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Ravelstein

Ravelstein

by SaulBellow (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2000

    $7.53
Synopsis

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 well beyond his means. His close friend Chick, a writer, has suggested that he pen a book encapsulating his ideas, and much to Ravelstein's surprise he and becomes a bestselling millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a biography of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris, Chick plays Boswell to Ravelstein's Johnson, narrating their life stories as the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, old loves, old suits, and old jokes. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS, yet this affectionate portrait of friendship remains by turn deeply insightful and always moving, as Chick himself faces his own brush with death.Saul Bellow's new novel is a journey through memory and friendship. It is brave, dark and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well lived.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 240
 Edition: First Edition, 1st Printing
 Publisher: Viking
Published: 29 Jun 2000
ISBN 10: 067084134X
ISBN 13: 9780670841349

Author Bio
Saul Bellow was born in 1915 to Russian emigre parents. As a young child in Chicago, Bellow was raised on books - the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Chekhov - and learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He set his heart on becoming a writer after reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to his mother's hopes that he would become a rabbi or a concert violinist. He was educated at the University of Chicago and North-Western University, graduating in Anthropology and Sociology; he then went on to work for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bellow published his first novel, The Dangling Man, in 1944; this was followed, in 1947, by The Victim. In 1948 a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Bellow to travel to Paris, where he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953. Henderson The Rain King (1959) brought Bellow worldwide fame, and in 1964, his best-known novel, Herzog, was published and immediately lauded as a masterpiece, 'a well-nigh faultless novel' (New Yorker). Saul Bellow's dazzling career as a novelist was celebrated during his lifetime with an unprecedented array of literary prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Gold Medal for the Novel. In 1976 he was awarded a Nobel Prize 'for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work'. Bellow's death in 2005 was met with tribute from writers and critics around the world, including James Wood, who praised 'the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself'.