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The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Modern Classics) by: Saul Bellow List Price: £10.99 City Travel Guides Price: £8.49 You Save: £2.50 (23%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 813 EAN: 9780141184869 ISBN: 0141184868 Label: Penguin Classics Manufacturer: Penguin Classics Number Of Pages: 560 Publication Date: October 25, 2007 Publisher: Penguin Classics Studio: Penguin Classics Sales Rank: 22231 Related Items:
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 Rating: - A poor kid from Chicago wades through the 1930s questioning life, love and how he should live. 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 and well read, he lacks the specialist skills and 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 and helping to train an eagle with his then girlfriend in Mexico. The realist style of ... Read More: Rating:  - A verbal feastSaul 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 ... Read More: Rating: - Bellow resurrects the idea of adventure in an urban setting.A brilliant portrayal of a young man trying to learn to live within his world. The experiences and encounters of Augie are vivid and richly colored. There is a wonderful freshness, almost vivaciousness, imparted to a tired and economically depressed Chicago. The very idea of adventure in an urban setting seems almost puerile perhaps to many, but Bellow perceives the existence of challenge and life in the run-down and 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' Rating: - Augie March- the all-american kidIn 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 ... Read More: Rating: - A genuine life-enricherI 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 ... Read More: |
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