About this title: HERZOG, one of Saul Bellow's most celebrated novels, portrays (via the hero's sad, manic, ironic letters) the slow decline of Moses Herzog, a failed writer, teacher, husband, and father, as he charges through life unable to face the mistakes that have crippled him and wounded those around him. Introspective, witty, and sharp, the novel provides an ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780140072709ISBN:0140072705
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 352 p. Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: FAWCETT CREST
Date Published: 1964
Description: Fair. Paperback. Cover shows moderate wear to edges, considerable spine creasing. Bottom corner of back cover is soiled. Top edge of pages is stained, as is top corner of most pages. Pages are lightly sunned, no pen or pencil markings. Binding is excellent. read more
"Wow! What a difficult, funny, amazingly written book. The four hundred pages of my edition sometimes felt like 800 to understand the neuroses of Moses Herzog. Story of literature professor with a messy personal life and an obsession with writing letters. One exemplary quotation: "Strong natures, said F. Nietzsche, could forget what they could not master. Of course he also said that semen reabsorbed was the great fuel of creativity. Be thankful when syphilitics preach chastity." On Time Magazine's 2005 list of 100 best novels written in English since 1923."
"I grimace at how long it took me to discover this master work.
Herzog is a highly intellectual 1960's man much aggrieved, most specifically by the loss of his brilliant spouse to his one-legged "friend" Valentine, but also by the the decline and fall of just about everything. (Imagine how he would feel today!)
Through letters written but not sent, Herzog wrestles with many questions:how to avenge himself, how to regain his beloved daughter, whether to accept the affections of his friend Ramona, how to understand his personal and family history. Above all he wrestles with one overarching question: is it right for him to accept simple happiness, to accept the pleasures of daily life, the charms of nature and of sensual love, or must he, as an educated intellectual, dedicate his life fully to the understanding of larger questions, to answer questions with which philosphers have struggled for hundreds of years.
The progression of the book is, by and large, a progression from madness to possible redemption. I found the book like a perfect onion, with Bellow unpeeling the layers of his character from surface to essence, from present to past. Much of the movement of the book is within Herzog's mind and memory, but as Herzog seeks justice and his daughter, there are priceless incidents in courtrooms, a trip to Chicago in which Herzog obtains his father's pistol and Czarist-era currency, and a highway collision which nicely ties together these events.
This book is neither misogynistic nor filled with "rant." It is a thoughtful tale of a troubled soul who, through both ideas and attempted action, seeks to cope with a world utterly different than the one of his childhood.
This book is not for everyone. I felt acutely the shallowness of my own knowledge of philosophy, and consequent inability to understand fully many of the philosophical issues that trouble Herzog. But the book is a masterful probing of a human mind and of issues that are no less important today than when this was written."
"The book is highly literate in an abstract way; Bellow makes some fragmented, interesting--if dated and naively ethnocentric--observations about some aspects of the world. But since the book lacks the dimensions of plot and characterization and has other novelistic flaws, better it had been a collection of essays, in my opinion.
This was a book I only read about three-quarters of the way through; I wasn't able to finish it. The characters are so flimsy as to be caricatures. And the main character is unbearable: pathetically self-absorbed, self-centered, and agonizingly short-sighted about his own life. That might have been okay, had the author cleverly shown us deeper insights and more mature observations than the main character was capable of doing by himself. However, as it was, there was no evidence that Bellow understands much more about people than Herzog does, particularly women. What's more, there's no sense that Bellow cares much for people more than Herzog does, particularly women.
None of the characters in this book is developed fully or kindly. Instead, the book is suffused with a kind of pompous vitriol. Without any real character development, the story itself becomes nothing more insightful than one long, anguished wail of self-pity: "I'm such a good guy, so how come nobody understands me? How come women treat me so bad?" But Herzog never actually appears as a good guy; he only sees himself that way, like a narcissist, and one gets the unavoidable sense that Bellow sees him that way too, narcissitically, as his alter ego.
Maybe some people will find it worth the pain of immersing themselves in Herzog's miserably irresponsible life and narcissistic wind-bagging in order to pick up some of Bellow's rambling observations about the modern world. But I did not even find those observations illuminating in themselves, and certainly not compelling enough to live with Herzog and the rest of his cast of losers for the duration. Basically-hard as I tried-I found nothing more here than a volume of posturing intellectualism strung together with sour sketches of sorry people.
People speak of Bellow and Faulkner as the two great American novelists, but based on the novel, Herzog, I can't speak of them in the same breath. Bellow simply does not deliver the depth of personal and human insight that Faulkner does. Insofaras what he has to say or show us about the human condition, Bellow is a dull, overrated writer who just happened to come along at a time when American academics needed his kind of machismo.
No doubt Bellow fans with a rounder appreciation of him (this was my first Bellow novel) will surely see past these flaws or have some good reasons as to why these aren't, in fact, flaws, and find something richer. If you have already decided you like Bellow, enjoy! If you haven't, it won't start here."
"Num passado recente, Moisés Herzog era um influente académico na área da Filosofia, tendo inclusive obras suas publicadas. Quando a sua segunda esposa, de seu nome Madalena, o troca pelo seu melhor amigo, Valentim Gersbach, Moisés entra numa crise emocional que o leva a escrever cartas de um modo compulsivo. Escreve à esposa que o abandonou, aos amigos, aos médicos, aos colegas académicos e a outras personalidades públicas. As cartas nunca enviadas funcionam para Moisés como um modo de escape, uma maneira de exteriorizar tudo aquilo que sente e que lhe vai na mente de modo a ficar melhor consigo mesmo. Demorei mais do que esperava a terminar este livro. O constante cruzamentos de planos de narrativa (passado, presente e as cartas) torna a história confusa e em certos momentos chata, principalmente quando começa a vaga obsessiva de cartas. O facto de ter muitas expressões em ídixe (língua adoptada pelos judeus e que resulta da compilação do germânico, de diversos dialectos modernos e do semita) também não ajuda na fluência da leitura."
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