The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow wrote The Adventures of Augie March.  Some reviewers liken it to a modern day Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I don't really agree with that.  For one thing, modern day would have to take place in this century, not during the great depression.  And Huckleberry Finn was great because of the river, the nature, the wild open spaces.  Augie spends most of his time in Chicago, Mexico, and the big cities of Europe.  The book follows Augie as he grows from a young boy in Chicago to a middle aged man.  Saul Bellow has a way with words.  Sometimes, after hearing a complicated sentence, I would have to pause the book on CD to decipher the meaning word by word because the language was so colorful and ripe.  Bellows makes lots of literary references and I am sure an English Lit major would get a lot more out of the book than I did.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this story that Time Magazine says belongs in the 100 best novels.  Augie was a complicated character.  Many times people would talk him into doing things that he really didn't want to do.  The trip to Mexico, for example, was to train a bald eagle to hunt iguanas.  Augie knew this plan would not pay out but he went along anyway; he was in love. Bellows spent many pages describing exactly how the eagle was trained.  Augie and his girlfriend picked up the eagle in Missouri and traveled with it into Mexico so it could hunt in the mountains.  The eagle rode in the back of a station wagon.  Of course the couple and the eagle made a big stir when they would stop for the night in a town.  Augie's girlfriend is the trainer.  Both had to build trust with the eagle and train it to listen for their voices.  Eventually the proud American bald eagle, tethered and wearing a hood. became a trained pet.  People are not allowed to keep bald eagles for hunting anymore and I, for one, am glad of this.  But it was fascinating to read about it.  This was a really good book.