Ravelstein (German Edition)

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The Biographer's December

Ravelstein, the eagerly anticipated new novel from Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, presents an interesting series of dilemmas to the reader. Part fiction, part biography, part autobiography, Ravelstein repeatedly circles around questions of writerly priority, asking whether the author's primary responsibility is to his own life, the life of his subject, or his imagination. Each possibility hides its own pitfalls. The novelist may become more absorbed in his creations than in his own life. The autobiographer runs the risk of self-absorption, of solipsism. The biographer, chronicling another man's life, is doomed to playing second fiddle in his own, at least until the task is done. Discussing his gargantuan biography of Bellow, a project ten years in the making that will be published in the fall of 2000, James Atlas has written:

Unlike the novelist, who invents (supposedly) his characters, or the historian, who grapples with a populous cast, the biographer enters into a curious intimacy with the person being written about, a relationship charged with ambivalence, resentment, love, dependency, and all the myriad other emotions that crowd in whenever we allow ourselves to become intimate with another. That the biographer doesn't actually live with, or in many instances even know, his subject; that the relationship may be involuntary (an unauthorized biography); that it's by its very nature unequal, one person focusing attention on another with no hope of reciprocity, in no way diminishes the intensity of the experience.

In the early pages of Ravelstein, Chick, the transparently Bellow-like narrator, meditates on this experience, this interconnection of author and subject. Having been asked by his good friend Abe Ravelstein to write his biography, Chick seems decidedly uneasy about the task ahead. "Ravelstein's legacy to me was a subject," he tells us. "He thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one. But what such a legacy signified was that he would die before me. If I were to predecease him he would certainly not write a memoir of me." Chick's work throughout Ravelstein is thus two-fold: doing justice to the life of his friend, on the one hand, while doing justice to his own, as well.

The connections of this novel's characters to the dramatis personae of Bellow's own life are too open to avoid mentioning. Chick's portrait of his ex-wife Vela, a brilliant Romanian physicist, is an at times scathing attack on Bellow's estranged fourth wife, Alexandra, a Romanian mathematician. Chick's new wife, Rosamund, a former student of Ravelstein's, bears much in common with Bellow's fifth wife and former student, Janis Freedman. But the largest subject of the novel—and the largest of its real-world connections—is Ravelstein himself. Bellow's portrait of Abe Ravelstein is based on the life of his good friend Allan Bloom, the conservative political philosopher and author of The Closing of the American Mind, who died in 1992 of complications from AIDS. Bellow, through Chick, represents Bloom, through Ravelstein, as a brilliant, eccentric, larger-than-life thinker, a dominant and dominating force among his students and friends, a man whose loss—imminent or accomplished—reverberates throughout the novel. As the last line of the book points out, "You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death."

But nor do you easily create a sufficient portrait of such a creature. Chick's remembrances repeatedly twist in upon themselves, creating a pretzel-like structure that cannot be wholly unknotted. These remembrances are dotted with expressions of concern that the portrait isn't quite right, that the reader will misunderstand. But the narrator's care, and the involutions of intellectual conversations that begin and end throughout the novel, come together to create, more than anything, the portrait of a friendship and of a biographer mourning the loss of his subject. "In approaching a man like Ravelstein," Chick tells us, "a piecemeal method is perhaps best."

The novel begins in Paris in the springtime, as the two celebrate the success of Ravelstein's book, a book suggested to him by Chick, in which Ravelstein popularized the ideas he'd long been teaching at the University of Chicago. Chick watches in something like awe as Ravelstein sates his enormous appetites—for food, for luxury, for ideas. This moment of revelry, however, gives way to mourning as the two return to the United States, and Chick is at last forced to confront his friend's illness—an illness that is, interestingly, first mentioned in the novel by a third party. Ravelstein's health rapidly fails, and Chick reluctantly begins to see that the biography his friend had asked for may actually need to be written. The closer the two come to facing Ravelstein's mortality, the more Chick notes a shift in their conversations, from a preoccupation with the Greeks to one with the Jews, from Eros to death. Returning yet again to Ravelstein's interest in the Socratic notion of Eros, Chick catches himself:

How readily you fall into the present tense when you talk about Ravelstein. And you can't help feeling that it is ridiculous to have a head filled with such notions, given what the times are—what the places are as this stupefying century ends with its wars of attrition, wars of movement, Dachaus, gulags, moonshots, its Hitler, its Stalin—its high-tech planetary transformation streaking into the next millenium.

This preoccupation with destruction, with endings, with the crushing devastation of the deaths of millions and the death of one close friend, paralyzes the biographer, who finds himself for several years afterward unable to obtain sufficient purchase on his subject to write the promised biography. The apparent impossibility of fully capturing his relationship to Ravelstein threatens to undo Chick's relationship to his own life. "For me," he tells us, "the challenge of portraying him (what an olden-days' word 'portraying' has become) by and by turned into a burden." Only after Chick's own all-too-close brush with death—based upon Bellow's own near-fatal infection from eating contaminated fish—can he begin to sort through the materials of his friend's life, to create a portrait that acknowledges its own insufficiency. "I would rather see Ravelstein again," he says, at last, "than to explain matters it doesn't help to explain."

In the end, the writer is able to separate himself from his subject only by gesturing toward the lack of necessity in completing that separation. Written in Bellow's matchless style, Ravelstein is finally about the loyalty of friends, the ties that bind the biographer and his subject, and the impossibility of truly detaching the teller from the tale.

—Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is assistant professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Baltimore Sun

Saul Bellow, a towering figure of American literature, has, at 84, produced a new novel. It is vibrant with life, joy, love — and a brim with wisdom. If proof were needed that great craft need not ebb with age, and that a brilliant mind and courageous heart need never cease growing. The book is concise and the story quite simple. After reading 'Ravelstein,' I found myself believing that Bellow has come, with great and honorable age, to a depth of wisdom, a blissfulness of spirit, a recognition of the dignity and necessity of energy — that liberate him fully to be both wise and celebratory."—April 9, 2000

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

Award-winning writer Bellow's elegy to friendship introduces Abe Ravelstein, a professor at a prominent Midwestern university who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. A man who lives life large, when his friend Chick suggests that he publish a book about his convictions, Ravelstein does, and he becomes a millionaire in the process. Ravelstein then suggests that Chick write his biography, and while on a celebratory trip to Paris, the two share their thoughts on mortality, philosophy, and history, and their old and new loves, etc.

Boston Globe

His voice has the meticulous range and certainlty of a cathedral choir. The wit is exquisitely mannered; the intelligence both fearless and elegant.

Jonathan Wilson

A cause for celebration . . . Bellow hugs the modern world hard in this novel . . . Ravelstein is rich, deep, and unnervingly entertaining. —The New York Times Book Review

Jonathan Yardley

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. —The Washington Post Book World

Joyce Carol Oates

No contemporary of ours is more consistently brilliant and more defiantly risky than Saul Bellow.
— New York Times Book Review

Roland Merullo

The magic still sparks and flashes on the page...Masterful in its thoroughness and intricacy . . . the prose rings as clearly as a meditation bell. —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Sean McCann

Bellow clearly wrote Ravelstein as a labor of love. It not only conveys sad truths, it is an example of an unfortunate fact itself-- great admiration does not always make for great art.
—Book-The Magazine for the Reading Life

Sven Birkerts

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. —Esquire

Wall Street Journal

... vintage Bellow, funny and human and intelligent."—April 14, 2000

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Age does not wither Saul Bellow. The 84-year-old writer's new novel is echt Bellow--the grab-bag paragraphs stuffed with truculent observations; the comedic mix of admiration and rivalry that subtends the friendships of intellectual men; the impossible and possible wives. Abe Ravelstein, a professor at a well-known Midwestern college, is obviously modeled on the late Allan Bloom. To clinch the identification, Bellow's narrator, Chick, a writer 20 years older than Ravelstein, uses phrases to describe Ravelstein that are almost identical to phrases Bellow used about Bloom in his published eulogy. Like Bloom, Ravelstein operates his phone like a "command post," getting information from his former students in high positions in various governments. Like Bloom, Ravelstein writes a bestseller using his special brand of political philosophy to comment on American failings. And like Bloom, Ravelstein throws money around as if "from the rear end of an express train." In fact, Chick is so obsessed with the price of Ravelstein's possessions that at times the work reads like a garage sale of his student's effects. Ravelstein also spends lavishly on his boyfriend, Nikki, a princely young Singaporean. Chick's wife, at the beginning of the memoir, is Vela, an East European physicist. Ravelstein dislikes her, and suspects that her Balkan friends are anti-Semites. Eventually, Vela kicks Chick out of his house and divorces him (fans will not be surprised that Bellow, as seems to be his habit, makes this a thinly veiled attack on his ex-wife). Chick ends up marrying one of Ravelstein's students, Rosamund. When Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS, Chick mulls over his obligation to write a memoir of his friend, but he is blocked until he himself suffers a threatening illness. Chick's alternate na vet and subconscious rivalry with Ravelstein is the subtext here. Amply rewarding, this late work from the Nobel laureate flourishes his inimitable linguistic virtuosity, combining intimations of mortality with gossipy tattle in a biting and enlightening narrative. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This latest novel by Pulitzer (1975) and Nobel prize (1976) winner Bellow is basically a rumination on the themes of friendship, love, death, and aging. It offers very little in the way of plot but a great deal as a sensitive exploration into the human condition. Ravelstein is a brilliant albeit eccentric professor of political philosophy, many of whose acolytes have become the movers and shakers of today's world. He has always lived life to the fullest, even when he couldn't afford to--a point that becomes moot when he publishes, at best friend Chick's suggestion, a best-selling book outlining his ideas. When he is diagnosed with AIDS (he is, as Chick says, homosexual but not "gay"), Ravelstein convinces Chick, a well-known writer in his own right, to become his Boswell. Consisting of Chick's reflections on their relationship--memories of discussions on a wide range of topics from the nature of truth to nihilism, from the responsibilities inherent in being a Jew to the nature of love, from the world of the intellect to the world of vaudeville--the book is at once witty, erudite, and compassionate. While its pace and intellectual depth may put off those more attuned to today's "popular" genre, this is the work of a master and unquestionably belongs in all academic and public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/00.]--David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

From The Critics

Abe Ravelstein is a university professor who has created a bestseller: after his death from AIDS, his friend decides to write a memoir and his findings result in a narrative about mortality, history, and modern times. Dakin Matthews spices the novel of one man's life.

Christian Science Monitor

A masterly piece of writing...There's no denying the engaging quality of Bellow's reflection on the power and mystery of friendship...

NY Times Book Review

Now here Bellow comes, at the age of 84, writing in his gold-standard prose as an antidote to mindlessness, in a lively, lovely, haunting novel that caresses Allan Bloom's life via the thinly disguised eponymous figure Abe Ravelstein..In Ravelstein he has produced a novel that is rich, deep and unnervingly entertaining.

Algis Valiunas

...Ravelstein, which offers a poet's understanding of a not quite philosophical friend - brilliant, noble, but fatally flawed - and of a wife who makes up for all his previous ill luck in love. To have inspired such a book is almost as much a triumph as to have written it.
—The American Spectator