Ravelstein - Saul Bellow

Ravelstein is a book I found sitting on my shelf at home and I honestly cannot tell you how it came to be mine. I did not purchase it, and I have no memory of it being lent or borrowed from anyone. If you are reading this and it happens to be yours, let me know if you would like it back.

How fitting that I finished reading Ravelstein while on the plane home from my weekend visit to my grandmother in Canada. You see, Saul Bellow was born in Canada and when he was nine his parents moved to Humboldt Park in Chicago. Bellow eventually attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. 

And despite my also having a Canadian background, and living in Chicago, and the fact that Saul Bellow has won both the Pulitzer Prize (1976 - Humboldt's Gift) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1976), I'd never heard of him before. For all this, Ravelstein is Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, five years before his death, Ravelstein is written in the style of a memoir. 

Abe Ravelstein is a professor with lots of opinions and ideas. Urged by his friend Chick, Ravelstein pens a book and finally meets with commercial success equal to his spending appetites. In turn, Ravelstein urges Chick to write a memoir of Ravelstein - you see, Ravelstein is dying, in the 90s, from AIDS-related complications. 

Chick, however, is unsure how to begin. And what unravels in the prose, is the tight intertwining of friendship, where a portrait of the subject is not complete without an equally revealing portrait of the storyteller. Clearly Ravelstein holds a place in Chick's life that cannot be duplicated, and his thoughts and opinions have formed some of who Chick is and his loss has left a large hole in Chick's life. 

Chick's style of telling the memoir is conversational, anecdotal -it's almost as if you've sat down with Chick at table and asked him to tell you about his late friend Abe Ravelstein. His tale marches backwards and forwards. Short on facts, the novel somehow paints a more complete picture of the man than a straightforward biography.

The way in which the memoir genre is explored in the novel is a huge feat. The novel is said to be based on Bellow's friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, the philosopher Allan Bloom. Bloom taught at UofC and was well known in academic circles, but gained notoriety with his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind which heavily criticized contemporary American higher education. 

If I had anything negative to say about the book, is that while brilliant, it is clear that Bellow was writing, perhaps not for the average person, but really for his contemporaries and colleagues - those that shared a common language and experience as he and Bloom. The book delves heavily into critiques on literary theory and philosophy, subjects that are a bit lost on me and probably the average reader as well. 

This may actually be a strong support for Ravelstein and therefore Bellow's argument about the failing of today's higher education. Chick notes that Universities today are well equipped to turn out engineers and mathematicians, but woefully inept at producing the level of caliber of great thinkers and philosophers who were once the recipients of a liberal arts education. As a recipient of an English undergraduate degree, I can see his point. 

All this can seem a bit of sour grapes as well as it means that type of men Bellow - and therefore Bloom and Ravelstein - were was becoming less valuable to society as a whole. And therefore Bloom and Bellow, at the ends of their lives were becoming all to aware of something lost. Bellow has been criticized for being out of touch with modern society and his novels are apparently not well liked in modernist and feminist circles.

But what stands out to me, is that Ravelstein captures a world and a language that is somehow slipping away from the author. On the other hand, the language of love and friendship, and the way we define ourselves through the lens of those who have impacted us most, is a concept that is timeless.

4/5 Stars.

I'm Not Stiller - Max Frisch

This book took a long time for me to finish. And I want to start by saying I thought it was going to be part mystery. I'm not Stiller? So who are you? And where is the real Stiller. Going into the book with this mindset really hurt my early reading of the novel. 

Later, I realized the book was a detailed and thoroughly thought-provoking dissection of self-deception and self-acceptance. And this made the entire book come into focus. So reader, I'm giving you a heads up, and it's not a spoiler, it will help you frame your reading.... This guy... who insists he is NOT Stiller? He is Stiller.

So with that, read the book carefully through that lens. What Frisch does is to really tackle the idea of who we are, and how we know ourselves. Stiller is a character who has allowed others' opinions of him shape his self-perception his entire life. He is a sculpture artist whose work does not sell well because the artist who creates, but does not know himself is really unable to create anything that speaks to others. He marries a beautiful ballerina named Julika. He believes she is all goodness and that she is too good for him. This becomes in itself a self-fulfilling prophecy as he allows this perception to inform his actions and decisions. 

Julika becomes ill with tuberculosis and goes to a seaside retreat to recover. Everyone blames her worsening condition on the fact that she continued to dance professionally as Stiller had no money to provide for them both so she had to continue working. Stiller does his best then to aggravate her condition further. He's so obsessed with other people's views of himself that he becomes completely narcissistic in reflection. 

Once he realizes how hideously he's behaved, and how he doesn't even know who he really is, he disappears for six years. The book actually begins with him being spotted on a train by a random stranger who points him out, at which point Stiller is arrested and placed in jail on suspicion of involvement in a criminal conspiracy. Although, this is Swiss jail where they apparently let you have visitors and trips out for dinner. 

Once he is back he tries to convince everyone that he is indeed not Stiller, but his old friends, and Julika herself do not believe it. He believes now that he is not Stiller he is more able to really love Julika. And it becomes apparent that he wants to throw off his past as if he were never responsible for the person he was before, because how can he be someone new now if he were still Stiller? 

That to me was the best part. Because it struck me as something I've never really thought about before. About how our past can also define us and who we are. And there are many people who would say, "don't let your past define you" meaning you can change, or rise up out of your circumstances. But to some extent you are still that same person and you have to live with those actions and consequences, even when you aim to start your life anew. So  Stiller attempts to have the changed life without the baggage and guilt that comes from previous decisions and actions. 

