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A review by savaging
Herzog by Saul Bellow
4.0
I can't entirely separate myself from the crew that complains this book is tedious. Only for me, it's the plot and the action that I find strained: when I can sit awhile in Herzog's thoughts as he writes his unhinged letters, I am fascinated. A flawed scholar scrabbling toward the Nature of the Universe through his own lonely ache. Moving all the way through the slime of the Real to maltheism:
And then, a movement beyond maltheism?:
I was irritated by the casual misogyny of this book, the kind that ruins early Vonnegut novels. At least in Herzog there are intelligent, interesting women, but they are largely described by how veiny their legs and thick their thighs. And oh the sad panic once they are in their 30s and going to seed. Of course this is all in the brain of a flawed narrator and I shouldn't hold it against the book itself -- but this narrator can self-analyze and question everything else he screws up, why not at least a twinge of self-loathing over his objectification of women?
But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks -- and this is its thought of thoughts -- that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that. And this is how we teach metaphysics on each other. “You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists he must be a murderer. But the one true god is Death.
And then, a movement beyond maltheism?:
Proudhon says, “God is the evil.” But after we search in the entrails of world revolution for la foi nouvelle, what happens? The victory of death, not of rationality, not of rational faith. Our own murdering imagination turns out to be the great power, our human imagination which starts by accusing God of murder. At the bottom of the whole disaster lies the human being’s sense of a grievance, and with this I want nothing more to do. It’s easier not to exist altogether than accuse God. Far more simple. Cleaner.
I was irritated by the casual misogyny of this book, the kind that ruins early Vonnegut novels. At least in Herzog there are intelligent, interesting women, but they are largely described by how veiny their legs and thick their thighs. And oh the sad panic once they are in their 30s and going to seed. Of course this is all in the brain of a flawed narrator and I shouldn't hold it against the book itself -- but this narrator can self-analyze and question everything else he screws up, why not at least a twinge of self-loathing over his objectification of women?