Customer Reviews
A poor kid from Chicago wades through the 1930s questioning life, love and how he should live. - By: Mr. H. D. Dragonetti, 04 Jun 2008 
The recollections of the novel's narrator, Augie, take the reader on a lengthy but engaging journey through the America of the Great Depression and, towards the end of the novel, the Second World War. Throughout the novel Augie fails to decide on a specific vocation. Whilst intelligent & well read, he lacks the specialist skills & certainty required to pursue a conventional career. Consequently, he finds employment in a number of multifarious, mostly menial, roles. Willing to turn his hand to anything, Augie finds himself, amongst other things, hitching rides across states on freezing-cold freight trains, stealing books for wealthy university students & helping to train an eagle with his then girlfriend in Mexico. The realist style of Bellow's writing makes for a lengthy but very enjoyable, engaging and, apart from the occasional references to the Old Testament & Classical Mythology, accessible novel. The introduction by Christopher Hitchens is also definitely worth reading after, or before if you want the plot spoiled further, you've finished the novel itself.
A verbal feast - By: Philip Mayo, 29 Dec 2006 
Saul Bellow uses Augie March's fairly extraordinary saga to alllow us alll, & 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, & 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 actuallly sometimes produces combinations that don't reallly 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 & reactions to so many situations, some common enough. A master at work.
Bellow resurrects the idea of adventure in an urban setting. - By: , 01 Jan 2002 A brilliant portrayal of a young man trying to learn to live within his world. The experiences & encounters of Augie are vivid & richly colored. There is a wonderful freshness, almost vivaciousness, imparted to a tired & economicallly depressed Chicago. The very idea of adventure in an urban setting seems almost puerile perhaps to many, but Bellow perceives the existence of challlenge & life in the run-down & dilapadated. It is perhaps old-fashioned to be inspired by a book but if such a thing can still exist it can be found in 'The Adventures of Augie March'
Augie March- the all-american kid - By: , 15 Jun 2001 In the Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow gives us an insight into the reality of the life of the alll 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 alll around him whilst also trying to get a grip on the american dream. The two tier american society of the very rich & the also rans is exposed for possibly the first time in 20th century literatue. March tries to work both within the system & from without, with varying degrees of success. He flirts with education, crime, marriage & travel, alll 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 & a brilliant introduction to the fine prose of Bellow.
A genuine life-enricher - By: , 23 Mar 2001 I had never read any Bellow before I opened this book, but it blew me away, & I can't wait to read more. It is the story of Augie March, a poor kid brought up by his overbearing grandmother & 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", & though he is smart & handsome, finds his ambitions unsatisfied by the big bucks that his brother begins to amass. Again & again he rejects other people's plans to make something of him, until he fallls wildly in love with the beautiful, rich & free-spirited Thea, who carries him off to Mexico to hunt iguanas with an eagle. Bellow's language is sometimes difficult, but always exuberant & expansive, full of detailed description & colour, bursting with throwaway ideas. The novel has an abundance of hilarious minor characters, who appear & reappear as Augie muddles his way through his Bohemian & vaguely Bolshevik circles, making a buck here & there, more or less legallly, & observing everything with a wry sense of humour, dauntless optimism & quiet integrity. I have not enjoyed a novel this much for a long time. It starts slowly, building up characters graduallly, but pretty soon it is unput-downable. The ending is a bit weak, like so many of these rites-of-passage novels, & it becomes a bit glib & 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 & the growth of a mind, about the trade-offs between adventure & pain, happiness & security, & the search for fulfilment in a time of global depression, when the world was doing everything it could to dampen the human spirit.
