This is brilliantly written.
Few contemporary novels are in this book’s league. Its never quite clear what is the standard against which HERZOG is to be measured. In one of his finest achievements, Noble Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and the longing for redemption.
I read this story 20 years ago and eagerly reread it. Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, a joker and charmer is a failed writer and teacher. As a father, he has lost the affection of his wife to his best friend. He sees himself as a surviver, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart.
He is an urbanite from Montreal who has spent most of his life in Chicago and New York, yet the only thing he owns is a decaying farmhouse in a depopulated area of the Berkshires. He believes that” brotherhood is what makes a man human”, yet he has been cuckolded by his best friend and has come to manhood in a period when six million of his fellow Jews were exterminated by the Nazis snd their allies. As a failed father, lover, husband, a writer, an academic; he faces each day and each night with the real possibility that his psyche is being invaded by the self- disintegration process of an actual psychosis.
Over the past 20-30 years, Jewish writers ‐ Bernard Malamud, J.D.Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth‐- have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. HERZOG is a masterpiece and is Bellow’s most Jewish book, as there are no gentiles in it. Its full of Jewish with, humour, pathos, moral and intellectual passion, insight into European social thought and foreign literatures.Herzog cries out for “a change of heart” and like all Jews in this generation, he feels himself to be a surviver with the responsibility of testifying to the continued existence of values which Eichmann had tried to send up in the smoke of burning flesh.
What makes this book great is the great characters. His second wife, Madeleine is a great character. She is beautiful, brilliant, cracked and is working towards a doctorate in Russian church history with the aim of rising like a phoenix from the ashes of her former husband’s scholarly reputation. A slut in the home, she is a bitch in bed, a dazzler in conversations with free-floating intellectuals. She is very touching because she is so fully and roundly drawn. Herzog is all for Justice, while Maddy’s passion is for justification. The marriage has been a tragedy and a farce. Her lover, Valentine’s Gersback is a great character , full of schmaltz while taking advantage of his friend. Bellow draws this with love, hatred and a racy vividness, the book structured with subtlety, mood snd memory.
Most of the important action takes place in Herzog’s mind, an outside voice, an anonymous third-person narrator, through Herzog’s memories and his fictional letters. Sometimes the third-person narrator appraises the reader of facts that Moses Herzog does not yet know, himself.
I love Bellow’s style, his use of plot in exploring a character in mental crisis and i might suggest letting this book simmer for a good long while before tackling another of his books.
Saul Bellow was born in Canada and served a wartime stint in the Merchant Navy. His novels, Henderson, The Rain King, Humboldt’s Gift, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, The Dean’s December, Dangling Man and Sieze the Day, have brought him innumerable literary grants, awards, scholarships, fellowships and honours in the US and internationally. In 1976 he was awarded the Noble Prize in Literature.
