The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow REVIEW

[@benkamal6448]

Honestly, this is my favourite book. Or at least I say it is when people ask. It seems we read two different books. I find AM easy, free flowing and joyous. I find Bellow’s writing stimulating, passionate and timeless. Throughout your review I kept thinking, I disagree, I disagree, I disagree. Still, I appreciate your thoughts. Keep it up. Un saluto!

[@gijsvanengelen]

Completely agree, it's one of the easiest, most rewarding novels I've ever read. One of the few High Literature books that is also 100%, unapologetically fun

[@guillermoflores3199]

I also completely agree. This has been my favorite book in a long time. The writing is gorgeous and the non-resolution of subplots is kind of the point. Augie is built up by these experiences but he is never the central protagonist really. Simon, Thea, Padilla, Einhorn, etc could have compelling books about their lives with Augie as a supporting character. But he is built up by all his relationships. He sees all these people struggling to find meaning in America and in doing so builds his way of thinking. At the end of the book he reflects on how he hasn't reached his true meaningful goal but thinks he still will be able to.

[@jonathanhope5351]

I agree with the other commenters.. it was an absolutely joyful read. The philosophical parts were my favorites.

[@k.e.1760]

Please read Stoner by John Williams!

[@soumiatulip]

please activate the subtitles feature so that we can hit teh CC button and the auto-generated translation. Thank you for the review.

[@alext7621]

I started watching your channel in high school, and I’m about to turn in my thesis and graduate with an honors in English literature. I just want to thank you for encouraging me to expand my reading interests. When I first started watching your channel, I almost exclusively read fantasy and science fiction. I still love those kinds of books, but now I read a much broader array of literature as well.

[@TheBookchemist]

:D congratulations on getting your degree my friend! What's your thesis about?

[@alext7621]

@@TheBookchemist Sorry for the late reply. Basically, I looked at the link between neoliberalism and socially deviant subcultures in Trainspotting (1993) and Skagboys (2012) by Irvine Welsh and The Football Factory (1996) by John King. I argued that the socially deviant behaviors the characters in these novels engage in--heroin use and football hooliganism respectively--represent deeper manifestations of broader feelings of political, economic, and cultural alienation and abandonment in the face of the sweeping neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s in the United Kingdom.

[@Gabrielcezar94]

Hum, interesting... I remember reading it about 10 years ago and finding it one of the most vibrant and compelling books I’d read; it sucked me in, made me a part of that world, which is a difficult thing for such a long book to do, to sustain the reader’s interest... now I want to reread it, because I’m sure I was too young then to fully comprehend the message of the book. I just remember enjoying a very entertaining story with completely fleshed out characters.

[@vincentharris3155]

exactly how I remember this book. It makes you feel what it means to be American

[@JuanReads]

I did try Angie March a couple of years ago, but gave up. I had read a couple of Below’s novels before, though, so I’m not sure why I struggled with this one. Well done for powering through!

[@vincenzoferrara4673]

You should read "Humboldt's gift", it's much more fun overall and, honestly, much more interesting too.

[@faizanhasnain7960]

Honestly dawg, your videos are a breath of fresh air in this spooky time. Really grateful to you for sharing your passion for reading with us! Also, side note: I bet you'd run an incredible podcast if you ever chose to pursue that - you're great at exploring topics without a script, just riffing and seeing where the ideas go. You should consider it, I'd watch/hear the hell out of that. Cheers! Great vid as always man!

[@TheBookchemist]

Thank you so much :D! I've been thinking about podcasts before, I'll see if there's something I can do with that form :)

[@jakobjohnson984]

Not gonna lie, I actually had never heard Saul Bellow before this video, but now I'm quite intrigued and want to read some of his work. Also, "there's nothing so flimsy as a canon" is just so true lmao.

[@NCbassfishing24]

Parts of it are very sturdy. The Greeks, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, Jame Austen, George Eliot, etc.

[@jakobjohnson984]

@@NCbassfishing24 You're not wrong, but that said, parts of it are equally flimsy. I'd argue that the concept of a "literary canon" is constantly being renegotiated and reevaluated by literary scholars.

[@NCbassfishing24]

@@jakobjohnson984 Agreed. I just wanted to point out that historically and artistically, some parts are more negotiable than others. I think that's how it should be.

[@TheBookchemist]

Shakespeare went through a long phase of absolute obscurity before being rediscovered in the late 18th (and exploding in the 19th) century, and the Romantic poets + Jane Austen achieved true canonical status only somewhat recently (and looking at current trends in academia I would argue that the poets, very sadly, are already well on the way to fading).

[@mattjmjmjm4731]

Interesting discussion on classical learning and modernism.

