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A review by mayralimeirajm
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Did not finish book.
Novels without chapters bug me.
Herzog had some sort of dissection; sometimes the prose would be cut, only to be continued a couple spaces below. It still seemed vague and disorganized to me, having been for so long used to chapters and clear division.
I read a measly 18% of this book, and this is what I have to show for it:
This book was extremely hard for me to review. I’m still not completely sure I have a finished opinion on it. It had been on my to-read list forever. And it’s long been on the corner of my eye, beckoning, begging me to open it, and discover the amazing Nobel Prize winner.
I thought I would love it. Sixty pages in, I still could not see the point the author was trying to sell with his story. It was not grabbing me. The introduction by Philip Roth had mentioned Tolstoy and compared their prose. I could not see the resemblance, as Anna Karenina is one of my all-time favorites.
I felt the writing was all over the place and it was not able to focus on one sole idea for even the length of a couple of phrases. Perhaps that was meant to illustrate Herzog’s “madness”, but it was sort of annoying.
Interspersed with that muddle were quotes of extreme genius, wit and introspection, so you might perhaps understand my difficulty in wrapping my mind on a fixed opinion.
Throughout what I actually read, I could sense a dulled, dark humor underneath the drama of the plot. Most of the time I didn’t know if I should consider some passages funny or insulting; like this one:
“Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.”
Nearing the 70th page, I grew extremely tired of the character’s crazy, chopped letter writing. Plus, my book was smelling all mildewy (thanks, new Penguin Classics copy, that managed to be the only book in my shelves – among 200 others – to get mildew/mold, having been less than 2 years old), so I just decided to abandon it for now, and maybe pick it up again in a couple of years. Maybe.
I just honestly could not bring myself to care for Herzog, or his incessant ranting.
These quotes are pretty killer though:
“You have to fight for your life. That’s the chief condition on which you hold it.”
”People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.”
Herzog had some sort of dissection; sometimes the prose would be cut, only to be continued a couple spaces below. It still seemed vague and disorganized to me, having been for so long used to chapters and clear division.
I read a measly 18% of this book, and this is what I have to show for it:
This book was extremely hard for me to review. I’m still not completely sure I have a finished opinion on it. It had been on my to-read list forever. And it’s long been on the corner of my eye, beckoning, begging me to open it, and discover the amazing Nobel Prize winner.
I thought I would love it. Sixty pages in, I still could not see the point the author was trying to sell with his story. It was not grabbing me. The introduction by Philip Roth had mentioned Tolstoy and compared their prose. I could not see the resemblance, as Anna Karenina is one of my all-time favorites.
I felt the writing was all over the place and it was not able to focus on one sole idea for even the length of a couple of phrases. Perhaps that was meant to illustrate Herzog’s “madness”, but it was sort of annoying.
Interspersed with that muddle were quotes of extreme genius, wit and introspection, so you might perhaps understand my difficulty in wrapping my mind on a fixed opinion.
Throughout what I actually read, I could sense a dulled, dark humor underneath the drama of the plot. Most of the time I didn’t know if I should consider some passages funny or insulting; like this one:
“Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.”
Nearing the 70th page, I grew extremely tired of the character’s crazy, chopped letter writing. Plus, my book was smelling all mildewy (thanks, new Penguin Classics copy, that managed to be the only book in my shelves – among 200 others – to get mildew/mold, having been less than 2 years old), so I just decided to abandon it for now, and maybe pick it up again in a couple of years. Maybe.
I just honestly could not bring myself to care for Herzog, or his incessant ranting.
These quotes are pretty killer though:
“You have to fight for your life. That’s the chief condition on which you hold it.”
”People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.”