Herzog

By: Saul Bellow

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.

Like the protagonists of most of Bellow's novels - Dangling Man, The Victim, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, etc. - Herzog is a man seeking balance, trying to regain a foothold on his life. Thrown out of his ex-wife's house, he retreats to his abandoned home in Ludeyville, a remote village in the Berkshire mountains to which Herzog had previously moved his wife and friends. Here amid the dust and vermin of the disused house, Herzog begins scribbling letters to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies, dead philosophers, ex- Presidents - anyone with whom he feels compelled to set the record straight. The letters, we learn, are never sent. They are a means to cure himself of the immense psychic strain of his failed second marriage, a method by which he can recognize truths that will free him to love others and to learn to abide with the knowledge of death. In order to do so he must confront the fact that he has been a bad husband, a loving but poor father, an ungrateful child, a distant brother, an egoist to friends, and an apathetic citizen.

Herzog is primarily a novel of redemption. For all of its innovative techniques and brilliant comedy, it tells one of the oldest of stories. Like The Divine Comedy or the dark night of the soul of St. John of the Cross, it progresses from darkness to light, from ignorance to enlightenment. Today it is still considered one of the greatest literary expressions of postwar America.

©1992 Saul Bellow (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"A masterpiece." (New York Times Book Review)

"Herzog 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)

interesting listen

My very first audiobook.
Great narrator but a bit difficult to listen, would have been a lot harder to actually read. Glad there is an audiobook version.

Excellent but tough

This is an excellent book written by one of the titans of literature. The story is good enough but there is so much more to think about here. This is a dense book that I will have to take the time and read on paper just to make sure I've caught everything.
Not for the faint of heart!!

Unique Voice

Moses Herzog is a unique literary voice. I think I prefer Frank Bascombe, but you can't go wrong here.

The Old Fool

Saul Bellow’s philosophical novel of a man in love with his rambling intellect is disturbing and beautiful. It is Death of a Salesman meets the Idiot. I enjoyed the audible reading.

Extraordinary story

An erudite (often amusing) introspection into the life of a brilliant man troubled by his own thoughts and intelligence, by his ancestry, his friends, the grocer, the cops, his ex wives, his lovers, the universe, and himself. To soothe his despair he writes letters to the transgressors that haunt his world. Provocative! This is a book of special characters, as in people.

The minutia of mentalness

A little too confusing - the machinations of a madman writing letters to everyone they ever knew. Too much detail, hard to follow and hard to know who is who - too mental. Kinda boring too.

It gets truer the older you get

I'm not sure how much empathy poor old Herzog would get if you're not a middle-aged guy. If you are unfortunate enough to be a middle-aged guy, then this book will resonate big time. Bellow has managed to capture with exquisite finesse what we all feel, while encapsulating it in a very specific story of a particular time and place. It is masterfully done. If you are fortunate enough not to be a middle-aged guy, you will hopefully come away with a better understanding of how they got to be the way they are. Ultimately, this is a story about reconciling the elements of your life and moving on with a new sense of equanimity. In other words, a mid-life crisis story. On a minor note, it is also a precious time capsule for those of us who remember Chicago in the early 1960s.

Herzog in Crisis

Moses Herzog after a second divorce is in mid-life crisis. He writes letters to all sorts of people who he feels have harmed him…both living and dead.

The book is masterful, great story, characters and dialogue. As the book progresses, Bellow slowly shows us Moses' past including the poverty of his immigrant Jewish family from Russia to Canada and then Chicago, his marriages and infidelities, and a sexual attack as a young boy.

I read a critique of how this book advanced many Henry James' techniques especially the unreliable narrator. The book slowly reveals Moses unstableness as he madly writes letters that he will never send to people both living and dead. The story weaves threads together incredibly using this technique.

In the end, Moses declares he'll stop his letter writing and start living - by fixing up his home in the Berkshires, and giving love another shot with Ramona.

Misogyny Redux

Bellow is at his misogynistic best in Herzog. It's still a brilliant novel. The man struggles to find his way through a minefield of women to find himself as a man. Surprise! He does.

Semi-smart, very touching novel of ideas

In which Bellow presents us with the perpetually outraged, perpetually pampered Herzog. I kept thinking that the book is the male writer's answer to the sophisticated romance novel - Herzog is offered delicious food, love, and great sex by a series of beautiful, intriguing women. A utopian fantasy, isn't it? The only problem is that Herzog is hung up on one of these women, his second ex-wife Madeleine, a meretricious academic wannabe and Jew-turned-Catholic (horrors, according to Herzog!). From the reader's point of view, Madeleine's reason for being is clear enough - she is one of the most unforgettable villains in literature, along with her strange associate Valentine. Bellow's examination of the folie a deux that connects Madeleine and Valentine is more fascinating than the most twisted reality show. But the main character's reason for being is less clear - okay, he's a fully sketched human being, but why should Herzog be interesting enough to narrate this novel? He mostly isn't; he writes countless letters puffed up with pseudo-learning and philosophical gibberish. In the end, the writing is lovely enough to carry you through to the end, but the book's reason for being was not always clear to me.