Word: ravelstein
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...easy-going and light-hearted style, famed novelist Saul Bellow read excerpts last night from his new novel Ravelstein to a large audience at the First Parish in Cambridge. He stopped afterwards to pose for pictures and meet with admirers...
...love and admiration that Chick lavishes on Ravelstein, he also notes some of their deep disagreements on fundamental matters. Ravelstein, the brilliant teacher of classical philosophy and political theory, thinks Chick's artistic temperament as a writer of fiction represents a refusal to grow up and grapple with the real world of public affairs: "Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics." Chick responds, "His severity did me good," but adds, "I had no intention, however, of removing...
...exchanges between Chick and Ravelstein cover a broad array of eternal questions, including, inevitably, death and the possibility of an afterlife. But the novel reads like the antithesis of abstractions. Ravelstein brims with life thanks to Chick's, that is, Bellow's, comic observations on the passing scene. Here are French waiters "working like acrobats" at a dinner Ravelstein throws for Chick at an exclusive Paris restaurant. Here is Chick on Ravelstein's notoriously messy eating habits: "An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers under his chair." Here is Ravelstein amused, laughing "like Picasso's wounded horse in Guernica, rearing...
Late in the novel, after Ravelstein's death, Chick himself nearly dies after eating a bad red snapper during a Caribbean vacation with his new wife Rosamund. Bellow readily acknowledges that this part of the novel was lifted pretty directly from his own life in 1994. "I was in St. Martin, and I went to a little French restaurant. I said, 'Do you have any local catch?' thinking that I'd outsmart the frozen-fish scene. But it didn't work, because it is the inland fish, the reef feeders, who get these poisons." Thanks to Freedman's quick thinking...
...said, 'I opened my eyes and here was the world. Here was this great human and divine enterprise.' And it was as though I had just opened my eyes on what human existence was, really. It was my turn." Bellow takes that turn again, childlike wonder and all, in Ravelstein, when Chick says, "In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia...