Herzog

"A masterpiece ... Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization" New York TimesHerzog is alone, now that his wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend. Solitary, in a crumbling house which he shares with rats, he is buffeted by a whirlwind of mental activity. People are rumouring that his mind had collapsed. But is it true? Locked for days in the custody of his rambling memories, Herzog scrawls frantic letters which he never mails. His mind buzzes with conundrums and polemics, writing in a spectacular intellectual labyrinth.Is he crazy, or is he a genius?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.

“"A feast of language, situations, characters, ironies, and a controlled moral intelligence . . . Bellow's rapport with his central character seems to me novel writing in the grand style of a Tolstoy-subjective, complete, heroic." - Chicago Tribune "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”

The character of Herzog is Bellow's grandest creation, and his mind is as rich as the mind of any character in American literature -- Philip Roth
Spectacular ... surely Bellow's greatest novel -- Malcolm Bradbury
A writer of genius Sunday Times
Nobody else has ever sat down and wallowed to this extent in his own life, with full art -- John Berryman

Saul Bellow was born in 1915. He published his first novel, The Dangling Man, in 1944; this was followed, in 1947, by The Victim. In 1948 a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Bellow to travel to Paris, where he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953. Henderson The Rain King (1959) brought Bellow worldwide fame, and in 1964, his best-known novel, Herzog, was published and immediately lauded as a masterpiece, 'a well-nigh faultless novel' (New Yorker).Bellow's dazzling career as a novelist was celebrated during his lifetime with an unprecedented array of literary prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Gold Medal for the Novel. In 1976 he was awarded a Nobel Prize 'for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work'.His death in 2005 was met with tribute from writers and critics around the world, including James Wood, who praised 'the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself'.

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