May 2021. Herzog by Saul Bellow

1964, Odyssey Editions, 374 pages. Written in English, read in English.

This would be a good place to discuss the synopsis of the book, but it doesn’t have one, as such. Herzog, from its title onwards, is a very Jewish book, in the sense that it is filled with what the Yiddish language refers to as Krechtzen, the issuance of complaints to slightly destabilise an otherwise ordinary existence.

Moses Elkanah Herzog, the protagonist, does seem to have legitimate grounds to complain, though, and in the course of the novel he is primarily doing it with a series of letters that are apparently never sent — in a nutshell, his wife has left him to pursuit a life with a former neighbour, who is a brute force version of himself. That neighbour has left a wife of his own for the same purpose, and together they are raising Herzog’s own daughter, whom they are trying to alienate from him. In the meantime, Herzog is a paragon of restlessness, spending as much time in the novel travelling from one place to another, then regretting and travelling all the way back, as he spends in thoughts and reminiscences. Somewhere in the distance of those memories there are another wife and son, various lovers, parents and brothers.

The novel begins as a very dense piece of literature. Herzog’s train ride, which is primarily where we find him for the first few chapters, does not appear to make any narrative progress, and I’ve felt that it was going to be a stream of consciousness novel, in which we are trapped inside the protagonist’s mind as much as he is. But the novel shifts between several narrative modes — in places it grinds to a halt, and then it is a tour of Herzog’s mind; in other places Bellow treats us to speedy recitatives, and the viewpoint often shifts — sometimes within the same paragraph — from the third person to the first person, making it a bit hard to follow.

At the end, after the last sentence has been written and read, our whirlwind journey with Moses Herzog, across the length of the continent, fuelled by a sudden desire for revenge that eventually backfires, comes to a close, very similarly to how it began — no resolution or redemption but just life again, starting from scratch.

The June 2021 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture by Jon Savage.