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Herzog (Penguin Classics)

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Author: Saul Bellow
Creator: Philip Roth
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$15.00~~
Buy Used: $3.98
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New (40) Used (39) Collectible (9) from $3.00

Seller: cherrybooks
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

74 reviews
Sales Rank: 158,243

Media: Paperback
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7

ISBN: 0142437298
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780142437292
ASIN: 0142437298

Publication Date: February 25, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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•	ISBN13: 9780142437292
•	Condition: New
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Also Available In:

•	Paperback - Herzog
•	Audible Audio Edition - Herzog
•	Paperback - Herzog (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
•	Paperback - Herzog (Penguin Modern Classics)
•	Hardcover - Herzog
•	Paperback - Herzog
•	Hardcover - Herzog
•	Paperback - Herzog: 2Viking Critical Edition (The Viking critical library)
•	Audio Cassette - Herzog
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•	MP3 CD - Herzog
•	Paperback - Herzog
•	Mass Market Paperback - Herzog: A novel
•	Paperback - Herzog
•	Hardcover - Herzog (Alison Press Books)
•	Paperback - Herzog
•	Audio Cassette - Herzog (Library Edition)
•	Audio CD - Herzog (Library Edition)

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
A novel complex, compelling, absurd and realistic, Herzog became a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1964. In it Saul Bellow tells the tale of Moses E. Herzog, a tragically confused intellectual who suffers from the breakup of his second marriage, the general failure of his life and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century. He responds to his personal crisis by sending out a series of letters to all kinds of people. The letters in total constitute a thoughtful examination of his own life and that which has occurred around him. What emerges is not always pretty, but serves as gritty foundation for this absorbing novel.

Product Description
In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.

Introduction by Philip Roth

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 1-5 of 74

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Sad Personal Perspective After Author's Own Divorce [34] July 3, 2010
Miami Bob (Miami, FL United States)
Unlike his two other most famous novels - The Adventures of Augie March (1953) or Henderson the Rain King (1959) - Bellow's Herzog is a sad character who does not even have open moments of happiness - or so it seems. When you read the first ten pages, you read the following, and wonder if you want to read more: "To his son and his daughter, he wads a loving but bad father. To his own parents he had been ungrateful child. To his country, an indifferent citizen. To his brothers and sister, affectionate but remote. With his friends, an egoist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive."

As the book progresses, those words prove to be wholly true, poignantly effective in delivering a pithy description of this novel hovering about the potentially worst years of a somewhat unamazing, and successfully and continually depressing life of a Ph.D. who cannot find essence in his being - though capable of dissecting eons of ages of historical events, his specialty.

Another great Jewish heartbreak kid, Herzog leaves marital non-bliss for relations with women who are anything but Jewish. To his Japanese lover, he wonders, " Have all the traditions, passions, renunciations, virtues, gems, and masterpieces of Hebrew discipline and all the rest of it - rhetoric, a lot of it, but obtaining true facts brought him to . . . this dirty mattress?"

Pouring over defeatist issues brought upon him by his former wife or other disastrous decisions he made, Herzog either is a sad sack with bad luck or a whining child. You, the reader, can choose which he is. In either event, he is someone you would probably not want to meet as his topic of conversation would seemingly always be about these depressing events in his depressing life which would only deliver a listener to depression.

Saul Bellow joins John Updike, James Agee, Norman Mailer and others who have the similar writing tone - that of white men whose works often seem the product after sleep-in mornings with hangover aches, followed by afternoon martinis and delivered with swollen eyes squinting from the dappled sunlight squeezing past the lone window's exposure as well as the surrounding cigarette smoke emanating from the ashtray stuffed full of butts and on the side of the writer's Remington typewriter.

2 out of 5 stars

Another obligation cheerlessly completed May 29, 2010
Gary Schroeder
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

So, another classic of American literature that I can officially cross off of my "to read" list...and believe me, that's really the only reason I finished Saul Bellow's "Herzog". Of course, I'd heard a lot of praise for Bellow over the years, and this book in particular as it's considered to be his masterwork. Seemed like a good place to start with an author I hadn't previously experienced.

Moses Herzog is an academic and intellectual staring mid-life right in the face. His academic publishing life is foundering, his marriage has collapsed and he's questioning everything about his life and the meaning of...well, virtually everything. Okay, such introspection can be entertaining. It can guide a reader to consider things they might not have done otherwise. But Herzog's got an additional problem that prevents this type of book from being enjoyable: he's a bit batty. Not only is he experiencing a typical mid-life crisis, he seems to be losing his grip on reality. He's not certifiable, not completely crazy, but his perception of the world is distorted. His grip on actuality seems tenuous.

