Herzog
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Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow's Herzog is part confessional, part exorcism, and a wholly unique achievement in postmodern fiction. Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend, and Herzog is left alone with his whirling thoughts - yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and the myriad catastrophes of the modern age. In a crumbling house which he shares with rats, his head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of his troubled heart.This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury'Spectacular ... surely Bellow's greatest novel'Malcolm Bradbury'A masterpiece ... Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization'The New York Times Book Review
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Author
Saul Bellow
Pages
368
Publisher
Penguin UK
Published Date
2012-07-26
ISBN
0141975032 9780141975030
Community ReviewsSee all
"This is undoubtedly one of my new favourite books, as well as one of the greatest American novels of all time. I am beyond excited to read more of Saul Bellow's work, and I only hope that it is literature of the same quality. In telling a short, painful section of Moses E. Herzog's life, Bellow conveys his entire human experience to the fullest extent. Herzog blends the dread of the modern existential perspective with the ancient notions of suffering from the Jewish Old World sensibilities. A comparison from film is the Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man", which has a similar power in conveying centuries of struggle through a few months of a single man's life. From the fantastic opening line, "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog", to one of the last ones, "I will do no more to enact the peculiarities of life. This is done well enough without my special assistance", this novel is full of beauty, pain, and a mastery of human philosophical hunger to know "why?"."
Jacob Longini
