Reviews for More Die of Heartbreak

The average rating for More Die of Heartbreak based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-10-03 00:00:00 Terrie Mclachlan “ARE YOU UNHAPPY, DARLING?” MORTICIA: “OH, YES! YES, COMPLETELY.” -Uncle Benn’s favourite Charles Addams Cartoon, quoted in More Die of Heartbreak. I’m going out on a limb on this one.... It was one of my absolute FAVOURITES from the pen of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow! It’s from the soul of a man who had seen all the incredible folly and pain of life close up - from the depths of a deeply hurt but all-forgiving Heart. And he was not afraid to laugh out loud at it all! I found its plot entirely believable - and you know, a LOT of outlandish things seem ENTIRELY credible to an old guy like me, after all I’ve been through. Before I met my wife in 1977? Heartbreaks galore. So like Morticia! Many of my readers may have been broken early on in life’s journey in a manner similar to my own experience... For when life breaks you like a mere twig, what do you do? You do like I did... You try to make good friendships for yourself! That helps to ease the pain. But MY mistake was being a bit too friendly with my enemies, the social predators in the circle of my real-world acquaintances. That’s commonly known as ‘currying favour.’ What does that expression mean? You may not know this, but it means to disarm our potential enemies by ‘grooming’ their strengths (as with a ‘curry-comb’ for horses). In other words, we FLATTER THEIR VANITY. What started out sounding charitable NOW seems like a cowardly form of self-protection. Because in reality, we’re just feeding the fire. We’re making our enemies STRONGER. Just as trouble awaits us when we do this, so it always crouches for attack at Uncle Benn. He creates much more trouble for himself than he ever had by currying favour with the predators around him. Like his craftily unscrupulous Uncle Vizzner. Or his wealthy fiancée herself - both ready to tilt unwary Benn’s wagon over - into A World of Hurt. Love Bites. And love Bleeds (an’ it’s driving ole’ Benn to his Knees)! Its main characters - Benn and Kenneth - are endearing, and the epic aporia at its core is universally true. Because it’s our very own first, lasting and ultimately untie-able Knot: Original Sin! And that is universally true, because we’ve all forgotten we’re only human and we’re all castaways in life. We’ve got the misbegotten idea into our heads that LIFE SHOULD BE FUN. Aporia, because we all keep creating inescapable spider webs of self-deceit out of the barren Fact of our Fall from Grace - to assuage our guilt at being born human! It’s so true! Benn and Kenneth’s story, though, may seem to you a bit TOO human and lost. Like those chocolates in a box that surprise us by being hard on the outside but gooey in the middle.... In a busy, busy world like ours there’s minimal tolerance for people who overtly wear their hearts on their sleeves. Know what? Bellow’s holding a MIRROR in front of our outwardly set but inwardly, endlessly emoting faces... hard but gooey! Like us, neither Benn nor his young nephew Kenneth know themselves too well - or their own spider webs - so their emotions are at loose ends, when they’re alone. And that’s most of the time. And when they’ve found someone in their lives? MUCH WORSE. Pessoa, at least, was honest enough to AGREE that he was at loose ends when alone - but acutely antsy in public! Are WE so honest? Like Benn & Kenneth, we know our chosen fields of work well, and we’re attracted to certain kinds of attractive people, but we don’t know themselves WELL ENOUGH to make relationships more than things that just don’t work. Bellow portrays B&K exactly that way - and the result is devilishly comical. I think he intended his story as a double-edged sword - that not only slices clean through Benn and Kenneth, but all those of us who tend to take ourselves too seriously! And I’m no exception. I still SQUIRM when I think of Uncle Benn’s tragicomic tale. But still, Bellow’s Human Comedy is so much easier to take than Balzac’s unsettled group of tragicomedies, because we are more likely to see ourselves in Bellow’s opus - with a dash of spicy fun. And relatively happy endings. Both Balzac and Bellow were in the same ballpark, though. But Bellow downplays the sorrow - and because he sees Benn and his nephew as such decent, lost souls, and because all their close calls seem stage-managed by their Guardian Angels, Life seems to let them off lightly. And they come out of these near- misses with evil-minded people IN ONE COMICAL PIECE. If you have a crowded mind, you will get claustrophobia from this book. It can suffocate you if you’re not relaxed. But I’ve got an idea... Read this gem during a getaway dream vacation after all this current fuss is over, when all your cares and anxieties have vanished, far from the madding crowd. At a distance from all the hubbub, you’ll get a good chuckle over how HILARIOUS our own hard Human Comedy can be - ON THE EBULLIENT SURFACE. And you may recover a bit of your lost, more sticky, side too, when you see your own hidden, sweet, gooey centre beneath - as if for the first time. Don’t it make you squirm? Good - Bellow’s done his job!

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-28 00:00:00 Michael Craig The novel More Die of Heartbreak is a dark intellectual satire written in Saul Bellow’s idiosyncratic highbrow style. It is a story of two modest savants – an uncle and his nephew… According to one of his colleagues, and colleagues are generally the last to say such things, Benn was a botanist of a “high level of distinction.” I don’t suppose that this will cut much ice with most people. Why should they care about the histogenesis of the leaf, or adventitious roots? I wouldn’t myself, if it hadn’t been for Uncle. Scientists? Unless they do cancer research or guide you through the universe on television, like Carl Sagan, what is there to them? The public wants heart transplants, it wants a cure for AIDS, reversals of senility. It doesn’t care a hoot for plant structures, and why should it? Sure it can tolerate the people who study them. A powerful society can always afford a few such types. They’re relatively inexpensive too. It costs more to keep two convicts in Stateville than one botanist in his chair. But convicts offer much more in the way of excitement – riot and arson in the prisons, garroting a guard, driving a stake through the warden’s head. That’s an uncle – a shy widowed botanist. Being busy, fully booked, having a flooded mental switchboard night and day, seems necessary for self-respect in certain circles. I have so many irons in the fire that if I had a hundred fingers I’d burn them all. Like my father before me, I do lots of traveling. Less than Uncle Benn, who is a demon traveler himself, but far too much. Knowledge of Russian will get you into politics (on the dark side) if you have a taste for thinking you’re behind the scenes. So many institutes, intelligence agencies, consultantships. I could do a conference a week if I wanted to. And that’s a nephew – a humble philologist, connoisseur of Russian culture of the turn of the century and the narrator of the story. The uncle and his nephew are close, they seem to have no secrets to keep from each other… Unexpectedly, unbeknownst to his nephew, the uncle marries the woman from a rich family… Botany was the big thing. Yet it had a rival, which was female sexuality. He couldn’t leave the women alone. When he traveled around the world, his professional cover was roots, leaves, stems and flowers, but actually there was a rival force of great strength. Part of his Eros had been detached from plants and switched to girls. And what girls! A phoenix who runs after arsonists! was my spontaneous and startling thought. Burnt to the ground, reincarnated from the ashes. And after all, every return of desire is a form of reincarnation. The world of corrupted love, the world of corrupted morals, the world of corrupted politics: the scientists find themselves in the alien milieu – they are like a pair of katydids fallen into a pond full of frogs. Walking a straight road one should stick to what one knows – a single step sideways and one will be lost in the world of falsehood.