The Adventures of Augie March (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) | Saul Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) | Saul Bellow | An American Columbus...

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	The Adventures of Augie March (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) Saul Bellow Penguin Classics, 1996 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A remarkable achievement

This novel provided a breakthrough in American literature when it was published in 1953. Bellow's fluid--and often florid--inner consciousness writing contains echoes of Walt Whitman, of learning pounded into students of the Old Testament, and of Greek myth. Best of all, his early chapters bring to life 1920s Chicago, the Jewish tenements, the old world condescension and superior attitude of Augie's grandmother, and of life on the streets, just as the film "Once Upon a Time in America" does for Robert De Niro's Bronx character, "Noodles." I marked any number of passages and lines that struck me as superior, too many to quote.

Where the novel goes astray, I believe, is in the episodes set in Mexico (with Thea and her eagle) and in France. The story comes alive only in the Chicago of Augie's inner life, with companions such as Dingbat, Augie's employer, the paraplegic father-figure Einhorn, the gangsters, gamblers and cheats, of his strange relationship with his brothers, the fortune-hunting Simon and the imbecile Georgie, and of his women, Lucy Magnus, Thea, and his wife, Stella.

Bellow used enough real events, such as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929 and the GM sit-down strike of 1937, to hold the attention of anyone interested in history, but he personalizes these events with poignant episodes of home life and the hard times his character survived. There is enough autobiographical detail in the novel to fill out the reader's impression of early Bellow, and if that isn't enough, his earlier work, "Dangling Man," completes the task.

There was a time when "page-turner" meant a boring book, one that the reader skims through. Nowadays it means a gripping read. This novel is a definite page-turner of the latter type. Augie constantly searches for meaning in his life, for strength of character he feels he lacks, and for something better than the "reality" we know about. As he has Thea say, "There must be something better than what people call reality."

Although I haven't yet read the later Bellow novels, it seemed to me as I put this one down that he began a philosophical search with this early book, and that he probably never completed the journey. I intend to follow him on his way.

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An American Columbus...

I have stopped reading Bellow. Because he is dead and wont be writing any more, and I am only 19 and still have most of my life in front of me and a limited number of his books to read.
Augie March is a not a flawless work, but it does embody every theme
that makes a book by Saul Bellow unique. Sentences that are long and deeply descriptive and, literally leave you breathless. He describes not characters but souls. People you can see and hear, not just static figures. At the end of his novels, you will know these people better than you know most real people.
Augie March, an illegitimate child, with his two brothers and mother, under the strict supervision of Grandma Lausch , their tenant, grows up in Chicago and has many adventures along the way to discovering the meaning of life, his life. That's the story, spanning probably thirty years of his life. Whether he finds it is left ambiguous.

Anthony Burgess once wrote that a novels worth is measured by the philosophical residue it leaves behind. On that basis alone, Augie March would be one of the best novels written in this century. In society, our worth is measured by achievements. Both the March brothers realize this :One marries a rich woman and forms a large business, grows rich, fat and unhappy, while the other takes his own route or rather paves his path as he goes along. Augie March, becomes a book-thief, an eagle trainer, Trotsky's bodyguard(or nearly), and finally gets stuck on a job as a war profiteer, never aligning himself to a particular ideology, and generally `fitting in others peoples plans.' Augie is not a stereotype, angry and disillusioned, but rather more sensitive, somebody with real depth. Towards the end he does have his epiphany, he finds his `axial lines', but is not able to put it to any practical use.

Definitely the book could have 50-pages shorter, March's exploits in Mexico and his abandonment on a boat with a sociopath who has an interesting theory on boredom, are over the top. But nobody but Bellow could have written about youth and the longing for greatness, or at least a meaningful life.
Augie March takes the lead among Citrine, Herzog, Henderson in the group of characters that Bellow created, men who want something more than this world could provide and dared to go out and find it. To bad he wont create any more...

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Long Saga of a Young Man Growing Up in Chicago and Elsewhere in the World

Augie March is Saul Bellow.

What an effective technique, writing a novel about yourself, an autobiography really, because you can play with the facts and draw on your experience to make the best of both worlds. It has to be such, because this long book is full of so much intimate detail.

