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Product Description
A masterful twist on the epistolary novel, Saul Bellow's "Herzog" is part confessional, part exorcism, and a wholly unique achievement in postmodern fiction. This "Penguin Classics" edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury in "Penguin Modern Classics". Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend, and Herzog is left alone with his whirling thoughts - yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and the myriad catastrophes of the modern age. In a crumbling house which he shares with rats, his head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of his troubled heart. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was a Canadian - born American writer who enjoyed a dazzling career as a novelist, marked with numerous literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His books include "The Adventures of Augie March", "Herzog", "More Die of Heartbreak", "Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories", "Mr. Sammler's Planet", "Seize The Day" and "The Victim". If you enjoyed "Herzog", you might like Bellow's "Seize the Day", also available in "Penguin Modern Classics". "Spectacular ...surely Bellow's greatest novel" (Malcolm Bradbury). "A masterpiece ...Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization". ("The New York Times Book Review").
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.
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