Translate

5.06.2009

1976 • Saul Bellow • Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975)
***Warning: Spoilers ahead***

I wanted to like Humboldt’s Gift – I really did. I was so pleased when I saw that a member of my book group had picked it as our latest selection. 

And as I started my Nobel trek and then quickly (and unfortunately) had to put a hold on it, I was glad indeed to be able to kill two literary birds with one stone – read Humboldt for my book club *and* for my Nobel project. 

Sigh. I was naive then. How little I knew ;o)

Anywho, let’s get right to it, shall we? This book frazzled me like no other has done in quite a while. I kept on seeing its amazing potential and then one page later it would once again descend into nonsense. So many great passages and then something like 30 pages of practically unpunctuated page long paragraphs of random facts…but not even random facts. Because see, that sort of thing would actually interest me, being that I’ve been known to read silly trivia books in one sitting. No, this was more like random factoid-ettes, a seedling of a factoid cut off in its prime to be left as an incomprehensible snippet, ala Lenin’s uncle. Sigh. Some of those pages, many times ‘philosophical’ in nature, reminded me of that song by Billy Joel ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, except not fun. 

But then he’d come back with some brilliant observation, referring to America as a ‘didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest’, thoroughly foreseeing our current era of confessional memoirs as bestsellers.

Or later Charlie would mention how’d he’d been a ‘passionate morbid little boy…’, bringing me back to my own childhood when (for I don’t know, fun?)I’d imagine a world without my mother, which would quickly reduce me to a slobbering mess.

And then we’d be back to tangents on top of tangents, just making me want to fling the book across the room.

I found Charlie to be just beyond sympathy which is another thing that made reading this book quite an endeavor. There was not one sympathetic character in the bunch. Now, I don’t have to like a character in order to enjoy reading the book. But it went beyond that – I just didn’t really care what happened to any of these people. I cared about what happened to Hannibal Lecter when I read ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, so it’s not about someone being bad or evil. It’s about them being blah. I couldn’t really get into any of them. I found myself endlessly annoyed by Charlie, but that was far as it went – I didn’t actually care about him though.

Particularly when he’d attempt to guess Renata’s thoughts, imagining them to be solely about wealth and possessions – how presumptuous of him. And even at the end, ‘…the beauty of a woman like Renata was not entirely appropriate. It was out of season…’ – after everything that’s happened to him, after Renata has left him and attempted to show him what he’d done wrong, he still doesn’t see her as a person. He still sees her as a symbol rather than a human being.
As for what the gift was – yawn.

Humboldt leaves him a Hollywood treatment. After all this tangential nonsense and shoe-gazing, that’s what we get? Boo.

I don’t want to judge Saul Bellow solely on this book. It wouldn’t be fair.
After all, some of my favorite authors have had off books as well. So I’m hoping that’s what happened with ‘Humboldt’s Gift’ and Bellow’s other books are just brilliant…or at least not inane.