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(88 reviews)
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ISBN : B0011T1SA0
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Augie is a poor but exuberant boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression. While his friends all settle into chosen professions, Augie demands a special destiny. He tests out a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each as too limiting - until he tangles with the glamorous perfectionist Thea.
Books with free ebook downloads available Epub The Adventures of Augie March [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 22 hours and 18 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: December 19, 2007
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0011T1SA0
Epub The Adventures of Augie March
For what has been widely described as both a picaresque and coming-of-age novel, Augie March is neither a quick read nor an easy one. Okay, there's no rule that requires novels in these categories to be either. But still and all, one somehow feels uneasy, given the various changes in locale and steady aging of the protagonist, that Bellow (or Augie) so steadfastly refuses to get on with it already. Much of the novel is rendered in a convoluted narrative style-Augie's voice-that may be termed ornate. Or off-putting. Or ornately off-putting. Intended to echo, presumably, the Yiddish, German and Russian speech patterns Augie grows up hearing in Chicago during the twenties and thirties, this narrative device may in fact do that; but its syntactical wanderings soon begin to remind one, whatever their authenticity, of the criticism once leveled at Henry Luce's beloved Timestyle: "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind." Lexicon also figures in the curious mix, as words are combined in unexpected ways-sometimes cleverly (and with a kind of mini-revelation effect: you mean you can say that?) but just as often, apparently, randomly--just for the heck of it. Augie likes to talk (write), and what comes out, comes out:
"Many repeated pressures with the same effect as one strong blow, that was [Einhorn's] method, he said, and it was his special pride that he knew how to use the means contributed by the age to connive as ably as anyone else; when in a not so advanced time he'd have been mummy-handled in a hut or somebody might have had to help him be a beggar in front of a church, the next thing to a memento mori or, more awful, a reminder of what difficulties there were before you could even become dead."
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When I was a kid, some of my classmates already knew what they wanted to be. They marched in a straight line towards the goal. I, however, never knew what I wanted to do. I liked studying, but had no vision of a future. I drifted along and climbed into whatever boats came within reach. Augie March is a young Chicagoan from a broken home, who drifts with the tides as well, in the period 1927-1947. He winds up smuggling illegal immigrants, stealing books, travelling to Mexico, trying to train an eagle to catch iguanas, and playing poker. After a few good, bad and indifferent experiences with women, he joins the Merchant Marine during World War II, gets married to a would-be actress, and survives a ship torpedoing. When we leave Augie, he's making illegal business deals in Europe. Has he ever made a really conscious decision ? It's not clear. Bellow's novel is full of humor, philosophy, and insights on life. For example, on page 305 --"But I had the idea also that you don't take so wide a stand that it makes a human life impossible, nor try to bring together irreconciliables that destroy you, but try out what of human you can live with first."
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH is an almost endless literary parade of portraits, of weird and wonderful characters from many walks of life. It's like a pilgrimage back in time to another America, another age---perhaps more innocent in some respects, but not so smooth, not so well-rounded, a thrusting, struggling America where raw money power arbited so much. Even though the book could have been cut down a bit here and there because 617 pages is overlong, Bellow's novel will remain a classic of American and world fiction for two reasons. First, because human nature scarcely changes.