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Herzog (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

~ (Author), Philip Roth (Introduction)
Key Phrases: potato love, New York, Father Herzog, Valentine Gersbach (more...)

3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (70 customer reviews)

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Mass Market Paperback Available from these sellers. Published December 31, 1963 Mass Market Paperback: A smaller paperback commonly used for bestsellers and genre fiction.	Mass Market Paperback	--	--	$10.00
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Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

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A masterpiece. -- The New York Times Book Review

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Product Details

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Penguin Classics (February 25, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0142437298
ISBN-13: 978-0142437292
Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (70 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #59,350 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What's this?)
#2 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Bellow, Saul
#16 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( R ) > Roth, Philip

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
potato love

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Father Herzog, Valentine Gersbach, Tante Taube, Uncle Val, Napoleon Street, Aunt Tamara, Harper Avenue, Mother Herzog, George Hoberly, Sandor Himmelstein, West Side, Aunt Zipporah, Grand Central, Phoebe Gersbach, Hyde Park, Moses Herzog, Aunt Zelda, Miss Schwartz, New Jersey, Sono Oguki, Ben Franklin, Cherry Street, Jackson Park, Lexington Avenue

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 22 books:

Seize the Day (Penguin Classics) by Saul Bellow on 5 pages
The Adventures of Augie March (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Saul Bellow on 4 pages
Dangling Man (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Saul Bellow in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text with Faulkner's Appendix (Modern Library) by William Faulkner in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text by William Faulkner in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)

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	86% buy the item featured on this page: Herzog (Penguin Classics) 3.7 out of 5 stars (70) $10.20
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	4% buy Humboldt's Gift (Penguin Classics) 3.9 out of 5 stars (45) $10.88
	2% buy Mr. Sammler's Planet (Penguin Classics) 4.0 out of 5 stars (38) $10.88

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Customer Reviews

70 Reviews

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4 star:		(13)
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3.7 out of 5 stars (70 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A comic masterpiece, February 11, 2002

By	Mark B. Friedman (Woodinville, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Herzog (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

I was prompted to write this because most of the reviewers published here miss the plain fact that Herzog is extremely funny. Herzog writes letters. He writes manic, crazy, poignant, inspired letters to people both living and dead: to his friends, to his shrink, to his divorce lawyer, to the President of the United States, and to Heidegger, to Schrodinger, to Nietzche and to Willie Sutton. It is, of course, one of Saul Bellow's best novels, written at the height of his carrer, which would place it somewhere on the list of the Top 10 or 20 best American novels of the 20th century. Herzog is worth both reading and re-reading, but the book is clearly not for everyone. It is as personal, realistic, and autobiographical as The Adventures of Augie March, but it is significantly more difficult to read in terms of both style and content. It is probably less accessible than Augie, the work of a maturer artist. Readers should expect neither a conventional plot or a chronological narrative, although the book is highly structured and is brought to a very satisfying and almost inspirational resolution as Herzog regains his equilibrium, which he loses to such comic effect in the early going.

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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't give up half way through, August 21, 1999

By	"derbyram@hotmail.com" (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Herzog (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

Half way through this book. I shared some of the doubts expressed by other reviewers. Yes it is well written, but it appeared to be too narrow in its focus. A book whose sole topic is the protagonist's ego is hard to sustain for 340 pages. It cried out for social or political contexts into which the eccentric character could be absorbed. However all my early doubts were dealt with as the book progressed. His love for his daughter, brother and mother give Herzog greater depth and the reader starts to realise that Moses is not just a self-pitying, self obsessive. He is a man out of his depth , an intellectual in an anti-intellectual age. He is a Jew with a long family history of suffering, a "schooling in grief" yet even this proud history of struggle seems trivial because as Herzog notes: "What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering". This is one of many aspects of personal history that troubles Moses

The early chapters lay the foundations for the wonderful latter parts of the book. Herzog is one of the most extraordinary literary creations of modern times. Bellow has created a multi-layered madman, pathetic yet loveable, a man of great intellect; solipsistic, moving, pedantic, gentle and above all believable. One moment he is plotting to murder the wife he loathes; the next he is showing the depth of his love for his daughter; then he writes to Nietszche telling the long dead philosopher that he is lying in a hammock in rural Massachusetts. He also writes to God, Heidegger, Eisenhower, ex-lovers and many of the personal and professional rivals he wishes to settle scores with. These letters (never posted), like the wife's one legged lover and Herzog's monkey kissing friend add much dark humour to what is often a very serious and moving narrative. This is a difficult, intense novel, but well worth the effort.

