Resumo de Herzog - Saul Bellow

Herzog is Bellow?s sixth novel, published in 1964, and is considered by many to be his most complete masterpiece, certainly one of his major works. It begins as it ends, with Moses Herzog at his country house in the Berkshires, but any further outlay of the novel?s plot and sequence of settings apart from the simplest would detract from its intent. It is certainly not a conventional novel in the sense that action does not tick along with any kind of chronological linearity; the narration switches between the third person and Herzog himself, either writing his letters or recollecting incidents from his past, and thus the present moment is often inextricably linked with Herzog?s memories.

A simple outline of the plot would run as follows: Herzog moves from Ludeyville, the Berkshires, from the house he bought for his second wife Madeleine and child June before she left him for his then best friend Valentine Gersbach, a leonine character with only one leg. He accepts an invitation to stay with an old flame of his called Libbie Vane in Vineyard Haven, but when he arrives he feels a terrible guilt at this imposition on the newlywed and secretly flees the house. He travels to New York with a notion of finding a lawyer and securing June?s custody, this task he sees as being vitally important as he has been warned by an ex-student and babysitter of Madeleine?s that June was once locked in a car while her mother and lover argued. He attends a series of trials in New York, waiting for his lawyer, and hears the horrific story of a young boy who is locked in a closet while his mother and lover squabble, and is eventually battered to death; this spurs him to form a plan of abduction. He leaves New York telling his own lover Ramona that he will be away on business for a few days in Chicago, flies to Chicago, and finds an old gun belonging to his father in his stepmother?s house, having a vague conception of kidnap and murder. When he arrives at his old house in Chicago, however, sneaking inside and seeing Valentine bathing his daughter, he is overcome with love, and a little remorse; he realises that his child is not in danger and Valentine is really no monster, albeit a treacherous friend, and he leaves. He stays with an old friend who agrees to phone Madeleine to arrange that Herzog might see June for the day, she refuses to talk to Herzog in person but agrees to the exchange in principle via his friend Lucas Asphalter. The next day he sees his daughter and takes her to the zoo, later the aquarium. Leaving the aquarium he is rammed by a truck from behind, mildly concussed, but then charged with the possession of an unlicensed firearm. The icy Madeleine comes to pick up her daughter from the station but cannot press any further charges, much to her chagrin. His brother Willie, a wealthy man of industry, posts bond, and he eventually returns to his house in Ludeyville for a period of convalescence.

The book ends in Ludeyville, Ramona, desperately keen to secure his affections, is on her way over for dinner while Herzog doses in a lounger, listening to the sweep of the cleaner?s brush in the kitchen. At the end, unlike the beginning, he is not writing letters, he has no more to say, and where his country house was once a grotto for his seeming incipient madness, his rambling internal dialogues and unsent missives to people known, famous, and dead, it is now a house with the promise of recovery, contentedness, possibly new life.

It is certainly of note that the preponderance of language dedicated to soul-searching, excuse, defence, against his own conscience and others gradually diminishes throughout the novel. Herzog charts the progression of a man overcoming his insecurities and the trauma of rejection, and in that sense it is also a novel that strikes a peculiarly historical and ethnic chord. Herzog is a Jewish man who is always apologising, who cannot understand his luck in certain situations, who has a default setting as victim. This is certainly not imagined; he is unfairly treated, swindled, betrayed and often just plain unlucky, and in that sense his final attitude of acceptance, and silence, lends the book remedial force. It is uplifting and often amusing to come through Herzog?s trials as he does, and end up as contented as he seemingly is, and will be.

Bellow?s skills at wielding complex language and complex structures of language, figurative, evocative, comical, are ever present. He is a writer whose voice defines a type of twentieth century man, is ever weighted with academic learning and yet can render prose of startling beauty. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Resumos Relacionados