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A review by rc90041
Herzog by Saul Bellow
4.0
Bellow seems to be one of those writers mentioned a lot by a lot of other writers, sometimes mentioned as a Nobel Prize winner, but read by basically no one these days. And I can see why he'd be a hard sell today: He's kind of like a proto-Roth, just even less concerned with anything beyond the male mind, but closer to the Old World, the War, and the penury of early days in the Americas, slipping into Yiddish like an old habit, and more self-consciously bookish.
It took me a while to get into this book, but about halfway through I started to really enjoy it. That said, it is a bit unnecessarily windy and self-indulgent: It's basically about a failed professor getting divorced for the second time, dealing with that, having a mental breakdown, writing letters that he never sends to Eisenhower, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hitler, et al. And that's about it. Herzog goes different places and remembers things and writes these letters and ruminates about what he's done with his life. But it's occasionally hilarious.
The writing really did feel like it came from a different, less hurried era, where the writer could assume some portion of a reading audience would have the patience to bear with unsorted observations and thoughts about Freud, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, descriptions of Chicago, various trips around the East Coast for no apparent purpose, etc. I don't know that readers today would generally have the patience for this kind of slower, more self-indulgent prose--putting aside some of Bellow's somewhat dated takes on race, sex, gender, etc.
An interesting archaeological study, really, in seeing how this ur-Roth/Updike influenced a younger generation.
It took me a while to get into this book, but about halfway through I started to really enjoy it. That said, it is a bit unnecessarily windy and self-indulgent: It's basically about a failed professor getting divorced for the second time, dealing with that, having a mental breakdown, writing letters that he never sends to Eisenhower, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hitler, et al. And that's about it. Herzog goes different places and remembers things and writes these letters and ruminates about what he's done with his life. But it's occasionally hilarious.
The writing really did feel like it came from a different, less hurried era, where the writer could assume some portion of a reading audience would have the patience to bear with unsorted observations and thoughts about Freud, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, descriptions of Chicago, various trips around the East Coast for no apparent purpose, etc. I don't know that readers today would generally have the patience for this kind of slower, more self-indulgent prose--putting aside some of Bellow's somewhat dated takes on race, sex, gender, etc.
An interesting archaeological study, really, in seeing how this ur-Roth/Updike influenced a younger generation.