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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece, but no easy read, December 30, 2004

By	Steven Reynolds (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

The middle-aged Moses Herzog is a notable literary-historical academic, the father of two children from two failed marriages, and the lover of a string of exotic women. His most recent wife, the Catholic convert Madelaine, has lately left him for his best friend. Herzog is lost. As he reflects on the continuing disaster that constitutes his life, and the choices which led him to this crisis, he begins writing unsent letters - to friends and family, colleagues and enemies, to famous figures both living a dead. As Bellow himself has noted, Herzog is a man who, in the agony of suffering, finds himself to be his own most penetrating critic. He re-examines his life by re-enacting all the roles he took seriously - the professor, the son, the brother, the lover, the father, the husband, the avenger, the intellectual. It's an attempt to divest himself of these personae, and when he has dismissed them, there comes a pause - a moment of grace - which is infinitely more valuable than his trying to invent everything for himself, or accepting human inventions, the collective errors, by which he's lived. He's decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening. The effect is that this is something the reader shares. Bellow has the capacity in his novels to cover the smallest timeframe - a matter of days, or even hours in some cases - and yet through the subtle interleaving of flashbacks, meditations and philosophical musings, cover a vast amount of intellectual and emotional ground. His novels are vast in scope yet humanly scaled. The philosophical is made real by instantiation. "Herzog" is a wonderful example of this, and it also contains two of the most compassionate moments I've ever read: Herzog's reaction to a court scene in which the death of an abused child is recounted; and the subsequent scene in which Herzog witnesses, through the window of the marital home from which he's been banished, his best friend and betrayer bathing Herzog's own child. Bellow's genius is to take these moments, one horrifying and one tender, and make them emblematic - give them real cultural, historical implication - without losing for a moment the convincing personal immediacy they have for the characters living through them. That's quite an achievement, and it's why Bellow's novels can be so intellectually rich and so viscerally touching at precisely the same time.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars It Stunk. And Yes, I Read Every Miserable Page.
For an exercise in intellectual pretentiousness, it would be tough to beat Saul Bellow's writing of the literary monstrosity entitled HERZOG. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Dan Herak

4.0 out of 5 stars Compassionate fool
Herzog is a compassionate fool, analyzing his life looking for the problem, when his self-analysis (self-absorption, really) IS the problem. Read more

Published 3 months ago by B. Larson

5.0 out of 5 stars Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow's classic novel "Herzog" is a complex novel of the mental life of a modern man
Herzog was published in 1964 and has never gone out of print. The novel by Canadian-Chicagoan Jewish author Saul Bellow has become a modern classic. Read more

Published 5 months ago by C. M Mills

1.0 out of 5 stars Book was misrepresented as in good condition when it was in POOR condition!!
This book, represented as in GOOD condition, was in terrible condition. The jacket was in tatters, missing a huge chunk out of the front. Read more

Published 7 months ago by Patricia L. Loftin

3.0 out of 5 stars Endless introspection, weak plot
I read Herzog I must admit because it was written by a Nobel Laureate; I figured there must be something of value in a work by someone so highly regarded. Read more

Published 8 months ago by MrSherlockHolmes

1.0 out of 5 stars someone shoot me
i read about 50 pages and then I just stopped and said why...? i don't care at all about this character, he doesn't interest me the least bit. Read more

Published 10 months ago by barto

3.0 out of 5 stars Just okay!
I am about halfway through this, which I'm slogging through for my reading group. I would never have chosen such a one, it being a book that is thought to be "enlightening. Read more

Published 13 months ago by Paul Svendsen

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book of Introspection
This book is not for the fainthearted. Nor, is it for the casual reader. The book is similar to that of Crime and Punishment, The Trial, Seize the Day, and The Death of Ivan... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Sancti Spiritus

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant, gripping study of value, intellect and breakdown
This novel starts with a ferociously strong image, then moves us into the mind of Moses Herzog. Herzog is a failing professor with an unfaithful second wife, a treacherous best... Read more

Published 15 months ago by Mr W

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for the tragically self-aware
Moses Herzog is like a Woody Allen character; utterly self-conscious, Jewish, well-educated, unsure of himself, and bizarrely anxious over how - in light of his place in history... Read more

Published 18 months ago by Roberto H

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