"That I should be so consumed with this novel is surprising to me. That it is making me emotionally uncomfortable is a revelation. Within this novel, there is no stream of action; in fact, little happens outside of Herzog's own mind. But it is within this landscape that he asks the most difficult questions....I sleep with Herzog on my bedside table even though I have finished reading it weeks ago. It no longer torments me, baiting me with its questions. Instead somehow it gives me comfort, knowing that even under an intense, ruthless scrutiny like Herzog's, the truths about life often escape us." Heather Hepler, The Cincinnati Review (read the entire review by the Cincinnati Review)
Synopses & Reviews
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
Review:
"I would say, if one were beginning to write, there are two places I would start, especially with American writers. One would be the particular chapter in Bellow's
Herzog where Herzog goes back to his New York apartment, showers and changes, and goes to see his lover. That's all that happens, basically, but there are just some of those superb Bellovian asides, divagations, on what it is to be a man, to be in a city, in a century, in a country, of a class, in a time....He really has that deep-sea thinking, but also caught up with a shimmering ordinariness. That chapter, which is actually about sixty or seventy pages long, I think is a masterwork, rarely equaled in any fiction."
Ian McEwan,
Powells.comReview:
"A feast of language, situations, characters, ironies, and a controlled moral intelligence...novel writing in the grand style of Tolstoy — subjective, complete heroic." Chicago Tribune
Review:
"A masterpiece." The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Saul Bellow, author of eleven novels and numerous novellas and stories, is the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards. He has also received the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Book Award Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Philip Roth, acclaimed author of The Human Stain and many other works of fiction, is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts from the White House.
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