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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
I need to stop reading Saul Bellow.
In fact, 2/3rds through this book, I was announcing that I was swearing off all mid 20th century male writers. But I'll walk that back some and just come to the point where I announce that I have now tried Bellows three times and there is something that absolutely turns me off. I had thought that since I had read two minor works (cue Squid and the Whale joke), The Bellarosa Connection and Mr. Sammler's Planet, I should try one selected as part of the cannon. Yet Henderson the Rain King just further cemented my distaste for his plot lines. I can admire the man's prose at certain points, but it is his characters and flow that just turns me off.
There is a certain narcissism that oozes from his protagonists. I find this a problem with Roth and Updike too (see why I was in a rage yesterday?) In reading Henderson, I just find myself overwhelmed by the use of “I” as a way of telling a story. Apart from the main character who is fleshed out and where the reader is stuffed into his mind, there is very little of three-dimension in this book. The landscape feels flat, the other characters seem paper thin, the African culture, stereotypical or not is bland and even the eventual spiritual growth (from a pig to a lion! Or other such force fed ideas) seems like it will wash away shortly after the book ends. Increasingly, I look to fiction as an exploration of interaction, whereas Bellows seems much more caught up in inner turmoil and self-centered reflection. It also is often disturbingly misogynistic – or at the very least devoid of any sort of compelling female perspective. Women – and in this book, different cultures as well – are props, jokes or unimportant.
My other issue with this book is with its humor, which hardly makes up for the irritating drip of the I pronoun. The book reminds of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in its description of a wealthy scion’s escape from expectations and descent into madness. Vonnegut used it for a societal critique, while Bellows used the tale as almost a celebration of what it is to be a man, searching for manliness, with a gloss of goofiness to blunt the edges of his masculinity theme. It doesn't help that Conrad in all his inelegance did it so much better - though Bellows does try to replace "the horror" with Henderson's "I want".
The quote that really ties up the nauseating quality of Henderson and his paper world is from page 197 - "I did treat everything in the world as though it was a medicine." It is a moment of clarity in an otherwise uncritical, opaque book. I feel used by the end, the reader as an antibiotic, sharing in all the minute miseries of a white privileged man. Frankly, I'd rather share in the life of someone else.
In fact, 2/3rds through this book, I was announcing that I was swearing off all mid 20th century male writers. But I'll walk that back some and just come to the point where I announce that I have now tried Bellows three times and there is something that absolutely turns me off. I had thought that since I had read two minor works (cue Squid and the Whale joke), The Bellarosa Connection and Mr. Sammler's Planet, I should try one selected as part of the cannon. Yet Henderson the Rain King just further cemented my distaste for his plot lines. I can admire the man's prose at certain points, but it is his characters and flow that just turns me off.
There is a certain narcissism that oozes from his protagonists. I find this a problem with Roth and Updike too (see why I was in a rage yesterday?) In reading Henderson, I just find myself overwhelmed by the use of “I” as a way of telling a story. Apart from the main character who is fleshed out and where the reader is stuffed into his mind, there is very little of three-dimension in this book. The landscape feels flat, the other characters seem paper thin, the African culture, stereotypical or not is bland and even the eventual spiritual growth (from a pig to a lion! Or other such force fed ideas) seems like it will wash away shortly after the book ends. Increasingly, I look to fiction as an exploration of interaction, whereas Bellows seems much more caught up in inner turmoil and self-centered reflection. It also is often disturbingly misogynistic – or at the very least devoid of any sort of compelling female perspective. Women – and in this book, different cultures as well – are props, jokes or unimportant.
My other issue with this book is with its humor, which hardly makes up for the irritating drip of the I pronoun. The book reminds of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in its description of a wealthy scion’s escape from expectations and descent into madness. Vonnegut used it for a societal critique, while Bellows used the tale as almost a celebration of what it is to be a man, searching for manliness, with a gloss of goofiness to blunt the edges of his masculinity theme. It doesn't help that Conrad in all his inelegance did it so much better - though Bellows does try to replace "the horror" with Henderson's "I want".
The quote that really ties up the nauseating quality of Henderson and his paper world is from page 197 - "I did treat everything in the world as though it was a medicine." It is a moment of clarity in an otherwise uncritical, opaque book. I feel used by the end, the reader as an antibiotic, sharing in all the minute miseries of a white privileged man. Frankly, I'd rather share in the life of someone else.
A Dickensian satire of American tycoons in the 1920s. An American heir to a fortune goes to Africa and becomes involved with a tribe of natives. A laugh out loud classic that offers insight into our lives without being trite and dusty.
I will definitely need to do a re-read of this book. My wife read it while in college and had discussions about it during her readings. I definitely think that I would have benefited from some literary guidance to make this book more worthwhile for me.
Yawn, see reviews giving this book two stars most of them are on target.
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Oh my god this book bored me to TEARS. I really tried but I fail to see the appeal. Only my dislike of setting aside a book half-read propelled me to make the rest of my way through this thicket of pseudo-philosophical drivel. I could excuse the, er, unreconstructed nature of Henderson’s views on women and the way that people of colour are portrayed in the novel. It was a different time and I get that. But I couldn’t see why we were meant to care about the bellicose Henderson, the stereotypical Ugly American Abroad from the days before that was a stereotype. Stop crying dude, put the lion cub down and go back home to your wife.
hopeful
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A classic, funny novel that goes off the rails completely once Henderson goes to Africa, and not in a way I enjoyed.