There is no intricate plot. There's not an even half-way solid plot to this novel. Instead, Herzog stumbles through through this particular period in his life, trying to figure out what to do about his career, how to deal with his wife's betrayal and affair, how to relate to his daughter under these new difficult circumstances and how to handle his involvement with his own girlfriend-on-the-side, Ramona. Bellow drags the reader through this maze of Herzog's personal details, interspersing them with a series of mystifying letters Herzog writes to other characters, some famous, some not (one is written to President Eisenhower). These letters are one of the most annoying features of the narrative. They are often impenetrable, meandering, and incomprehensible. Frankly, most of them seem like meaningless academic drivel that are either intended to highlight Herzog's anguished mental state or are meant to be deeply meaningful investigations of existentialism. Whatever the intent, they simply bored me and caused me to wish for a rapid end to the book.

In the end, like other books that I have thoroughly disliked, Herzog simply runs out of pages. No great story has been told, no great revelations have been made and the reader (at least this one) has little to show for the investment of their time. It's a bad sign that you're reading a book simply because you refuse to let it defeat you. I can say that I successfully wrestled "Herzog" to the ground and read every last page, but I can't say that I'd recommend the experience to anyone else that enjoys literature.

4 out of 5 stars

Between godly insight and madness April 24, 2010
Rune Rindel Hansen (Copenhagen, Denmark)
So I finnished "Herzog" by Saul Bellow. It was good. It's a strange book about a guy Herzog who is maybe mad, maybe wise, all the time you think he is going to collapse. Herzog is a very clever, perceptive guy, a university professor who has written a book about the Romantics and Christianity. "Herzog" describes among other things Herzog's thought processes, often Nietzsche is mentioned. The meaninglessness of the world is all the time threatening to make his world collapse all together. I came to think about the chapter in the bible:
"Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity." (The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Ecclesiastes 1:1 ) Also the book reminded me about Nietzsches collapse, reading the book is perhaps a little bit like being inside Nietzsches head when he was growing mad. The book is also about an American who seems still very attached to his Jewish identity, a bit puzzling for me. Because I think he was born in America, so I should think his identification as an American would have been stronger. Another reference comming to mind concerning this book is good old Franz Kafka, although not stylistically, but something about the authors alianation from his surroundings made me think of Kafka. I guess you could say that this book is a modern classic in American litterature?

4 out of 5 stars

Tough, gritty, real: how to live in a world that tears you apart December 28, 2009
Negative Space (Los Angeles, CA USA)

Saul Bellow is definitely one of my favorite authors. Most specifically for his ability to blend his hard-scrabble working class upbringing with the life of the mind he ends up leading. In this book he is tackling the two problems: his own humiliating 2nd divorce and the thinker's reaction to holocaust and genocide of the mid-20th century.

Bellow's books are dense and read more like philosophical treatises than proper novels and this is no exception. His protagonists are overtly male which I think would make this book doubly difficult [potentially uninteresting?] for women readers.

Still, if you are curious about the state of the mind in mid-twentieth century (was Hegel right about history ending, just in the wrong century?), then this book will be rewarding.

5 out of 5 stars

Laugh, look, and reconsider December 23, 2009
caramelizeme (ca, usa)
It is a comedy. He is making fun of the whole academic circuit. Read his foreword to "Closing of the Amrican Mind"- another book worth reading-, he discusses how people misinterpret his book as a mental challenge. Then notice the coincidence with the 1-star reviews.

Herzog is a man who filters all his miseries, instabilities, and unanswerable paradoxes into his intellectual exercises. For a reader, it can be quite funny. At the same time, one can see a fresh perspective on how certain humans, particularly Americans, quiver in the face of fear; the unique manifestation of psychological torment and coming to grips with deep-seated pain. I think, if you follow closely Herzog's wanderings, you will see an aimlessness reflected in the human soul, guided, at times by nothing but a dread of the unknown, at other times by a thin hope. In the process, Bellow debunks the bulk of philosophy (throughout history) of any spiritual validity and wisdom. Philosophy, then, becomes a grunge taken on by ne'er-do-wells seeking salvation from a few words in time of emotional crisis, yet failing ingloriously to make any maturer headway. Yet, for Herzog, everything changes by the second half of the book. This is why you have to read the WHOLE book. All in all, you witness a man making a very tedious, but gradually renewing transformation.

Thank you, Saul Bellow.

Showing reviews 1-5 of 74

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