Badass Sentences in Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift"
Saul Bellow at the 1990 Miami Book Fair International A friend from work last summer recommended that I read Saul Bellow, citing his humor and intelligence. It took me a year, but I got around to reading Humboldt's Gift (1973) and found that Bellow is both incredibly funny and deeply, humanistically conscious of the world. Charles Citrine, an aging, divorced intellectual, writer, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and playwright, struggles over the course of the novel to make sense of his relationship with a meteorically successful and idealistic poet, Von Humboldt Fleisher, who dies destitute and estranged from Citrine. In the meantime, Citrine has plenty of other business to attend to: the vampiric divorce proceedings working against him, an intrusion by a inexperienced gangster-buffoon named Ron Cantabile, and a budding relationship with Renata, a much younger lady who he is continually on the fence about marrying.