Herzog

ISBN: 1441711899

Author: Saul Bellow

Condition: New

Product Description Winner of the 1965 National Book Award for Fiction. Herzog is a man seeking balance, trying to regain a foothold on his life. Thrown out of his ex-wife's house after his wife leaves him for his best friend, Herzog retreats to his abandoned home in a remote village in the Berkshire Mountains. Amid the dust of the disused house, he begins scribbling letters to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies, dead philosophers, ex-presidents, to anyone with whom he feels compelled to set the record straight. The letters which are never sent are a means to cure himself of the psychic strain of the failures of his life: that of being a bad husband, a loving but poor father, an ungrateful child, a distant brother, an egoist to friends, and an apathetic citizen. Primarily a novel of redemption, progressing from ignorance to enlightenment, Herzog is still considered one of the greatest literary expressions of postwar America. Review A masterpiece. --New York Times Book ReviewThe book is a feast of language, situations, characters, ironies, and a controlled moral intelligence that transcends the fact that we are spectators at a hard luck story. Bellow s rapport with his central character seems to me novel writing in the grand style of a Tolstoi subjective, complete, heroic....Eventually Moses Herzog becomes as natural an American phenomenon as the faces carved on Mount Rushmore. --Chicago TribuneHerzog has the range, depth, intensity, verbal brilliance, and imaginative fullness the mind and heart which we may expect only of a novel that is unmistakably destined to last. --Newsweek About the Author SAUL BELLOW (1915 2005), was born in Quebec and raised in Chicago. Three of his novels, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet, won the National Book Award for Fiction. He was also the author of several plays, short stories, and critical essays. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, he served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He taught at New York University, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota. From AudioFile HERZOG is Saul Bellow's most famous, and perhaps best, novel--and one that translates wonderfully to audio. Moses Herzog suffers from an epic midlife crisis. The book focuses on the numerous letters written by Herzog to seemingly every person in his life, and many people he has never known, letters and rantings that for the most part are never sent. But the book is much more--it's a complex "quasi-autobiography" requiring great concentration to absorb. At first, narrator Malcolm Hillgartner's voice seems a bit smooth for the character of Herzog, yet his presentation is highly effective. His polished tone complements the manic Herzog's life and never distracts the listener from the focus --the inner life of an intellectual who is trying to come to grips with his own foibles. D.J.S. AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine