Humboldt's Gift

Fülszöveg

For many years Von Humboldt Fleisher and
Charles Citrine were the best of friends—
Humboldt a grand erratic figure, a great poet;
Charlie a young man of frenzied and noble
longings, straight out of the Middle West, his
heart inflamed with literature. But by the
1970s Humboldt has died a failure in New
York and Charlie's success-ridden life in
Chicago has taken various turns for the worse
when Humboldt acts from the grave to change
Charlie's life. He has left Charlie something
in his will. Charlie comes into a legacy.
Now Charlie is middle-aged and a bit shaky
and it is high time that his life came to some-
thing. His days are cluttered with comic absur-
dities and his destiny seems obscured. Himself
a thinker, he longs to come from left field and
knock them all dead, to make intellectuals as
clearly superfluous as they seem to him to be.
But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in law suits;
he is held in thrall by the young sexually
beguiling but expensive and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

For many years Von Humboldt Fleisher and
Charles Citrine were the best of friends—
Humboldt a grand erratic figure, a great poet;
Charlie a young man of frenzied and noble
longings, straight out of the Middle West, his
heart inflamed with literature. But by the
1970s Humboldt has died a failure in New
York and Charlie's success-ridden life in
Chicago has taken various turns for the worse
when Humboldt acts from the grave to change
Charlie's life. He has left Charlie something
in his will. Charlie comes into a legacy.
Now Charlie is middle-aged and a bit shaky
and it is high time that his life came to some-
thing. His days are cluttered with comic absur-
dities and his destiny seems obscured. Himself
a thinker, he longs to come from left field and
knock them all dead, to make intellectuals as
clearly superfluous as they seem to him to be.
But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in law suits;
he is held in thrall by the young sexually
beguiling but expensive and unsuitable
Renata; he has fallen into the hands of a neu-
rotic Mafioso called Rinaldo Cantabile; and
his career seems to have ground to a halt.
And then there is the redeeming Von
Humboldt Fleisher, surfacing from the depths
of Charlie's memory, his wide-set eyes "like
a whale's" taking it all in, wary, expressive. "I
wish I knew why I feel such loyalty to the
deceased," Charlie wonders. But the deceased
prove also to be loyal to Charlie, and Hum-
boldt's gift comes just in time.
How the gentle but resilient Charlie comes
to know what he must do and how he triumphs
over his ever more ridiculous tribulations is
the great discovery of Humboldt's Gift—
Saul Bellow's exuberant, dazzling new novel. Vissza