I was able to endure its racism & exoticism enough to (painfully) get through it because it was published in the 1950s, but that doesn't make it good. And I was only able to read it by pretending this "Africa" is an entirely fictionalized place and not a reference to a real continent with one billion people, which of course, the way Bellow tells it, is basically the idea – it's a stage on which Henderson can play out his midlife crisis. It also prattles on philosophically in a way I found tedious – endless conversations between Henderson and King Dahfu on the meaning of life, which are either dull or went straight over my head.
But, as frustrated as I was by the majority of the book, I have to say that the first part - taking place on the East Coast - is one of the funniest things I've read.
I was able to endure its racism & exoticism enough to (painfully) get through it because it was published in the 1950s, but that doesn't make it good. And I was only able to read it by pretending this "Africa" is an entirely fictionalized place and not a reference to a real continent with one billion people, which of course, the way Bellow tells it, is basically the idea – it's a stage on which Henderson can play out his midlife crisis. It also prattles on philosophically in a way I found tedious – endless conversations between Henderson and King Dahfu on the meaning of life, which are either dull or went straight over my head.
But, as frustrated as I was by the majority of the book, I have to say that the first part - taking place on the East Coast - is one of the funniest things I've read.
This is bawdy, spontaneous, poetic writing.
Eugene Henderson, an overblown, twice-married, millionaire pig farmer and violin player is having an existential crisis.
Henderson the Rain King is a quest as complicated as any Haruki Murakami tale, but the protagonist is a bloated, bungling American—a man with “the Midas touch in reverse.” In Africa, his first stop is a village of people whose beloved cattle are dying of thirst because the water reserve is occupied by frogs. On one hand, Henderson wants to rescue everybody; on the other, he longs to be rescued:
There was so much I could relate to in this wonderful book: the obsession with truth and purpose; the hopelessly flawed character of Henderson whose face belied every twisted thought and emotion; his chronic craving; and finally his exhaustion at the “too-muchness” of living with remedies for his predicament stymied by equal parts laziness, impatience for expanded consciousness, and terror of it.
With so many references to mind-body medicine and scenes that will resonate for anybody who has practiced alternative therapies or body psychology, this feels like a modern book, although it was first published in 1959. I learned from the introduction that Bellow was practiced in (arguably the father of Western mind-body medicine) Wilhelm Reich’s body psychotherapies, and much of that work and characterology shows up in the book—a bonus for anybody with this knowledge.
The writing is weighty, sometimes digressing in a kind of ADHD spasm, and Bellow lacks the precision I so admire in, my hero and Bellow’s contemporary, John Cheever, and the meticulous cleanliness that makes Murakami’s books so easy to read. But so be it. What he offers is worth the sometimes-exhaustion of the reading effort: a full-blown spiritual quest, from despair to acceptance of our moving gross-body experience of life.
Eugene Henderson, an overblown, twice-married, millionaire pig farmer and violin player is having an existential crisis.
I want, I want, I want, I want, I want!This is the geshrei that drives fifty-five-year-old Henderson into and through a spiritual quest in Africa. He doesn’t know what he wants, just that “everybody is working, making, digging, bulldozing, trucking, loading, and so on . . .” until it is a form of madness. (I think he would be right at home in our time when value is quantified by how many “likes” we’ve accrued.)
Henderson the Rain King is a quest as complicated as any Haruki Murakami tale, but the protagonist is a bloated, bungling American—a man with “the Midas touch in reverse.” In Africa, his first stop is a village of people whose beloved cattle are dying of thirst because the water reserve is occupied by frogs. On one hand, Henderson wants to rescue everybody; on the other, he longs to be rescued:
This was a beautiful, strange, special place, and I was moved by it. I believed the queen could straighten me out if she wanted to; as if, any minute now, she might open her hand and show me the thing, the source, the germ—the cipher. The mystery, you know. I was absolutely convinced she must have it. The earth is a huge ball which nothing holds up in space except its own motion and magnetism, and we conscious things who occupy it believe we have to move too, in our own space. We can’t allow ourselves to lie down and not do our share and imitate the greater entity. You see, this is our attitude. But now look at Willatale, the Bittah [highly evolved] woman; she had given up such notions, there was no anxious care in her, and she was sustained. Why, nothing bad happened! On the contrary, it all seemed good! Look how happy she was, grinning with her flat nose and gap teeth, the mother-of-pearl eye and the good eye, and look at her white head! It comforted me just to see her, and I felt that I might learn to be sustained too if I followed her example. (74)
There was so much I could relate to in this wonderful book: the obsession with truth and purpose; the hopelessly flawed character of Henderson whose face belied every twisted thought and emotion; his chronic craving; and finally his exhaustion at the “too-muchness” of living with remedies for his predicament stymied by equal parts laziness, impatience for expanded consciousness, and terror of it.
With so many references to mind-body medicine and scenes that will resonate for anybody who has practiced alternative therapies or body psychology, this feels like a modern book, although it was first published in 1959. I learned from the introduction that Bellow was practiced in (arguably the father of Western mind-body medicine) Wilhelm Reich’s body psychotherapies, and much of that work and characterology shows up in the book—a bonus for anybody with this knowledge.
The writing is weighty, sometimes digressing in a kind of ADHD spasm, and Bellow lacks the precision I so admire in, my hero and Bellow’s contemporary, John Cheever, and the meticulous cleanliness that makes Murakami’s books so easy to read. But so be it. What he offers is worth the sometimes-exhaustion of the reading effort: a full-blown spiritual quest, from despair to acceptance of our moving gross-body experience of life.