Word: ravelstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bellow is the narrator of Ravelstein. He assumes the character of "Chick," long a friend to Ravelstein, an intensely intellectual professor at an elite Midwest university...
...Ravelstein taught in comfortable obscurity (though he was in debt), until, at Chick's urging, he put to paper his ideas on the life of the mind. Ravelstein became instantly famous, in the U.S. and overseas. And so, to return the favor, he has asked Chick to write his memoirs. He was traditional, conservative and gay. The book tries not to linger on his homosexuality-Ravelstein certainly didn't consider it the defining aspect of his personality-but since he is dying of AIDS, it is rather unavoidable...
...Some of the exposition, and there is lots of exposition because the book focus on moments, is necessary-watching Ravelstein finger through silks in a Paris boutique, for example. But the reader often longs for something more concrete than the image of an effete, successful intellectual on a Paris shopping binge. The sum of Ravelstein's character is revealed in ordinary interactions, rather than when his intellectual or personal muscles are challenged...
...Bellow writes many philosophical asides into the book. These very brief but highly content-full paragraphs remind us not only of Ravelstein's appetite for all the belles lettres, but also, by proxie, of Allan Bloom's own writing style. In the Closing of the American Mind, the screed on anti-intellectualism and academic nihilism that made him rich and famous,Bloom dispatches most Continental philosophy in a page, and postmodernism in a few short paragraphs. Here was a man who saw in grand narratives but could very easily produce piquant details at the first challenge...
...There's no denying the engaging quality of Bellow's reflections on the power and mystery of friendship" wrote Ron Charles in his Christian Science Monitor review of Ravelstien. As audience members found out on yesterday evening, the novel begins in the early 1990s and documents Abe Ravelstein' s ostentatious lifestyle and tragic death from AIDS...