Ravelstein - Softcover

Bellow, Saul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0670893722 ISBN 13: 9780670893720

Publisher: Viking, 2000

Synopsis

In time for the centennial of his birth, the Nobel Prize winner's moving final novel

Deeply insightful, Saul Bellow's moving last novel is a journey through love and memory, an elegy to friendship, and a poignant meditation on death. Told in memoir form, it follows two university professors, one of whom is succumbing to AIDS, as they share thoughts on philosophy and history, loves and friends, mortality and art.

This Penguin Classics edition commemorates the fifteenth anniversary of Viking's first publication of Ravelstein. Featuring a new introduction by Gary Shteyngart, it rounds out the entirety of Bellow's major works in Penguin Classics black spine.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About this title

Review:

With his latest novel Ravelstein, Saul Bellow proves that even in his ninth decade, he can pin a character to the page more vividly, and more permanently, than just about anybody on the planet. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Bellow confined himself to shorter fictions. Not that this old master ever dabbled in minimalism: his novella The Actual was bursting at the seams with wit, plot and the intellectual equivalent of high fibre. Still, Bellow's readers wondered if he would ever pull another full-sized novel from his hat. Well, he has.

Character is very much the issue in Ravelstein, whose eponymous subject is a thinly disguised version of Bellow's boon companion, the late Allan Bloom. Like Bloom, Abe Ravelstein has spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, fighting a rearguard action against the creeping boobism and vulgarity of American life. What's more, he's written a surprise bestseller (a ringer, of course, for The Closing of the American Mind), which has made him into a millionaire. And finally, he's dying--has died from an AIDS-related illness, in fact, six years before the opening of the novel. What we're reading, then, is a faux-memoir by his best friend and anointed Boswell, a Bellovian body-double named Chick:

Ravelstein was willing to lay it all out for me. Now why did he bother to tell me such things, this large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio? Because it very urgently needed to be said. He was HIV-positive, he was dying of complications from it. Weakened, he became the host of an endless list of infections. Still, he insisted on telling me over and over again what love was--the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures.

Ravelstein is a little thin in the plot department--or more accurately, it has an anti-plot, that consists of Chick's inability to write his memoir. But seldom has a case of writer's block been so supremely productive. The narrator dredges up anecdote after anecdote about his subject, assembling a composite portrait: "In approaching a man like Ravelstein, a piecemeal method is perhaps best." We see this very worldly philosopher teaching, kvetching, eating, drinking and dying, the last in melancholic increments. His death, and Chick's own brush with what Henry James called "the distinguished thing," give much of the novel a kind of black-crepe coloration. But fortunately, Bellow shares Ravelstein's "Nietzschean view, favourable to comedy and bandstands," and there can't be many eulogies as funny as this one.

As always, the author is lavish with physical detail, bringing not only his star but a large gallery of minor players to rude and resounding life ("Rahkmiel was a non-benevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed"). His sympathies are also stretched in some interesting directions by his homosexual protagonist. Bellow hasn't, to be sure, transformed himself into an affirmative-action novelist. But his famously capacious view of human nature has been enriched by this additional wrinkle: "In art you become familiar with due process. You can't simply write people off or send them to hell." A world-class portrait, a piercing intimation of mortality, Ravelstein is truly that other distinguished thing: a great novel. --James Marcus

Review:

The magic still sparks and flashes on the page...Masterful in its thoroughness and intricacy...the prose rings as clearly as a meditation bell. Roland Merullo, The Philadelphia Inquirer (front-page review)

This book rings with laughter and joy....Ravelstein is an extraordinary character...it is hard not to feel privileged at being allowed a glimpse into a human connection as intimate and rewarding as this one. Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World (front-page review)

"With his new novel, Saul Bellow proves that he still dominates. . . . Ravelstein is full of heart and wisdom, and I want to praise it without a pinch of qualification. Sven Birkerts, Esquire

A cause for celebration...Bellow hugs the modern world hard in this novel...Ravelstein is rich, deep, and unnervingly entertaining. Jonathan Wilson, The New York Times Book Review (front-page review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0670893722
• ISBN 13: 9780670893720
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240