Review of More Die of Heartbreak (Paperback)

An man long devoted to intellectual pursuits comes down from his ivory tower in a final bid for love, but finds himself defenseless in the real world, where people do not understand him but are happy to harness his prestige for their own purposes.Benn Crader is a world famous botanist, but he also is a soft-hearted man, as you will know when you encounter the quotation that includes the book's title.Will the great scientist protect his special intellectual gifts, or will he allow the pressures of his new, very materialistic adopted family to destroy him?It's a great premise for a novel, and Bellow covers many, many of its implications and takes the story to a logical yet surprising ending.Bellow's narrator, Crader's admiring nephew, often takes off on tangents to ruminate on current events, the contemporary intellectual scene and various intellectual pursuits.Some of these tangents seem to fit into the story better than others, and once in a while I got frustrated and found myself paging ahead to see when he would stop ruminating and start telling the darn story again.Yet Bellow's intellectual meanderings include many interesting observations about life, and taken as a whole, they help to build a textured world around the story."More Die of Heartbreak" is not a literary classic, but it is worth reading.



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Review of More Die of Heartbreak (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This isn't the one to choose if you've never read Bellow. Seize the Day (think brevity) is the place to start. From there, Henderson the Rain King, Humboldt's Gift, or Herzog make the best long reads. Augie March is the most renowned, but a good 200 pages too long if you ask me. After that, Mr. Sammler's Planet rounds out the best of Bellow. Dangling Man and The Victim are quite different from the rest, and are most interesting (I think) as points of reference to watch the evolution of a great mind.

More Die of Heartbreak ranks with The Dean's December and Ravelston as books to read only if you've already fallen for Bellow. Or, I suppose, if you're interested in reading what a Nobel Laureate thinks about sex.(For there is no book in which he tackles the topic more directly than this).There are times when the author seems to lose even himself in the mad confusion that spills from Ken Trachtenberg's head. This, I believe, would be enough to drive impatient readers away from Bellow.

But More Die of Heartbreak, like all of Bellow's work, lifts the reader above the mundane. Its force doesn't come from plot, but observation. His gift is to take the ordinary, the accepted, and acceptable and expose it for something extraordianry, corrupt, or even contemptible. His success, I think, comes from a steadfast and good-natured optimism in the face of Western decline.


Product Description
Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of More Die of Heartbreak, has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described "plant visionary." While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from "bliss to breakdown." Imagining that a settled existence will end his anguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood of new torments. As Kenneth grapples with his own problems involving his unusual lady-friend Treckie, the two men try to figure out why gifted and intelligent people invariably find themselves "knee-deep in the garbage of a personal life."

About the Author
Saul Bellow, the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards, is the author of numerous novels, novellas, and short stories, including The Adventures of Augie March and Humboldt's Gift.

Martin Amis is a bestselling author whose many works include Time's Arrow, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and, most recently, Yellow Dog.

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