Ravelstein (Penguin Classics)

Ravelstein (Penguin Classics)

This Penguin Classics edition commemorates the fifteenth anniversary of Viking’s first publication of Ravelstein . Featuring a new introduction by Gary Shteyngart, it is the final novel of Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow and rounds out the entirety of his major works in Penguin Classics black spine. Deeply insightful, Saul Bellow’s moving last novel is a journey through love and memory, an elegy to friendship, and a poignant meditation on death. Told in memoir form, it follows two university professors, one of whom is succumbing to AIDS, as they share thoughts on philosophy and history, loves and friends, mortality and art. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. "The magic still sparks and flashes on the page...Masterful in its thoroughness and intricacy...the prose rings as clearly as a meditation bell." —Roland Merullo, The Philadelphia Inquirer (front-page review) "This book rings with laughter and joy.... Ravelstein is an extraordinary character...it is hard not to feel privileged at being allowed a glimpse into a human connection as intimate and rewarding as this one." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World (front-page review) "With his new novel, Saul Bellow proves that he still dominates. . . . Ravelstein is full of heart and wisdom, and I want to praise it without a pinch of qualification." —Sven Birkerts, Esquire "A cause for celebration...Bellow hugs the modern world hard in this novel...Ravelstein is rich, deep, and unnervingly entertaining." —Jonathan Wilson, The New York Times Book Review (front-page review) SAUL BELLOW (1915–2005) won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift , and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The only novelist to receive three National Book Awards, he was presented the National Book Award Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. GARY SHTEYNGART is the author of three novels and a memoir, Little Failure . His work has won the Stephen Crane Award and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. He lives in New York City. Chapter One Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it. During the Civil War people complained about Lincoln's funny stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke. But critics said that he was frivolous and his own Secretary of War referred to him as an ape. Among the debunkers and spoofers who formed the tastes and minds of my generation H. L. Mencken was the most prominent. My high school friends, readers of the American Mercury, were up on the Scopes trial as Mencken reported it. Mencken was very hard on William Jennings Bryan and the Bible Belt and Boobus Americanus. Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes, represented science, modernity, and progress. To Darrow and Mencken, Bryan the Special Creationist was a doomed Farm Belt absurdity. In the language of evolutionary theory Bryan was a dead branch of the life-tree. His Free Silver monetary standard was a joke. So was his old-style congressional oratory. So were the huge Nebraska farm dinners he devoured. His meals, Mencken said, were the death of him. His views on Special Creation were subjected to extreme ridicule at the trial, and Bryan went the way of the pterodactyl—the clumsy version of an idea which later succeeded—the gliding reptiles becoming warm-blooded birds that flew and sang. I filled up a scribbler with quotes from Mencken and later added notes from spoofers or self-spoolers like W. C. Fields or Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Huey Long, and Senator Dirksen. There was even a page on Machiavelli's sense of humor. But I'm not about to involve you in my speculations on wit and self-irony in democratic societies. Not to worry. I'm glad my old scribbler has disappeared. I have no wish to see it again. It surfaces briefly as a sort of extended footnote. I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject—shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jacks