato. If he had to choose between
Athens and Jerusalem, among us the two main sources of higher life, he chose Athens, while full of respect for Jerusalem. But in his last
days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not the Greeks.

Yes, in the midst of one's life it may seem sufficient to think about all the big ideas, but shouldn't one also choose from among them and
create a moral structure for one's life? As Ravelstein lies dying he does focus on the fact of his own Jewishness, as if, finally brought to the
brink of the void, he suddenly realizes the importance of the ethical life too. But Bellow does not explore this any further. Instead, after
Ravelstein's death he turns to his own near death experience, after eating some bad fish, and his struggle to write the book.

Throughout the book Ravelstein and Chick discuss Chick's lack of perception. At one point Chick says :

I do shut off my receptors sometimes and decide, somehow, not to see what there is to be seen.

The reader can't help wishing that Bellow had seen what was there to see. It might have transformed a decent but minor book into an
excellent and important one, one that would explain how this exceptional man reconciled his atheism and his licentiousness with the
conservative impulse. That it fails utterly in this task makes it a great disappointment.

GRADE : C

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable Satire of Grotesque American Character
Review: Bellow has a lot of satiric fun with his character Ravelstein, a boorish professor who has made a mint with a book massaging the prejudices of the American middle classes, then uses his new-found wealth in crassly (and very funny) conspicuous ways - expensive suits and cars, brand names always on his lips, an expensive BMW for his no-brain Singapore toy-boy - Ravelstein is the kind of American that gets labelled "ugly" in Europe - all of which is very good fun and entertaining.

The only problem with this book is that, while Bellows mocks this coarse buffoon (and mocks him well), we know from other Bellow novels that the author himself likes a bit of name-dropping, too; perhaps that should make it all the more lovable but Bellow's wit is a powerful weapon and it's a shame to have to think of his own self-indulgences in these areas in other novels like Humboldt's Gift (where a great 200-pager was ruined by a hundred extra pages of "look how much I've learned from books, ma!" style writing). I missed once again some of the clean, tight writing and scrupulous lack of self-indulgence that Bellow displays in Seize the Day, Dangling Man and The Victim. Though not as padded as some of his taught-in-the-classroom "masterpieces" (there is none of that bizarre, Chariots of the gods-school of philosophizing here, either, that marred Herzog), this book, prose-wise, is (sadly) the work of an elderly writer.

Nonetheless the satire is first-rate. And who really cares if it's about Alan Bloom or not?

Rating:
Summary: Now I know
Review: Now I know why Saul Bellow is considerd one of the best writers of our time. Ravelstien was my first Bellow read and I loved it. Now I want to read all his work.

Rating:
Summary: THE DEATH OF A STRAUSSIAN
Review: As a novelist with my debut work in its initial release, I am amazed at the success, commercial and critical, of Saul Bellow's RAVELSTEIN. I graduated from Claremont McKenna College at a time when the Straussians were battling for their intellectual position that great thinkers must be understood as they understood themselves. They argued for absolute standards and the importance of great truths in the traditions of Western Civilization. Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow's good friend and fellow scholar at the University of Chicago, served as the basis for the novel's central character, Abe Ravelstein. Bloom was one of the leaders of the Straussian Movement, and Claremont McKenna College was where the Straussians held their California foothold. We were all required to read Bloom's books and hear him speak every time he was in town. I am fascinated how this purely intellectual figure has been transformed by his pal Saul Bellow into the complex fictional character who is the title character of this novel. This book is fascinating to me for largely personal reasons dealing with my undergraduate education. It is also a fine novel, one of the best Bellow has written in recent years. I am amazed at the huge popularity of this book among the general public. I doubt if any contemporary author other than America's greatest living literary giant, Saul Bellow, could have accomplished such an achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Left me cold
Review: Perhaps because I thought I was reading a novel and not a thinly disguised biography of someone Bellow knew (and whom I do not), Ravelstein left me cold. Bellow has always been a favorite of mine, and I picked up this book with great anticipation, read it, and put it down with great disappointment. (Maybe I missed something, but what WAS all that rambling off at the end about Chick's fish poisoning?).

I'll stick with Henderson the Rain King and Humboldt's Gift, thank you.

Rating:
Summary: An unexpected present
Review: Some people did not expected Bellow to produce yet another book at his age. But he gave us this compact, universal and solid book that reflects a brilliant mind providing views on all essential matters of one's existence. To a certain extent a more Continental-European than American discourse, this last present from Bellow is a must to be read now and take notes, and to be read once again in old age and compare notes.

Rating:
Summary: A moving story of physical as well as material aesthetics
Review: Saul Bellow might not have written a biography that entirely encapsulates all sides of Alan Bloom, the man - nor of Alan Bloom, the professor (Saul Bellow was asked by Alan Bloom to write about him after his death - Saul Bellow = Chick. Alan Bloom = Ravelstein). What he has created, though, is a heartgripping account of how powerful the intellectual instinct can be in man. Firstly,he portraits a man who is on the brink of death but keeps on pulling through because of the immense mental machinery that simply must keep on running full steem in his head. But Bellow doesn't glorify or idealize, he treats Ravelstein/Bloom like a man in full - showing us that insanity and genious walk hand in hand.

Saul Bellow describes the interrelations between different sorts of intellectuals - but he also does a lot else. He touches seriously, although at times from odd angles, upon actual themes of interest - f.x interweaving Platos philosophy and some views on the motives of John Maynard Keynes.

One musn't expect a masterpiece of great dimensions. But one can expect a story that tells us a bit about Alan Bloom but more about the man set out to tell his story. It cannot be dismissed that when reading this book written by a man beyond the age of 80 you are spending time with a well studied fellow - Young at mind, old and wise - That's Saul Bellow. (excuse the metre)