Herzog by Saul Bellow (PDF)

Description

Moses E. Herzog, the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s Herzog finds himself in a pickle. He may be handsome, witty and wise, but his wife has just taken off with his best friend, and he is without resources to face his troubles. What is an academic to do when his personal life turns to chaos? Well this one writes letters—to enemies and friends, the living and the dead, politicians and philosophers—and even to God, though this last, along with the others, remains undelivered. An eccentric and vivid crowd of family and friends, keen to intervene as “reality instructors”, make things a lot worse for Herzog. And there’s no help in the books he has spent a lifetime studying. As Herzog’s comic predicament unfolds, we enter a mind as dazzling and brilliant as it is turbulent and confused, and we come away from the encounter surprisingly moved and satisfied.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I appreciate the work of Saul Bellow but this is not his best best effort in my opinion. The book had it’s moments but dragged in places as well. Because of this I would recommend that you look at some of his other work before you attempt to tackle this one.

⭐There’s big-time grade inflation on this forum and no one is guiltier of this practice than me. I feel that if the book is entertaining, fits together tightly, stretches my thinking, and has passages of beauty, well, give it five stars. As the author of two novels that were finally self-published, I figure: Why make success even harder for the author?Within this context, I’d say that HERZOG is also a five-star book, except that it’s much much better. This is because in each of these categories–entertainment, structure, insight, and beauty–HERZOG is truly superb. It’s off the charts.The narrative line of HERZOG is simple. Essentially, this presents the thoughts and experiences of Moses Herzog over a few days as he travels from New York to Martha’s Vineyard, back to New York, then to Chicago and ultimately to the Berkshires.But as Herzog travels (and writes his zany letters), Bellow provides a spectrum of many characters who are both fully realized and who offer some choice to Herzog, which is somehow a reflection of, or parallel to, his own problems. The amazing thing about this is that these choices always come out of character. No one in HERZOG is simply a thin veil worn by Bellow to preach or to fill out a point in the argument.Can the universe be considered benevolent? Or is reality crazy, cruel, and mercenary? These are the questions that torment Herzog on his journey. Certainly, there are plenty of high-minded professorial letters, with Herzog heckling Nietzsche and so on. But many of these letters are simply educated fun and it’s the people that Herzog knows who really carry and explore the argument. It’s absolutely brilliant stuff.At the same time, Bellow organizes many of these characters in “V”. At one corner is Moses Herzog, a self-absorbed academic who, in his own mind, is benevolent albeit befuddled. At another is Madeline, his ex-wife, in whom craziness and selfishness mix in a single dark brew. Then, Bellow arranges his characters on this “V” so that differences gradually narrow and ultimately disappear in Herzog’s brother Willie, who helps Herzog at his nadir.Near the end of this novel, Herzog plays a game with his little daughter June: try to distinguish between the world’s shortest tall man and its tallest short man, its hairiest bald man and its baldest hairy man. Ultimately, this is also what Bellow does with his characters, showing that benevolence and pragmatism can finally exist in a single decent and sane person.The flawless structure of this novel, however, is only part of its brilliance. Here’s my favorite bit of Bellow’s prose. It’s funny, probably a professorial reference to Whitman, and straight out of Herzog’s character: “…what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home…”READ THIS GREAT BOOK

⭐Beautiful cover as well as the language. Bellow’s writing is slow and tends to be drawn out, but his usage of language and luring you into his world is unammountable and articulate.

⭐Herzog is a book about a middle aged man and his reflections on life. He’s had 2 failed marriages. He’s a somewhat itinerant academic. He thinks about philosophy and history and literature. He tries to make sense of things. Tries. There’s not a whole lot of plot. It meanders. Lots of him recollecting things, going off on mental tangents, to the point where most of the time I can’t tell where he is or what time of day it is. He talks to friends, lawyers, his daughter. He writes letters that he never sends to intellectuals, world leaders and anyone he’s in mind of. He ponders (a lot). Occasionally he looks around his environment – the train to the beach, a cab, graffiti, the store, etc.Cons – it’s rambling. I tried reading it a few times before I finally got through it. I kept waiting for something to start happening. I had to get past that expectation. Stuff does happen, but it’s buried under an exceptional amount of discursion. Much of what happens is just in Moses Herzog’s head.Pros – Rambling could also be considered, more charitably, as non-linear. Moses overthinks things, but this is something many people, if not all, can relate to. There is some good description. You get a certain feel for what life is like from the eyes of a particular individual. That is something I especially like from a book.In sum – I’m glad I read it, for the most part, but I wouldn’t say it left me wanting more. My guess is that a lot of people can’t get past the first chapter or two but that those that do really click with it. So the rating of the book is skewed that way. (Though maybe this is true for all books.)

