Ravelstein (Penguin Modern Classics)
This is a book about how to die without giving up.
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The Ravelstein of the title is the flamboyant political philosophy and classics professor Allan Bloom, who before dying of AIDS in tasked his friend Saul Bellow to write a memoir about their friendship. What Bellow finally wrote was a novel where only the names were changed to protect the innocent or protect Bellow from legal actions. Ravelstein is an entertaining meditation on dying without surrendering. Bloom, who had recently become rich and famous as the author of The Closing of the American Mind, was dying in a way that a writer of lesser talents than Bellow might have turned into a maudlin tragedy.
But Bellow saw the book and the life as a triumph of Bloom being Bloom: Fancy dinners, designer clothes, luxury apartments in Chicago and Paris. It was a dream come true. Then the raging AIDS epidemic of the late s took it all away. But even as he knew he was dying, Bloom refused to give up who he was.
Ravelstein (Penguin Modern Classics)
Smoking cigarettes when he was fresh out of an oxygen tent. Jet setting to Paris when he could barely walk. Buying a BMW he couldn't drive. It was outrageous but as Bellow makes clear, it wasn't out of character for Bloom, who lived as he always had -- politically incorrect habits and all -- right up to his final days.
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Ravelstein, a brilliant, blunt speaking and humorous professor at a midwestern university, having stretched himself beyond his teacher's salary, is persuaded by his friend, Chick, to write a book expounding his political and philosophical ideas. The success of Ravelstein's book has made him wealthy and famous - enough so that Ravelstein would now like Chick to write a biography or memoir of his life.
Ravelstein (penguin Classics): By Saul Bellow | eBay
Chick and Ravelstein spend much time together, sharing memories, ideas and thoughts. Realizing that Chick is the fictional counterpart of Saul Bellow, and Ravelstein the counterpart of Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, it seems apparent to the reader that many of those ideas belong to Bellow himself.
Although Chick finds himself unable to write a memoir of his friend, he reveals enough of Ravelstein's history, his personality and character, his philosophical and political ideas, his sexual identity, and finally his death by Aids, so that the reader must conclude that while the fictional Chick failed to write the fictional Ravelstein's memoir, the real Bellow did indeed write a memoir of his real life friend, Bloom.
Some readers may feel that Bellow's book is "anti-gay. Whenever Chick speaks of Ravelstein's sexual "irregular behavior," it is without censure or judgment. Bellow credits mythology in explaining the yearning of one person for another as he writes: Looking for love, falling in love, you were pining for the other half you had lost, as Aristophanes had said.
Only it wasn't Aristophanes at all, but Plato in a speech attributed to Aristophanes. In the beginning men and women were round like the sun and moon, they were both male and female and had two sets of sexual organs. In some cases both the organs were male.
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