Details
Synopsis
In Saul Bellow's tragicomic HUMBOLDT'S GIFT (1975), the main character, Charlie Citrine, is a successful writer who is tortured by a feeling of emptiness and by his troubling memories. Through his friend (and sometime mentor), the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer, Citrine learns the importance of the spiritual; and, through the unlikely figure of a gangster named Cantabile, Charlie is reawakened to his responsibilities. The question he grapples with is "how to be a man" in the materialist and antihuman society in which he lives--and then how to find the courage to deal with the answer to that question. The character of Humboldt is heavily based on Delmore Schwartz, who was Bellow's friend. HUMBOLDT'S GIFT was one of Bellow's most successful books, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
| Details | | Series: | Penguin Classics Series |
| Size | | Length: | 487 pages | | Height: | 7.8 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 11.2 oz |
Industry Reviews
"What Bellow is trying to do with the novel form is, of course, immensely ambitious and very difficult. In HERZOG, he brought it off by the letter device and the fine madness of the hero. Charlie Citrine is an interesting study in the competing urges of the flesh and the spirit, money-making and truth-seeking, but he is over-indulged by his creator. The novel would have been vastly improved by ruthless cutting; as it stands it is chiefly memorable for its many comic moments, superb descriptive snapshots of Chicago and brilliant mimicry of lawyers, businessmen and crooks. And that, it must be said, is a lot to be grateful for."
Times Literary Supplement - David Lodge (10/10/1975)
"...HUMBOLDT'S GIFT by Saul Bellow is a very funny novel--a kind of Felix Krull in reverse, with society as the confidence man; a fierce energetic comedy about postwar Jewish intellectuals trying to come to terms with American popular culture....Richard Gilman, in these pages, found the book guilty of lacking an 'ineluctable vision.'....Anatole Broyard in the daily Times seemed to feel that Bellow had insulted the late Delmore Schwartz (the von Humboldt Fleisher of the title)..., had turned his back on high culture, and had mindlessly succumbed to the 'anthroposophical' meditations of his narrator....Vivian Gornick in The Village Voice saw little in the novel but male chauvinist piggishness....Somehow, some way, the outsider has got to be elected, if not captain of the American team, then at least head cheerleader. This passion has never been so hilariously rendered....Everybody who is anybody, including a few grumpy friends of mine, has a walk-on part and a pratfall in HUMBOLDT'S GIFT."
New York Times Book Review - John Leonard (09/07/1975)
"HUMBOLDT'S GIFT is far and away the screwiest of the euphoric going-every-which-way out-and-out comic novels, the books that materialize at the very tip-top of the Bellovian mood swing....HUMBOLDT is...the most brazen of the comedies, looper and more carnivalesque than the others, Bellow's only joyously open libidinous book and, rightly, the most recklessly crossbred fusion of disparate strains...."
New Yorker - Philip Roth (10/09/2000)
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