[@blimey1107]

It's great listening to your reviews! I have an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and considering a phd (but research doesn't come to me very easily!-- should I still pursue one-- there's the rub and your very first statements about Augie March hit a very familiar but uncomfortable chord). Haha! But I really enjoy these reviews which are also analyses of sorts! I come from a country where Medieval lit, Early Modern lit and Classical lit are still considered more prestigious and people rarely talk contemporary fiction.

[@etucker82]

I'm a huge Bellow fan but I think Sammler is his worst book. The key with Bellow is to just accept the stream of consciousness, it flows like a river, and it's not all that different from Keroac/Burrows/Miller, the only real difference is the erudition and that unlike them, Bellow is generally thinking deeply (if often mistakenly, though mistaken beliefs often make for great fiction writers - Naipaul, Saramago, Dostoevsky, Shaw...). Your read on Bellow is pretty unique. It's interesting that you would call Bellow's prose awkward. A lot of Brit critics, Wood/Amis/Hitchens, would claim the opposite. Assuming that Melville and James are Europe-influenced worlds to themselves, I would think Bellow's prose is second to Twain among Americans precisely because it lets in the urban vernacular and popular culture of Bellow's time, which, admittedly, seems a bit archaic now. I would diagnose the reason for Bellow's neglect as kind of the opposite of your read. He came from the World War II generation, which was the only US generation in which the American Dream seemed to be attainable. He did not exclude popular culture, he just excluded popular culture from the generations after him, whose hostility to his kind of high erudition he viewed as a self-fulfilling rejection of the kind of learning which made the US able to offer opportunities like the ones he got. In that sense, i don't think he was wrong about the direction later US generations went, but I do think, like many people who become conservative as they age, he was unrealistic about young people's capacities to repeat his achievements without his specific advantages. And that, for the moment, has damned him to neglect. Bellow is not Longfellow, he's too important and too inclusive, whether in the US or taken up by urban intellectuals in distant cities, he will be back. I totally get his flaws, you could tear out 150 pages from any novel and wouldn't lose much, but the scope of his books is much too wide to be ignored for too long.

[@patrickbrennan2864]

Has everyone watched the Hocopolitso video on KZbin of Saul Bellow reading from “Henderson the Rain King” and talking to the audience? It’s really really good- he’s so humble funny and generous in his interactions with them

[@grai]

after Martin Amis died I watched an interview in which he said Saul Bellow's writing made him feel like he may as well give up trying to be a novelist particularly The Adventures Of Augie March I have just finished reading Augi March because amis' comments made me curios and tho I think I enjoyed it more than you did I agree with your criticisms But the sheer originality of the writing style and subject matter just swept me along and also the poetry of the language and how vividly he set the scenes Having said all that I don't think I will read any more Saul Bellow! I was just curious to try him after Martin Amis cited him as such a strong inspiration I felt Bellow had probably read a lot of Dickens something I hate about Dickens is how he packs the books with thousands of characters Most of them caricatures and grotesques I felt Augie March was Disckensian in this regard

[@MartianManhunter1987]

I've just finished reading Augie this week and I didn't like it as much as the venerators nor did I dislike it as much as the detractors. I thought the second half was better that the first, indeed the Mexico and post-Mexico sections are worth the price of admission alone. It's like Bellow finally got to a point where he could just unleash what he was building up to in the first half. The pacing becomes faster and the 'adventures' stated in the title actually become adventures as you would regard them in the classic sense of the word. However, at times the book is a quagmire; sluggish prose, exceedingly punishing passages where you feel like no point has been made and my patience was tried numerous times. The main reason for writing this comment though revolves around Mattia's obliquely dismissive tone regarding 'classical' literature and the way it is written. Firstly, to say that literature has moved beyond this kind of writing is a misnomer as it's been revitalised through the works of Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, DFW to an extent and various others. The move away from and a bulwark against postmodern ennui and inertia is what, for me, this kind of literature strives to achieve. I know Mattia is talking from an academic point of view but this a problem as what academia dismisses as 'outdated', 'redundant' etc, goes against what literature is all about. Should we eschew 19th century fiction and early 20th century fiction because it doesn't have references to pop culture or doesn't constantly refer to itself as text and so on and so forth? Surely acute psychological observations still have their place in literature? If we truly love literature and wish to see it's continuing propagation we can't and shouldn't omit writing because it was written before 1960. Ironically, for me, the best postmodern novels contain classical styles of writing and those sinuous reflective passages still have momentum and are a defence against postmodern doom and gloom. Indeed, we reflect on our lives more than we say "Toyota Celica" in our sleep lol.

