Herzog [Anglais] [Broché]

I was prompted to write this because most of the reviewers published here miss the plain fact that Herzog is extremely funny. Herzog writes letters. He writes manic, crazy, poignant, inspired letters to people both living and dead: to his friends, to his shrink, to his divorce lawyer, to the President of the United States, and to Heidegger, to Schrodinger, to Nietzche and to Willie Sutton. It is, of course, one of Saul Bellow's best novels, written at the height of his carrer, which would place it somewhere on the list of the Top 10 or 20 best American novels of the 20th century. Herzog is worth both reading and re-reading, but the book is clearly not for everyone. It is as personal, realistic, and autobiographical as The Adventures of Augie March, but it is significantly more difficult to read in terms of both style and content. It is probably less accessible than Augie, the work of a maturer artist. Readers should expect neither a conventional plot or a chronological narrative, although the book is highly structured and is brought to a very satisfying and almost inspirational resolution as Herzog regains his equilibrium, which he loses to such comic effect in the early going.

The middle-aged Moses Herzog is a notable literary-historical academic, the father of two children from two failed marriages, and the lover of a string of exotic women. His most recent wife, the Catholic convert Madelaine, has lately left him for his best friend. Herzog is lost. As he reflects on the continuing disaster that constitutes his life, and the choices which led him to this crisis, he begins writing unsent letters - to friends and family, colleagues and enemies, to famous figures both living a dead. As Bellow himself has noted, Herzog is a man who, in the agony of suffering, finds himself to be his own most penetrating critic. He re-examines his life by re-enacting all the roles he took seriously - the professor, the son, the brother, the lover, the father, the husband, the avenger, the intellectual. It's an attempt to divest himself of these personae, and when he has dismissed them, there comes a pause - a moment of grace - which is infinitely more valuable than his trying to invent everything for himself, or accepting human inventions, the collective errors, by which he's lived. He's decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening. The effect is that this is something the reader shares. Bellow has the capacity in his novels to cover the smallest timeframe - a matter of days, or even hours in some cases - and yet through the subtle interleaving of flashbacks, meditations and philosophical musings, cover a vast amount of intellectual and emotional ground. His novels are vast in scope yet humanly scaled. The philosophical is made real by instantiation. "Herzog" is a wonderful example of this, and it also contains two of the most compassionate moments I've ever read: Herzog's reaction to a court scene in which the death of an abused child is recounted; and the subsequent scene in which Herzog witnesses, through the window of the marital home from which he's been banished, his best friend and betrayer bathing Herzog's own child. Bellow's genius is to take these moments, one horrifying and one tender, and make them emblematic - give them real cultural, historical implication - without losing for a moment the convincing personal immediacy they have for the characters living through them. That's quite an achievement, and it's why Bellow's novels can be so intellectually rich and so viscerally touching at precisely the same time.

Half way through this book. I shared some of the doubts expressed by other reviewers. Yes it is well written, but it appeared to be too narrow in its focus. A book whose sole topic is the protagonist's ego is hard to sustain for 340 pages. It cried out for social or political contexts into which the eccentric character could be absorbed. However all my early doubts were dealt with as the book progressed. His love for his daughter, brother and mother give Herzog greater depth and the reader starts to realise that Moses is not just a self-pitying, self obsessive. He is a man out of his depth , an intellectual in an anti-intellectual age. He is a Jew with a long family history of suffering, a "schooling in grief" yet even this proud history of struggle seems trivial because as Herzog notes: "What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering". This is one of many aspects of personal history that troubles Moses

The early chapters lay the foundations for the wonderful latter parts of the book. Herzog is one of the most extraordinary literary creations of modern times. Bellow has created a multi-layered madman, pathetic yet loveable, a man of great intellect; solipsistic, moving, pedantic, gentle and above all believable. One moment he is plotting to murder the wife he loathes; the next he is showing the depth of his love for his daughter; then he writes to Nietszche telling the long dead philosopher that he is lying in a hammock in rural Massachusetts. He also writes to God, Heidegger, Eisenhower, ex-lovers and many of the personal and professional rivals he wishes to settle scores with. These letters (never posted), like the wife's one legged lover and Herzog's monkey kissing friend add much dark humour to what is often a very serious and moving narrative. This is a difficult, intense novel, but well worth the effort.