Herzog (Penguin Classics) | Saul Bellow | Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow's classic novel "Herzog" is...

Herzog (Penguin Classics) | Saul Bellow | Laugh, look, and reconsider

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	Herzog (Penguin Classics) Saul Bellow Penguin Classics, 2003 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 71 reviews view larger image
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In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.

Introduction by Philip Roth

Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow's classic novel "Herzog" is a complex novel of the mental life of a modern man

Herzog was published in 1964 and has never gone out of print. The novel by Canadian-Chicagoan Jewish author Saul Bellow has become a modern classic. I reread the novel in the Penguin edition which contains an insightful introduction to Bellow's novels by the famous novelist Phillp Roth. This introduction is a bonus to the reading of an excellent work of fiction.
The chief character is Moses Herzog. Herzog possesses a PH.D in English Literature and is noted for his work on Romanticism as a literary movement. He is recently divorced from his mercurial and sexy wife Madeline. She was his second spouse. He has two children by first wife Daisy and a girlfriend named Ramona. Ramona is a kind woman who owns a flower shop in New York.
The novel is set in New York City, the Berkshires of Massachusetts and Chicago were Moses grew to manhood during the Great Depression. Herzog grew up in an immigrant Jewish family mired in poverty and interfamilial conflicts. Throughout the nonlinear novel we see him musing upon people and family members from his past; old flames and remembrances of his World War II service. We also are invited in to his musings upon his failed marriages and difficulties with children.
Bellow reads slowly. He jumps from one situation and time frame with ease making the reader sit up and pay attention. This style is difficult as there are so many characters to follow. The novel is character rathern than plot driven. The novel is most famous for the letters Herzog writes to famous people such as Adlai Stevenson, Nietzche, Spinoza and even God! Herzog is a liberal academic who has a rough private life culminating in a car crash and an arrest for carrying a loaded gun. The novel ends hopefully as the middle aged Herzog returns to the loving arms of the fetching Ramona.
Bellow is a challenging novelist who deals with the hassles, heartaches and challenges of modern living. He is able to probe with insight into the mind of a brilliant man Moses Herzog. The book is autobiographical as are all of Bellow's major fictions. Herzog is one of his best novels.

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Laugh, look, and reconsider

It is a comedy. He is making fun of the whole academic circuit. Read his foreword to "Closing of the Amrican Mind"- another book worth reading-, he discusses how people misinterpret his book as a mental challenge. Then notice the coincidence with the 1-star reviews.

Herzog is a man who filters all his miseries, instabilities, and unanswerable paradoxes into his intellectual exercises. For a reader, it can be quite funny. At the same time, one can see a fresh perspective on how certain humans, particularly Americans, quiver in the face of fear; the unique manifestation of psychological torment and coming to grips with deep-seated pain. I think, if you follow closely Herzog's wanderings, you will see an aimlessness reflected in the human soul, guided, at times by nothing but a dread of the unknown, at other times by a thin hope. In the process, Bellow debunks the bulk of philosophy (throughout history) of any spiritual validity and wisdom. Philosophy, then, becomes a grunge taken on by ne'er-do-wells seeking salvation from a few words in time of emotional crisis, yet failing ingloriously to make any maturer headway. Yet, for Herzog, everything changes by the second half of the book. This is why you have to read the WHOLE book. All in all, you witness a man making a very tedious, but gradually renewing transformation.

Thank you, Saul Bellow.

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Compassionate fool

Herzog is a compassionate fool, analyzing his life looking for the problem, when his self-analysis (self-absorption, really) IS the problem. Though Bellow portrays him as absurd, comical, foolish, and sometimes trivially hypocritical, the author never fails in his own compassion for Herzog.

This novel is brilliantly characterized, with lovely details that make my spine tingle. But it is a little too long - I think Bellow could have painted this portrait of Herzog in half the pages if he had really been inspired. Thus many folks will find it too long or pointless. It's a pity, because it's worth sticking with to the end.

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Tough, gritty, real: how to live in a world that tears you apart

Saul Bellow is definitely one of my favorite authors. Most specifically for his ability to blend his hard-scrabble working class upbringing with the life of the mind he ends up leading. In this book he is tackling the two problems: his own humiliating 2nd divorce and the thinker's reaction to holocaust and genocide of the mid-20th century.

Bellow's books are dense and read more like philosophical treatises than proper novels and this is no exception. His protagonists are overtly male which I think would make this book doubly difficult [potentially uninteresting?] for women readers.

Still, if you are curious about the state of the mind in mid-twentieth century (was Hegel right about history ending, just in the wrong century?), then this book will be rewarding.

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