⭐I found Herzog to be an unbearable book. The psychological analysis of Herzog as described by Below seems to me to be completely fake. The descriptions are long and repeating themselves. Bellow tries too hard to write a modern sophisticated book about a simple man. To some degree he seems to have “Ulysses” in mind when he wrote the book.I hesitated to write this review in light of the rave reviews the book received both from “experts” and from readers. But i recently finished the book “Stoner” by John Williams. That book is based on a rather similar “hero”, but Williams does not try to outsmart other writers and impress his readers with his vast knowledge of literature. He writes simply and believably about his “hero”. The contrast between the wonderful book “Stoner” and Bellow’s “Herzog” finally convinced me that reading Herzog is a waste of time. Read “Stoner” instead.

⭐This is partly an historical novel populating Chicago in the 1940s with cityscapes that can be followed today. These are all recorded by the ex-professor narrator in his mid-thirties, but looking back to his childhood as he navigates love affairs, divorce, a child-custody battle and relationships with his caring successful brothers. His somewhat unbalanced mind, as well as Bellows’ social and political convictions, is revealed through scores of letters he writes to famous authors, politicians, friends, enemies and acquaintances, none of which is ever mailed. These sustain his apparently deteriorating mind, symbolized by a house built in the remote Berkshires for his first marriage, but missing a secure foundation and later abandoned–still standing, but slowly reverting to its natural elements.

⭐Brilliant writing about a less than brilliant subject. Disjointed ravings of someone coming unhinged. Hard to see why Bellow won the Nobel Prize – especially when compared to Phillip Roth who truly is an amazing, best writer.

⭐I found Saul Bellow’s 1964 tale of mid-life crisis-obsessed, Moses Herzog, to be very much one on an increasing profile of engagement as the novel proceeds. Herzog’s early stream-of-consciousness ramblings and imagined letters to all and sundry (personal and famous figures), whilst generally indicating the man’s dissatisfaction with the state of his own personal and professional life, the USA and beyond, I found to be only marginally engaging and largely absent of any really compelling (or, certainly, sympathetic) characters. Not one to normally shy away from cynical world-views or even narrative negativity, I was at a loss to pinpoint what was for me lacking in Bellow’s widely-acclaimed tale. The turning point came when Herzog witnessed a tragic court case of parental abuse, seemingly shaking Bellow’s protagonist out of his internally-focussed malaise and prompting Herzog into some form of action, itself leading to a road accident and brush with the police. Thereafter, Herzog’s humanity breaks the surface, first in his dealings with his young daughter, Junie, and then in a beautifully poignant denouement, with his ‘lost’ brother, Willie, as Moses (and presumably Bellow) seems to recognise the value of dispensing with endless intellectual cogitation and instead attempting to reconnect with the human race at a more primal level. It was this transition that convinces me to stick with Bellow and to further explore the author’s work.

⭐Herzog is a cuckolded Jewish intellectual. Two marriages have failed. He has a child from each of them. The novel starts in the aftermath of his discovery that his wife Mady cheated on with him a close friend, Valentine Gersbach, a radio personality. Herzog writes letters – a lot of them – to public figures, dead people, anyone he can think of – pouring out his ruminations on the meaning of life. Mady appears to want to have him institutionalised – there are indications Herzog, first name Moses, is losing his mind. But he does have a beautiful new lover. Slowly he’s trying to piece his life back together again. Really this is a story about a midlife crisis. It’s not plot-driven though the closing sections – by far the best – contain most of the ‘incident’ in the novel. There are many brilliant lines. Bellow’s clearly a genius. But that doesn’t make it an easy read… it was, in truth, a bit of a slog… and for my money Updike’s much more compelling. As for Herzog, despite his bottomless self-pity, he’s done pretty well for himself, landing on his feet despite the emotional trauma of his Mady’s betrayal. I found him a bit of a pain. But there’s so much memorable writing here, and such a store of wisdom, that it is an incredible accomplishment. It’s also darkly funny, at times. There are clear echoes of Joyce. Overall, perhaps more a novel to admire than to enjoy…

