Julian Moynihan
This age is full of fearfull abysses. If people are to go ahead they must move and into and through these abysses. The old definitions of balance and sanity do not help on this journey, but the ideals these terms gesture at remain, even though they require fresh definition. Love still counts, justice still counts, and particularly intellectual and emotional courage still count. This book reserves its sharpest criticism for those people...who try to cope homeopathically with the threat of violence under which we all live by cultivating an analogous, imaginative violence or intemperate despair.
— Books of the Century; New York Times review, September 1964
From the Publisher
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Winner of the National Book Award in Fiction
"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
"A masterpiece" —The New York Times Book Review
AUGUST 2010 - AudioFile
HERZOG is Saul Bellow’s most famous, and perhaps best, novel—and one that translates wonderfully to audio. Moses Herzog suffers from an epic midlife crisis. The book focuses on the numerous letters written by Herzog to seemingly every person in his life, and many people he has never known, letters and rantings that for the most part are never sent. But the book is much more—it’s a complex “quasi-autobiography” requiring great concentration to absorb. At first, narrator Malcolm Hillgartner’s voice seems a bit smooth for the character of Herzog, yet his presentation is highly effective. His polished tone complements the manic Herzog’s life and never distracts the listener from the focus —the inner life of an intellectual who is trying to come to grips with his own foibles. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
