Ravelstein
Ravel Stone is the last novel of the Nobel Prize for Literature joist Saul Bellow . The original edition was published in the United States in 2000, and a German translation in Cologne that same year.
action
The work, designed as a key novel, tells of the friendship between two university professors. The narrator appears as one of these professors who writes his memoirs after the death of the other due to AIDS .
This other, the protagonist and titular of the work, is Abe Ravelstein, a character who is closely based on Saul Bellow's friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom , who taught at the same time and partly together with Bellow on the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. The dazzling figure of Ravelstein, an academic star with political influence, exuberant education; homosexual, chain-smoking and gossip-addicted, dominates the novel, which accompanies the AIDS-infected protagonist until his death. Ravelstein appears as one of the last Renaissance personalities to be found at modern universities.
In addition to Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow also portrayed other prominent academics in Ravelstein, such as Bloom's teacher Leo Strauss as "Felix Davarr", Werner Dannhauser as "Morris Herbst" or Mircea Eliade as "Radu Grielescu".
literature
- Saul Bellow: Ravelstein. Viking Press, New York 2000, ISBN 978-0-670-84134-9 .
- Saul Bellow: Ravelstein. German by Willi Winkler . Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2000. ISBN 978-3-462-02919-2 .