Oh, of course, Augie March's adventures are not all true, not all of them. It's fictionalized for effect, but it's just truer in some respects than many novels. Maybe that also explains why it seems to drag and get boring so often.

Knowing nothing of Saul Bellow's life, I can't really say how much Saul and Augie resemble each other, but I'm sure there's a knowledgeable English professor out there somewhere who has studied and written about Bellow, his life, his works, and their interweaving.

Those who can't do, teach, or maybe they write. Augie admits that he can't do much, so he writes to fill up the empty space in his life.

Augie narrates the entire story in the first person, just as an autobiographer does. However, Augie is not an "important" personage, at least not in the public's eye, so his story is "fiction," so to speak.

However, it is interesting. This is my first reading of Bellow. I know he became highly respected as he continued to write, and I do intend to read more of his oeuvre.

He's verbose and a little confusing at times, but nevertheless, he's interesting, him and Augie both, Augie being his alter ego.

Augie March is the second son in a small and relatively poor family. His father has disappeared. His mother is passive and a surrogate grandmother moves in to rule the young household. This all takes place on Chicago's South Side toward the end of the 1930's, and we then follow Augie through the end of the Second World War, when he ends up in Paris helping to run some kind of black market operation on surplus Army supplies.

Augie's brother, Simon, marries into a family with money and then makes his own fortune. In the book's last chapter, we get the denouement of Simon's life story, an ill-fated tryst with a paramour who then tries to sue him.

Augie, meanwhile, meanders here and there, in a seemingly aimless path, keeping a journal because of all the free time he has, so he tells us.

He takes up with various women, rich and poor, does some petty crime with an old homeboy, and reads constantly, whenever he can, educating himself.

He breaks a bone falling off a horse while training an eagle in Mexico with his girlfriend, so the military will not accept him, and instead, he joins the Merchant Marines. His boat is blown to bits and he finds himself, along with the ship's carpenter, as the lone two survivors, as far as they know. This part is hard to believe, among other parts, but who cares? It's real enough.

All through his narration, Augie gives us various philosophical tidbits to think about, for example, when he and his boat mate, the ship's carpenter who has a degree in biophysics or some such are discussing why humans get bored and amoebas don't. A question I often ask myself, sort of.

Or Augie writes: "People don't do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to...(for example) If they're good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni...It's having to prove full and ultimate self-sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don't need anyone else to do these things for you."

This little bit of Augie's philosophy really hit home with me, and it described my feelings "to a tee" (so to speak).

Augie's romantic experiences never quite spill over into the profane or pornographic, but they get close. He travels to a small town outside of Mexico City (Acatla) to be with one sweetheart, a rich and eccentric young woman who finally jilts him, though he was first untrue to her.

There are too many other characters in Augie's narration to even keep track of. I started highlighting people's names, to help me remember them, because they keep recurring, just as people come and go in each of our lives. Nevertheless, it did not help: I still could not keep everyone straight in Augie's long story.

Augie's brother, Simon, stands out, and his mentor, Einhorn, the crippled man who still manages to make it the best way he can. The Mexican, Padilla, is an interesting character, an apparent mathematical genius, and with a good heart.

Augie's women are not very appealing. His mother is kindly but seemingly lost due in part to loss of vision as she aged. Grandma Lausch is too much of an autocrat, small kingdom or no.

Augie's Greek girlfriend, Sofie, seems good-hearted and she certainly was not a prude.

Stella, a minor actress whom he ends up marrying after meeting her in Mexico, is pleasant, up to a point, but later Augie learns about her "sugar daddy" and a little habit Stella has of not telling the truth.

Anyway, the crux of the matter is that, if you like long and involved novels, that go nowhere and everywhere at the same time, this is your book.

It's nothing like the quick and dirty novels that cloy the best-seller lists today, but it should hold up over time, especially for the unique perspective of Augie March, aka Saul Bellow, growing up in the Chicago of that era.

In that geographic respect, Augie/Saul share Chicago with Nelson Algren, although he was a little bit later in sequence, and with Nelson's friend, Studs Terkel, the "working" person's writer.

Diximus.

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Tastes like Chicago

A dense novel, requires chewing but will fill you up. Real characters and relevant situations. More character driven than plot. You will be too full for dessert.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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