Ravelstein | 
 enlarge | Author: Saul Bellow
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  115 reviews
Sales Rank: 1156173
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio Cassette
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 4
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 4.4 x 2.1
ISBN: 1565114280
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9781565114289
ASIN: 1565114280
Publication Date: August 6, 2000
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Amazon.com
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Saul Bellow confined himself to shorter fictions. Not that this old master ever dabbled in minimalism: novellas such as The Actual and The Bellarosa Connection are bursting at the seams with wit, plot, and the intellectual equivalent of high fiber. Still, Bellow's readers wondered if he would ever pull another full-sized novel from his hat. With Ravelstein, the author has done just that--and he 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. 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 of AIDS, 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, which 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, favorable 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
Book Description
Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.
Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow's new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.
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 Tender and Riveting June 11, 2008
I remember seeing books by Saul Bellow carried around by people in college but I never read any of them before last week. I just finished Ravelstein and am incredibly impressed. Further, I am embarrassed that I never read more from him in the past so I placed Herzog and three other works on my wish list a few minutes ago. I first heard of this gem from a writer who penned an essay celebrating Alan Bloom's masterpiece, The Closing of the American Mind. Of course, Bloom is Ravelstein but so much more. What a character! Bellow's Chick is nearly as interesting, however. While some may object to how much the author reveals about Bloom's personal life, he treats his protagonist with tender empathy and understanding. Ravelstein loved life; indeed, he was larger than life. His zeal and zest inspire and inspired me in particular.
 When Ravelstein dies, so does the book... May 30, 2008
God bless the late Saul Bellow. Eighty-four years old and he wrote a better book than most authors in their "primes" could manage. (It's interesting to note some conspicuous repetitions in the text,--viz. the de trop description of Ravelstein's malformed feet--and to speculate whether Bellow's advanced age bears culpability. It didn't appear--to me at least--to be a stylistic choice, or in any way deliberate.)
It's a good book, not a great book, and it becomes merely mediocre once Ravelstein finally croaks from AIDS. It always remains readable, however, and it offers an inside glimpse into the milieu of higher academe, and the cult of Leo Strauss (a very influential philosopher at the moment).
 Fine, but lacking in depth April 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Saul Bellow's slim eulogy to the late Allen Bloom in novel form has its moments, but it is ultimately a superficial achievement. Banking on the colorful eccentricities of the late professor of philosophy, Bellow is content to retreat from anything resembling a story. I preferred the intricate weavings of philosophy, art, and life that Bellow was able to create and Herzog, whereas in Ravelstein he takes it for granted that the subject is supremely interesting to the reader. Still, I admit that Bellow is quite at home in the elite intellectual circles that Bloom liked to frequent at the University of Chicago, and his pedantic monologues about the ancient Greeks, Rousseau, and Machiavelli have a certain amount of resonance. But this is still a well-written puff piece at the end of the day.
 On philosophical friendship April 5, 2008
Ravelstein is a few things at once. It is Saul Bellow's sweet farewell to his longtime friend Allan Bloom, and would be worth reading for that aspect alone; I've never read such a loving ode to a friend, nor such an erudite ode to the virtues of friendship itself. It is a continuing exploration of some of the ideas about modern life from Bellow's earlier books. It may well be a look, a la Philip Roth, at the boundary between the artist and his narrator, though I'm not sure, and it's not at all clear that it matters here as much as it matters in a Roth novel.
Ravelstein's namesake, Abe Ravelstein, is a very thinly veiled Allan Bloom. He's just written a very important, very popular book (a thinly veiled Closing of the American Mind) that has made him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Ravelstein is a disciple of a certain Felix Davarr, who's a thinly veiled Leo Strauss (Leo for lion, Felix for cat; not sure about Strauss and Davarr). In fact the thin veiling of everything in this book may well be a hat tip to Strauss, who argued that the true meaning of many philosophical texts is hidden in plain sight, and that only initiates to the true way of reading the text could ever hope to piece it together.
In at least a couple books -- Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet -- Bellow has given us a sad but ultimately redemptive picture of the United States: modern life is confused, people define themselves by their possessions, and we're flooded with a million contradictory ideas that bring us no real understanding of the world. (The structure of society is given by the structure of production! No wait: society's problems are caused by sexual repression! No wait: society's problems will be fixed when unfettered capitalism allows individual talents to bloom! No wait...!) We're rootless consumers of ideas. After a lifetime as a professor of philosophy, Moses Herzog's life falls apart, and the best he can do to put some ground beneath his feet is to send letter upon letter to philosophers, living or dead. The irony of Herzog's life is that his studies of philosophy, which were supposed to bring some order to the world, have not helped him at all when push came to shove.
Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow agree on this. Indeed, Bellow wrote the introduction to at least one edition of The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom's critique of the university basically ran as follows: the university should be a monastery in which those rare souls capable of understanding true philosophy lived among their brethren. Since World War II at least, the American university has moved away from that priesthood; it has brought all the problems and confusion of the outer world within its walls. Where the outer world has given up trying to find any order in things, so the university has replaced thought with technology. Where the outer world venerates consumerism, so the university has invented the "business degree." And so forth.
This can sound curmudgeonly rather than scholarly, and indeed that's how The Closing of the American Mind sounded to me when I read it a few years back. With a few more books under my belt since then, Bloom sounds like Ruskin without the poetry. Having finished Ravelstein, though, I think I may need to go reread Bloom. Abe Ravelstein may not have experienced a dark day in his life. When he watches the world, he doesn't see confusion; he sees the underlying order. When Ravelstein watches the narrator fall in love with one of Ravelstein's students (again, a thin veiling of Bellow's own life, in which his fifth wife [!] was a Bloom devotee), he sees it through Plato's Symposium. Ravelstein's life is one of pure joy and deep, continuous thought. His relationship with the narrator is one of constant, unflinching honesty. He lives the life of the philosopher.
Ravelstein spends most of the book living the life of the philosopher from a hospital bed. He is dying of AIDS. He urges the narrator to write a biography of him; this book is that biography, tinged with Bellow's own thoughts on sex and death, and thick with notes on the difficulty of writing about such a brilliant man.
Both Bellow and Philip Roth have emphasized that the role of the writer is opposite to that of the philosopher or the political leader. The philosopher and the ideologue deal in abstractions; they cannot focus on the details. The novelist lives for the details; that's what the novel is. In Bellow's Nobel lecture, he talks about the novelist's role in combating the modern malaise: we're swallowed up by massive institutions, and we've become little more than numbers in a larger system. Some would say that this requires us to rethink who we are, and in particular abandon the novel: there are no characters anymore, they'd say, only statistical markers on a hard drive somewhere. How can the novel survive, they say, if it's based on an outmoded view of the world we live in? Bellow insists to the contrary that if we're going to save ourselves from the modern world, we have to do so by honoring those details more, by respecting characters more. Bellow's own novels are testaments to that principle: amidst the whirlwind of modern urban life, his characters cannot escape the souls that they came in with. The characters of his characters will reveal themselves no matter what.
That's why Ravelstein is such an interesting book, and Abe Ravelstein himself is such an interesting character. The book is a touching biography of Ravelstein, but it's more about the friendship between Bellow and Bloom. It's about the constant tension between the demands of the writer and those of the philosopher, and how those demands can exist peacefully side by side in the friendship of these two brilliant men. I think the message is that philosophy and the grubby details of existence must be kept in their proper balance. (I feel obliged here to quote from Doctor Zhivago : "I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish.")
I found Ravelstein really touching. Bellow obviously loved Bloom dearly, and missed him a great deal after he'd parted. The last sentence in the book is "You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death." I feel the same way about Bellow.
Slight Work of Great Writer October 15, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you love Bellow as I do, this is both thrilling and disappointing. Thrilling, because it is Bellow. One is reminded throughout of his voice, his humor, his zest for life, his oddball modesty, his thrilling observations. Disappointing, because this is not a great work of fiction, but rather a disguised biography of a friend, lovingly remembered. Bellow succeeds partially in laying bare his subject, but his strategy of avoiding Ravelstein/Bloom's ideas creates a barrier to the sort of breakthrough work one might have hoped for. It is fun to hear again and again about Ravelstein's preferences in music, crystal, ties, and the rest, but in the end this material goes nowhere. Bellow is not about to criticize his beloved friend, but without insight, irony, or both, these descriptive passages become shallow observations. Ravelstein's ideas, had Bellow tried to do something with them, would have added to the portrait by showing the man's value to civilization. Simply stating his greatness is not enough. This is especially true when we take into consideration the fact of Ravelstein/Bloom's enormous influence, which Bellow makes reference to on numerous occasions. The gossipy, rude, sloppy, effete snob portrayed here does not seem to be a great loss at all.
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