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Humboldt's Gift

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About this listen

 For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.©1973 Saul Bellow (P)1992 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction Inspiring
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That’s what the narrator seems to like to do. Perhaps it’s just me, or that I listen to audiobooks on my headphones and am sensitive to the dynamic range I should subject my ears to, but he eats words up, rendering them inaudible. The prosodic contours that the narrator chooses to parse the cadences of Saul Bellow’s masterly writing plunges the trailing bits of nearly every unit of diction below my audible threshold. This is quite annoying as it makes me lose words that have been carefully chosen by the author, or crank up the volume, in which case his voice takes on a piercing rasp which is also a source of discomfort. I persisted with this for a while, taking it in in short stretches, but I am strongly inclined to return the audiobook and pick up the paperback instead. I have nothing negative to say about the novel, but then this is one of Bellow’s famous works....

Eat my words

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On reflection, this was quite a remarkable book. At first, I really struggled to follow the narrative, as there were so many tangential strands of the story and I was in serious danger of giving up. However, I'm really glad I stayed with it and I would advise just relaxing and not worrying about trying to find the 'real' plot - just enjoy Bellow's flights of intellectual fancy and allow yourself to wallow in the sublime turns of phrase and the incredible descriptive depths he goes to. I think he won the Nobel prize for this book and you can understand why. It really does become utterly engrossing at times and, despite his oft atrocious over-intellectualising, Charlie Citrine (having to guess at spellings, is one downside of audible books!) becomes truly vivid and lifelike.
I'm not well-up on my regional American accents, but the reader did a great job and seemed to bring a genuine Chicago-feel to the whole novel. Different characters were effortlessly portrayed with only the slightest of vocal changes and the intricacies of the fairly taxing philosophising were navigated as well as possible.
All in all, I was genuinely saddened when the book came to its predictably unpredictable end. Beautiful.

Worth the effort

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I remember struggling with Saul Bellow at school - Henderson the Rain King, I think it was. So I approached this book with some trepidation. But it is excellent - I love that sharp fluid prose of the best American writers. The novel itself is what you would call multi-layered. The story itself is quite interesting but what really makes the book is the clever way the author juxtaposes the storyline with the philosophical musings of the two main characters; at the beginning I could not believe that the author was being so serious, but by the end the subtlety of the presentation became more clear. The contrast between the main narrator's serious approach to matters intellectual and the seemingly luckless course if his life, and how the two are eventually reconciled is done with great generosity of heart. I loved it.

The narration is beautifully paced and does a great deal to bring out what the book is about.

Warmly recommended.

A Great Novel

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Unstoppably brilliant. Up there with Herzog, Augie March and Ravelstein. The guy reading it does a near-genius job in capturing the mock-heroic, comic and often deeply moving tones Bellow could effortless convince onto the page too. Bravo. My only slight side-note or nag would be the over-all recording quality isn't great. It's clearly been recorded digitally off of an original cassette tape, the other side of said tape on occasion faintly coming through. Very soon though i almost totally faded this out and it didn't ruin my enjoyment a jot after the opening 15 minutes. This is a must read, highly recommended, and not just for fans of Bellow or stylish prose: the story being compelling enough in itself. It's one i'll read and read again over the years, dipping into the physical copy often for one of those many spellbinding bellow set-pieces. 10\10.

A full-on world-beater. A masterpiece.

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One of Bellow's mature tours de force, with a wonderful performance from the reader, quite characteristic of Bellow audiobooks. If only all authors were this lucky with their audiobook readers!

A mature Bellow tour de force

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