Product Description

Augie March is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A 'born recruit', he latches on to a wild succession of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as too limiting. Not until he tangles with the glamorous Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, is his independence seriously threatened. He goes on to recruit himself to even more outlandish projects, but always ducks out in time to continue improvising his unconventional career. Augie March is the star performer ina richly observed human variety show, a modern-day Columbus in search of reality and fulfilment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45889 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

About the Author
SAUL BELLOW's dazzling career as a novelist has been marked with numerous literary prizes, including the 1976 Nobel Prize, and the Gold Medal for the Novel. His other books include The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, More Die of Heartbreak, Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize The Day and The Victim. Saul Bellow died in 2005. Christopher Hitchens (b. 1949) is among the best known and most controversial figures in contemporary media. He is a prolific author, journalist, literary critic, and public intellectual who is often described as a "contrarian". Hitchens has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Nation, Slate and an occasional contributor to many other publications.

Customer Reviews

A genuine life-enricher
I had never read any Bellow before I opened this book, but it blew me away, and I can't wait to read more. It is the story of Augie March, a poor kid brought up by his overbearing grandmother and downtrodden mother in 1930s Chicago. As he grows into maturity, he starts to make ends meet on the very edge of the law, doing odd jobs, working for a series of well-meaning but self-important grandees who try to make him into a big success. But Augie has "opposition", and though he is smart and handsome, finds his ambitions unsatisfied by the big bucks that his brother begins to amass. Again and again he rejects other people's plans to make something of him, until he falls wildly in love with the beautiful, rich and free-spirited Thea, who carries him off to Mexico to hunt iguanas with an eagle. Bellow's language is sometimes difficult, but always exuberant and expansive, full of detailed description and colour, bursting with throwaway ideas. The novel has an abundance of hilarious minor characters, who appear and reappear as Augie muddles his way through his Bohemian and vaguely Bolshevik circles, making a buck here and there, more or less legally, and observing everything with a wry sense of humour, dauntless optimism and quiet integrity. I have not enjoyed a novel this much for a long time. It starts slowly, building up characters gradually, but pretty soon it is unput-downable. The ending is a bit weak, like so many of these rites-of-passage novels, and it becomes a bit glib and conceptual. But the first 350 pages represent some of the finest twentieth-century writing in English that I have read. It is a novel about the limits of the soul and the growth of a mind, about the trade-offs between adventure and pain, happiness and security, and the search for fulfilment in a time of global depression, when the world was doing everything it could to dampen the human spirit.

Augie March- the all-american kid
In the Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow gives us an insight into the reality of the life of the all american kid. March is a jewish kid growing up on the wrong side of the tracks during depression time Chicago. He strives to do his best by all around him whilst also trying to get a grip on the american dream. The two tier american society of the very rich and the also rans is exposed for possibly the first time in 20th century literatue. March tries to work both within the system and from without, with varying degrees of success. He flirts with education, crime, marriage and travel, all with startling results. The Adventures of Augie March is as accuarte a portrayal of the difficulties of growing up underprivliged in the US today as it was sixty years ago. An excellent read and a brilliant introduction to the fine prose of Bellow.

A verbal feast
Saul Bellow uses Augie March's fairly extraordinary saga to allow us all, and probably himself too, to muse our ways through a succession of reflections on the human predicament. I would be surprised if most readers did not discover from time to time in these pages something of themselves; of their fears, hopes, dismay, despair, and perhaps resilience. It's a very rewarding read. Not that it's not difficult sometimes. In fact, either he, S.B., simply ratchets up his verbal dexterity beyond my reach from time to time, or could it be that his determination to find ever more complicated verbal chords actually sometimes produces combinations that don't really work. Certainly sometimes they don't work for me. But there are also passages of breathtaking effect which leave one to wonder how words can be crafted with such skill to describe with such extraordinary clarity our previously unvoiced (because by us un-voicable, if not un-thinkable) feelings and reactions to so many situations, some common enough. A master at work.