Name: Humboldt's Gift
Rating: 3.454545454545455 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 9780670386550

Saul Bellow

Fitz Hugh McMaster

Charlie Citrine, suffering from steadily worsening troubles with women, career, and life in general, receives unexpected aid and comfort in the form of a belated bequest from his onetime friend and mentor, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher

Humboldt's Gift

Charlie Citrine, suffering from steadily worsening troubles with women, career, and life, receives unexpected aid in the form of a belated bequest from his onetime friend and mentor, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher.

Edwin Lang

I purchased Humboldt’s Gift because it looked light and like it might be a fun read. Overall it was very good and was a well-constructed story. It was something of a dark comedy, or even a light tragedy, but there was nonetheless a lightness about it that made it a relatively easy read. I found a quote by James Wood (from The Guardian) who said of Saul Bellow that he “was a great pleasure-giver, and a very serious pleasure-giver, too. I mean that he treated the novel in the highest terms, considered it a metaphysical vessel, a form for the examination of the self and its strivings”. Humboldt’s Gift seemed to have had all that. Charlie Citrine, an aging Jewish (self-identifying but non-practicing and perhaps a non-traditional believer – this was 1975, a time of New Age thinking) intellectual and once-critic (a seemingly severe one when younger), recently divorced with two young daughters, now with a voluptuous woman of whom a friend described the relationship as ‘an idiotic old lecher [who] was leaving two children to follow an obvious gold digger to corrupt Europe”, investigated for some form of possible tax evasion, befriended by a minor and possibly psychotic mafia figure whose (married) girlfriend is strikingly attractive and whose wife (whom we do not meet) is pursuing a PhD on Humboldt and, overall, surrounded by seemingly false friends and lovers. In short, Citrine’s life is falling apart. There is a scene that reminded me of Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version where a few people, including a once-lover, show up at Barney’s grave – this story had that kind of angst. One wondered, that in spite of the lofty thoughts, what was this Charlie / Barney doing with his life? Charlie came across as the prototype of what today we call the ‘elite’. I discovered John Berger (as an old and yet brilliant man) this week, a seemingly wonderful man even at 90, who died earlier this year. He seemed to have had a special hatred for elites whom he thought of as people full of their own importance and hot air, people who have nothing to add as solutions to the problems we face today. I am watching a ridiculous little show ‘The Right Place’ about a woman (Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop) who dies and mistakenly ends up in this little special part of Heaven reserved for the most ethically impactful. Alive she had been a self-seeking narcissistic and conscienceless – she answered her would-be employer ‘you want me to sell this chalk as medicine to sick seniors? No problem!’. So the premise of the show is a modern one, as is the book’s underlying theme: have you made a positive contribution to those around you? Charlie worries about his fast paced life: ‘the gratification-threshold of my soul had risen too high and I knew everything I was supposed to know and nothing I really needed to know’ and wonders if he is not actually guilty of Sloth. We tend to think of busy people as leading eminent and productive lives, and couch potatoes as perhaps not, but the reality is that both can be guilty of being lazy. I had read similar thoughts in a little book by a German priest / philosopher, Josef Pieper, and published in 1948: Leisure – The Basis of Culture. That the world demands of us constant attention to it - that we are permitted no time for contemplation, play and worship, the elements that are the basis of our essential humanity – that to be really human each of us needs a real activity that is not work where ‘on Sunday [we can] regain their human dignity for a day and put themselves on a level with their masters’. Today the Malls are open for business, pretty well year round, and I remember when Sunday’s, with most stores closed, used to be mind-numbingly boring: I hadn’t realized that that had been a good thing – that we are engulfed instead in a conspiracy of sorts – today we are tempted to settle to be little more than machines that keep the economy afloat. A few years ago a colleague, when I wished him a happy Chinese New Year and asked if it was going to be fun time (eating, drinking, parties and just plain old fun) said to me jokingly but somewhat bitterly that “No. We don’t believe in fun. You know we have 5,000 years of culture but today all we care about is money”. And this is one reason why the book is important - in his heart author Saul Bellow (who was born in a suburb of Montreal, Canada; grew up in Chicago, was of Russian descent; served with the Marines in World War II – a very honourable man) and Charlie Citrine, protagonist, are rooted in their Jewishness, as are Christians to a significant degree, and believe in a fundamental truth: that ‘there are two ways, one of life – that is a life of yes to seeking goodness, being of value to our fellow human beings, to our God – and one of death, that is a life of selfishness and selfish ambition. Humboldt’s final words to Charlie ‘You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Do not become frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Become better with women. Remember we are not natural beings but supernatural beings’. Saul Bellow said way back in 1976 in his Nobel lecture: ‘Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. [We need writers to remind us in their novels] that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice … [to remind us] what is fundamental, enduring, essential’. That individuals matter, that each of us matters, and that we are asked to ‘waste our lives on something useful’. Edwin

Adam Scharf

François Declercq

Seth Kalback

Giovanni Garcia-Fenech 

Kathryn Reyes

"First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1975"--Copyright page.

Humboldt's Gift

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