Humboldt’s Gift (1975) - Saul Bellow

Category: Adults, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: Advice From The Dead Grim Humor

Written by Saul Bellow
Read by Christopher Hurt
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: December 4, 2007
Duration: 17:54:40

The novel, for which Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1976, is a self-described “comic book about death,” whose title character is modeled on the self-destructive lyric poet Delmore Schwartz.

For years, they were the best of friends: Humboldt, a grand, erratic figure, and Charlie, a young man of frenzied and noble longings. But by the 1970s, Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie’s success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie’s life by leaving him something in his will.
Now Charlie is middle-aged and his days are cluttered with comic absurdities. A thinker, he longs to come from left field and knock them all dead. But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in lawsuits; he is held in thrall by a sexually beguiling but unsuitable young woman; he has fallen into the hands of a neurotic Mafioso; and his career seems to have ground to a halt. How the gentle but resilient Charlie comes to know how to triumph over his ever more ridiculous tribulations is the great discovery of Humboldt’s Gift.

At the novel’s end, Charlie has managed to set his own course.

It is an erudite book with lots of ideas in play and Bellow has great fun with all sorts of sacred cows. There are lots of comedic moments and some pure slapstick (the fate of Chalie’s mercedes).

AudioFile
Bellow’s bestseller is the story of the relationship between Charles Citrine, a best-selling author, and his friend Von Humboldt Fleisher, a failed poet. It is not one of Bellow’s greatest efforts, but was well received when published almost twenty years ago. This production is exceedingly well narrated by Christopher Hurt, whose narrator’s voice conveys the various moods of the main character, Charles Citrine, an aging Lothario, battling the aging process and his writer’s block. Some production flaws mar the presentation but can’t overshadow the fine quality of the narrator’s interpretation.