Ravelstein Audiobook By Saul Bellow cover art

Ravelstein

Preview
Try for $0.00
Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.

Ravelstein

By: Saul Bellow
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $11.87

Buy for $11.87

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent Midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously - and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas that sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein’s own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire.

Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.

Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow’s new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.

©2015 Saul Bellow (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Biographical Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological France
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup
All stars
Most relevant  
Not for the self-righteous or indignant reader - better than Wilde’s Dorian Gray for those who love Allan Bloom - a treasure for the ages. Blooms trembling hand spills champagne on the pages of philosophy and the reader. Full of love from Bellow to Bloom and back again 🎩🍾

If Voltaire did a bio of Plato

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This is a roman à clef of an apparently authorized biography of the philosopher Allen Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind) where the names have been changed to protect the author or publisher.

While I was reading this book, even at the end, I did not feel this was the best of Bellow - there was really no storyline. Yet, as time went by, the novel, particularly the two friends, Bloom and Bellow, suck with me. The humorous juxtaposition of the brilliant Bellow with the astoundingly brilliant Bloom, along with the American Jewish mystic does make this a Bellow classic.

The narrator was up to these challenging prose.

Grew on me after finishing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Not much else to say, a beautifully written, simple story.

Through Ravelstein we learn about life, legacy, death, sickness, pleasure, and money, without ever noticing.

A wonderful portrait of a human being

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

A wonderful book that I found to be exciting and interesting to get through. I found this book to be developmental and maturative for a young man coming of age such as myself. I very much enjoyed this book and further highly recommend it.

A great book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I seem to have mixed up console and Saul Bellow. and I chose this title thinking it was a thriller. though this is not the book I would have thought out of my own I did greatly enjoy it.

wrong Saul

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.