[@gijsvanengelen]

I LOVE this book. I had to read it because I'm writing my thesis on the Great American Novel canon, and was less than excited initially. It's difficult to get into, but after that, it's a breeze, in my opinion. It's so much fun, so original. I have to say that it improves considerably when you read it within its "crisis of humanity" (see Mark Greif) and GAN-contexts: a return to the Huckleberry Finn archetype to reject the postwar "settled down", materialist, non-spiritual version of the American Dream, exposing its negation of the old Dream of dynamic adventure with a kind of picaresque. The design is very smart: Augie is a quintessential American, a pioneer hero, yet his defining feature is his refusal to climb the social ladder, which is completely un-American. Bellow was basically saying that the new American identity was completely un-American in the classical sense. (btw, you really think the language doesn't flow? I have never heard anyone say that before, everyone always goes on about its inventing postwar literary language: bookish, eloquent, yet with a certain swagger and colloquial speed)

[@TheBookchemist]

About the language - one should take the comment for what it is, considering who it comes from, but Kingsley Amis remarked about March that "it is painful to watch [Bellow] trying to pick his way between the unidiomatic on the one hand and the affected on the other."

[@gijsvanengelen]

Haha, funny indeed that an Amis would say so. His son thinks it's THE Great American Novel, btw. Mark Greif says that Bellow, in attempting to write a Great American Novel, "battered the lock until it gave", so I guess he agrees with Kingsley 😂

[@Lebowski55]

Thanks to Fionn Regan for introducing me to this book in his song Put A Penny In The Slot

[@Gabrielcezar94]

As for academia today... I don’t particularly get it either, but in a different sense. I feel people study and write their thesis about books not because they’re good or even great pieces of literature, but because they tackle themes that are “important”, meaning themes that, to the academics, have great social relevance. What ensues is that the art object serves merely as a crib for the exposition of the ideas a person wants to share; and this oftentimes goes for criticism in general as well... gone is aesthetic pleasure; now here we have “the book/film/album we ‘need’ right now”. And this to me just feels stupid.

[@TheBookchemist]

I agree! I firmly believe we are surrounded by social questions that need addressing and working on, but using the arts as a prop to address social questions does not do any favor either to the arts or to the social questions! (And falls into the neoliberal trap of trying to "justify the existence" of art criticism by saying how "helpful" it is. The state of criticism is one of the measures of how much we value our culture, and we should preserve it and fun it because of this, rather than out of a strange belief that it's going to solve our problems).

[@human.yoohoo4646]

Hey! Just wondering if you would ever reprise your "Best Book Ever" series and go further and share some of your thoughts on canonicity, yadda yadda ?

[@TheBookchemist]

I really should - I think I would have a lot of fun talking about it - but I would need to plan the series well and make something good out of it :) (I enjoyed filming my "Best Book Ever" series but I obviously only scratched the most superficial of surfaces with each of those books!)

[@human.yoohoo4646]

@@TheBookchemist regardless, very grateful for your videos-how they revamp my mood for reading and keep me on my toes as a reader!

[@GeorgeMillerUSA]

Please review Don DeLillo's The Silence. This is my first DeLillo and I would like to hear your thoughts on it.

[@crowdofdissidents155]

I'm a new subscriber, and I really enjoy your videos. Just started my PhD in lit.

[@TheBookchemist]

Best of luck with it :)

[@joaoluizsiqueiraclemente8743]

How about, while we're talking about difficult and rewarding books, a review of a Thomas Mann or José Saramago novel

[@TheBookchemist]

Funny you should mention - one of those is coming next ;)

[@joaoluizsiqueiraclemente8743]

@@TheBookchemist glad to hear that. I can't wait :)

[@dhritimangiri4092]

Thank you😀😀

[@jeanlobrot]

Saul bellows greatest shortcoming was being the father of Adam bellow

[@rubeng9092]

Don't forget Gaddis in this discussion! Go read the Recognitions!

[@vasari9198]

I cannot take seriously anyone who organises his or her books by colour.

[@rishabhaniket1952]

The adventures of Augie March…..well not so ‘adventurous’ it seems. That’s a great line bro😂

[@RichardTasgal]

I'm totally with you that the philosophical reflections in Augie get way out of hand. Not only is there often no good reason for including them, but they don't fit the character. Augie's career development is too extreme and not very believable to me. In contrast, the same sort of philosophical reflections are done better and in a way that fully fits the characters in Herzog, which is one of my very favorite books. In contrast to Augie, I found all of Herzog completely believable. If only Herzog had been published first....

[@deane2473]

This was a great review. It seemed like you'd fallen into a pattern of vague compliments and minimal critique on some of your latest reviews, this was a fantastic departure!!

[@parvathyram4054]

😍👍🏼

[@benjaminrevol54]

Yes

[@christinacascadilla4473]

Na-boak-off...

[@NCbassfishing24]

It's not like pronouncing that Russian name in any American/non-Russian way would be "correct" either.