Humboldt's Gift
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.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2019–2026years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "But, hardly in my 20s at the time, I’ve wondered since what I detected in it. What did the man have to offer me, so green, so goyish? This was Bellow’s very last novel, written in his 80s. Riffing on topics of Jewishness, sickness, aging, dying, marriage, politics, history, friendship; he was a very adult sort of thinker, a mature man’s writer. Yet I was so thrilled by this that upon my return home I read all of his work, and later his essays and letters, then the multitudinous biographies, memoirs, and studies that came out in the decades following his death."
This was precisely my experience in my early 20s! And how many times have I read Humboldt's Gift?
- Honestly, it's no wonder The Pile produced models have to be "bias adjusted."
Please, pick, at random, any date on that page and you can say the same thing about any of the subject matters. Here. I just did it. 2003. Middlesex. Book about a girl that's not a girl. 1982. Rabbit Is Rich. Book from a series that explores drugs, identity, religion, this one has alcoholism themes. 1976. Humboldt's Gift. Story about commodification and culture.
The whole point of the Pulitzer for books novels and music is to encourage and highlight the unique stuff. The fact that they may reflect the current themes of those times should not be surprising or bothersome.
- Reading Humboldt's Gift, by Saul Bellow, I could have made a gigantic list of things I had never read or often even heard of, and still left out about half the references I didn't see because I didn't know they were references.