Once he is forced to admit that he is, was and always will be, Stiller, he is released from prison and retires to the countryside with Julika where he begins making pots. But the irony is that he doesn't seem any happier than he was before. He continues to live with Julika and continues to feel shame and guilt over her condition and the life he led before. It's an interesting concept of how when we are with those from our pasts we can never truly escape who we have been. A sort of forced nostalgia which influences how we behave. 

That said, translations of material are always a bit out of sync sometimes with narrative voice. The story was overall well done and the themes were excellent. At the end though the book could probably have been about 30-40 pages shorter and everyone would have been just as happy. 

4/5 Stars

Feed - Mira Grant

I'm really torn on giving this book three or four stars. I really enjoyed it. It was really well researched. Exhaustively researched. Exhaustive. Yeah sometimes I felt the details were exhaustive. The background research bogs down the story line sometimes and slows down the action.

Feed is an interesting offering in the zombie apocalypse genre. Following the combination of two miracle drugs each curing their own affliction but then combining to create a super-virus which, yep, reanimates dead people and causes them to hunger for others' flesh. Oops. Thanks science. The research into virology and epidemiology is so well done. It's amazing. But, it also reads a bit like a peer reviewed journal.

The thing that I love most about the book is that in the midst of the zombie outbreak, the country has recovered somewhat. The government is still functional. People still have jobs and live throughout the country, except Alaska (sorry Alaska). But it's sort of a life goes on and technology evolves rather than disappears angle that I really enjoyed.

The story follows Georgia and Sean Mason as they, in turn, follow the campaign of Senator Ryman as he runs for president. They become attached to the campaign as embedded media. Georgia, the "newsie" covers all the straight forward news for their combined blogging/news/multimedia site. Sean, the "irwin" is the part of the team that pokes zombies with sticks and films it for an adrenaline rush. Buffy, the fictional, writes poetry but also handles the team's technological needs.

The three team members each have their responsibilities covering the Senator's promising campaign. As they travel with him, they endure one zombie outbreak that starts to look a bit like sabotage and then uncover a plot to use the zombie virus as a weapon - terrorism in 2039. How much will their pursuit of the truth cost them? Well, it's not all hugs and puppies folks.

Still the inventiveness and thorough approach to the story deserve some well earned accolades for author Mira Grant. I imagine the next book in this trilogy (why is it always a trilogy!?) will likely flow faster since a lot of the background material is out of the way.

Let's call it 3.75 Stars because it's closer to 4 than 3.

Things We Set on Fire - Deborah Reed

I really want to give this book 4 Stars, but there's just something a little missing to get it over that hump.

Things We Set on Fire starts off really strong. Vivie commits a terrible act. She shoots her husband as he's out illegally hunting, which in turn makes it look like a hunting accident. This event is the gravitas around which all other events in the book get their weighty meaning. And for whatever reason, it just doesn't work.

Fast forward about twenty-five years and we are again shown Vivie getting a call from the police that her two granddaughters who she hasn't seen in six years, are in need of shelter after their mother has been admitted to the hospital.

Drugs? That's Vivie's thought, although later on in the book it's not really clear why this would have been her guess. In any case, Vivie takes in Kate's two daughters and calls Kate's sister Elin who lives in Oregon. Vivie and the girls are in Florida, but Elin agrees to come and drives all the way to see them.

Elin has lived in Oregon for about 8 years, having unceremoniously packed up and left Florida behind. She was trying to escape the heaviness of her life there and created a new life for herself in Oregon. When she arrived in Oregon she found that her longtime boyfriend had moved on... to her sister. This man is the father of the two girls who Elin becomes the caretaker of.

This all happens in the very first chapters of the book and the momentum builds as it is apparent that the Elin is aware of her mother's action from long ago and no one has spoken of it. But then something happens with the book, where the characters, and their background stories don't really match up with their current actions. The reason for Kate's hospitalization is laid bare, but there isn't really any time dedicated to getting the characters through their processing of events. Instead they have these wholesale realizations and understandings that don't really ring true.

The book meandered toward the end and the ending was overall not very satisfactory. So while the writing was great and the story line good, the book just missed some element to push it over into a four-star rating.

Three stars.

Finding Fraser - K.C. Dyer

This was a fun book turned on a goofy premise. The story follows Emma, a 29 year old woman who is (understandably) a bit obsessed with one James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser of the Outlander series (and now TV show - seriously, look up Sam Heughan and I dare you not to drool, see below and you're welcome). Emma, having had no luck in love or life is in need of a serious life shake up and decides to sell all her worldly possessions and head to Scotland to find her very own Jamie.

Since Emma has very little money and a vast lack of world experience, surprising given her living in Chicago (see I'm totally biased, I think people from Chicago have to have the world travel thing figured out), she is going to do the trip on the cheap. Emma came across as a bit naive throughout the story, although she does have enough self awareness to admit to this after the fact.

I would be more annoyed with Emma's "need to find a man to complete myself and save me" attitude if she didn't vocalize the fact that women needed to be stronger characters in their own story. In the end, this is what Emma becomes, a stronger protagonist in her own story. I like the backdrop of using the Outlander books as a foothold for the blog turned novel concept, which is not actually a blog turned novel.


The book is fun and entertaining and a good summer read. I listened to this one on audible though and I have to say the narrator's accents were a bit forced and stereotypical. Let's just say one of the commenters on Emma's blog is Japanese and well.......the butchered English in the fake accent and what I can assume is the attempt at English as a Second Language syntax are a tad on the offensive side.

I love that Diana Gabaldon was pleased with this Outlander inspired work, since I've read before that she dreads and disapproves of fan-fiction. This isn't fan fiction in the strictest sense, so if Herself gives it a pass, all to the better.

This book was a solid 3/5 Stars.