⭐Herzog, more than any other, reveals James Joyce’s influence over the novels of Saul Bellow. It is for much of its length an internal conversation conducted by Moses Herzog with himself, some of which he occasionally commits to paper as part of a series of notes to personages both dead and alive, ranging from existentialist philosophers to his former sexual partners. He remembers his hardscrabble childhood, with his family’s migration from Canada to Chicago, echoing Bellow’s own, and the struggles of his father in making a living, including his foray into bootlegging which earns him a serious beating.Occasionally other people intrude. He spends a night with his latest girlfriend, Ramona. He rather creepily stalks his ex-wife Madeleine and her partner at her home one night, watching them through the window. He takes his daughter to the zoo carrying an antique pistol, loaded, wrapped in a blanket of czarist roubles, is involved in a minor car crash and finds himself in the police station charged with possession of an unlicensed weapon. In amongst this he travels around New York, Chicago and his country pile in the Berkshires.For the reader there is little doubt that Herzog is a little unhinged. How else to explain his resentment at the anger displayed by Madeleine when she collects their daughter from the police station? How else to explain the capricious wanderings by train, plane and automobile? How else to explain the compulsive scribblings?Some of Herzog’s musings reveal a streak of misogyny. It is not possible to say definitively that this reflected Bellow’s own attitudes, but some of the circumstances in the book reflect Bellow’s own at the time. His musings in particular on his treatment by Madeleine suggest it is she, not him, who is the crazy one; he twists her every action so it appears to him a part of a typical feminine conspiracy effected over a long period of time which somehow included marrying him and having his child just out of spite. In his later novel, Humboldt’s Gift, the protagonist Charlie Citrine finds himself strung along by Madeleine’s alter ego, Renata, who ends up dumping Citrine in favour of an undertaker. Ramona on the other hand ostensibly represents a different side of women, more nurturing, forgiving. But she, too, is able to dump lost causes, and it is possible to see Ramona and Renata, and therefore also Madeleine, as the same woman, just seen from different angles.Returning to this novel after forty years – my college dissertation addressed the works of Bellow – I was struck by how much it is a novel of its time. Published in 1964, it represents a time before the collapse of the post-second world war boom; the big battles of the Civil Rights struggles of the sixties were yet to come, and the counterculture was still in the wings. It is instructive to read it to acquire a sense of what in those days were common modes of discourse, even in the context of liberal art, on a variety of subjects. More prosaically, it is shocking to find Herzog being questioned in the police station, following his road accident, with an untreated head wound. Surely, it occurred to me, a cop nowadays would ensure somebody involved in such an incident would first receive medical attention to ensure there is no concussion? Different times, different priorities, apparently.Malcolm Bradbury, in the Introduction, suggests that this is Bellow’s best novel, but I don’t agree: Humboldt’s Gift I would say is better executed, has a more interesting worldview, and is also more amusing. Herzog has its moments, and is certainly a fine piece of literature, but four decades on I was less captivated by rereading this than I was when I reread Humboldt’s Gift a couple of years ago. But all that means is that it’s worth trying both to see if it’s me or Malcolm you agree with.

⭐We follow a middle-aged academic as he writes countless unsent letters to friends and luminaries, dead and alive, while travelling around New York and elsewhere, contemplating his imminent divorce.Less a novel of ideas than a novel about a man who is in love with ideas, this is one of Bellow’s most celebrated works, with a typically verbose and pensive protagonist. Moses Herzog is a shambling intellectual, a university lecturer without a permanent position; a man who gives the impression of poverty, despite being a property-owner who is able to book air journeys at short notice; who bemoans his romantic failures whilst recounting his numerous sexual liaisons; who muses constantly on ethics while, one might argue, behaving unethically.When I first read this book many years ago, Herzog seemed like a confused old man; now that I’m somewhat older than him, that impression remains. It seems, to some extent, to be a self-portrait by the author – he was the same age as his leading character at the time the novel was written, and the narration veers seamlessly between third- and first-person.Bellow’s style is remarkable – discursive and learned but fluent and entertaining, and replete with beautiful, startlingly original turns of phrase (“The hot tear was often in his magnanimous ruddy-brown eye.”; “My whole life beating against its boundaries, and the force of balked longings coming back as stinging poison.”)”Herzog” is a joy to read, but the self-indulgent protagonist is hard to love, even as one empathises with his frustrations.

⭐Herzog is one of those books which you feel you should read rather than one you want to read. It reads like an important book more than an enjoyable book. It is IMHO, a book for academics and students of literature.Personally I felt little connection with Herzog, partly because I am not a Jew, more because I am not an American and most because I don’t understand the references that are scattered throughout the book.However, his character did eventually appeal and I even felt myself strangely identifying with him at times. I also appreciated Bellow’s style of narration with the switches between first and third person and the movement from past to present tense.Yes, I’m pleased that I read it.

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