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"No contemporary of ours is more consistently brilliant and more defiantly risky than Saul Bellow." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review
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 much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends old and new, old suits, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.
Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow's new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny; an elegy to friendship and lives well (or badly) lived.
If you liked Ravelstein, try these:
by John Banville
Published 2016
John Banville, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, now gives us a new novel - at once trenchant, witty, and shattering - about the intricacies of artistic creation, about theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves
by Martin Amis
Published 2008
In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in Moscow. The fraternal conflict then continues in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released.
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