Humboldt's Gift.

Item request has been placed! ×
Item request cannot be made. ×
loading   Processing Request
  • Author(s): Birkerts, Sven
  • Source:
    Virginia Quarterly Review. Summer2005, Vol. 81 Issue 3, p148-159. 12p.
  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
    • Abstract:
      This essay explores the plot of the author's favorite novel "Humboldt's Gift," by Saul Bellow. "Humboldt's Gift" is a baggy, talky book, crammed with episodic set-pieces, comic as well as elegiac interludes, but the gist of the narration is as follows. Charlie Citrine, the man pegged early on as having sensibility, is in Chicago fumbling through what is thankfully never called a midlife crisis, but which bears all of the now clichéd markings of that disorder. A successful thinker and man of letters, Charlie finds himself in his mid-50s assailed from all sides as well as from within. His ex-wife, Denise, has her cut-throat lawyers after him for a fat divorce settlement; his sensuously manipulative younger girlfriend, Renata, is trying to get him to go with her to Madrid, with some idea that she will reconnect with her long-lost father and marry Charlie. Moreover, his beloved Mercedes has just been pulverized by a bat-wielding hood named Rinaldo Cantabile, who claims that Charlie welched on paying a poker debt and who now insists on restitution. At the same time, more centrally, Charlie, an amateur student of the anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner, has begun to experience vivid memories of the eponymous Humboldt, the great friend of his young manhood, the poet, supposedly based on the poet Delmore Schwartz, who went down to pills, alcohol and dementia in his own middle years, and who Charlie now feels he abandoned to his demons.