Humboldt's Gift

From AudioFile
Bellow's best-seller is the story of the relationship between Charles Citrine, a best-selling author, and his friend Von Humboldt Fleisher, a failed poet. It is not one of Bellow's greatest efforts, but was well-received when published almost twenty years ago. This production is exceedingly well-narrated by Christopher Hurt, whose narrator's voice conveys the various moods of the main character, Charles Citrine, an aging Lothario, battling the aging process and his writer's block. Some production flaws mar the presentation but can't overshadow the fine quality of the narrator's interpretation. E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Saul Bellow, published in 1975. The novel, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, is a self-described "comic book about death," whose title character is modeled on the self-destructive lyric poet Delmore Schwartz. Charlie Citrine, an intellectual, middle-aged author of award-winning biographies and plays, contemplates two significant figures and philosophies in his life: Von Humboldt Fleisher, a dead poet who had been his mentor, and Rinaldo Cantabile, a very-much-alive minor mafioso who has been the bane of Humboldt's existence. Humboldt had taught Charlie that art is powerful and that one should be true to one's creative spirit. Rinaldo, Charlie's self-appointed financial adviser, has always urged Charlie to use his art to turn a profit. At the novel's end, Charlie has managed to set his own course.


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For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.


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