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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2011
SAUL BELLOW has earned the Nobel prize for literature really for the precision of his language - and for the optimistic tonic to which he is able to return always again amusingly - in spite of all sporadically desperation:
"Simkin sat in his office under endless rows of juridical books in a big armchair. The person is born to become an orphan and to leave orphans, but an armchair like this armchair is a big consolation if one can afford him."
This quotation from the novel "HERZOG" has been remembered to me more than 40 years - and, among the rest, has led of course to the fact, that I have procured a nice comfortable ear armchair in the Oxford style for myself. The small passage at the beginning of the novel already rescues in itself the whole message: Not totally despair as it is in vogue in certain intellectual layers over and over again, but enjoy that there are in the life also over and over again small things which give consolation, courage and even joy.
In this case the erotic situations - count to it RAMONA (from Buenos Aires; "she went with quick firmness and clattered with the sales in vigorous, Castilian kind. She entered a space challenging, with light swaggering" ...) - and the smaller joys of the everyday life: child poems, music, the visit of a fish business: all this is only because by this method of story telling all those positive childhood-recollections come to life again with all the smells and noises :
"My mother has spoiled me certainly. Once, at night she has moved me on a sledge about crusty ice and the small glitter of the snow. Near the old grocery we met an old Baba who said: "WHY DO YOU PULL HIM, DAUGHTER?" Mummy, dark rings under the eyes. She breathed hardly. She carried the sharpened lake dog coat. Dry fish hung bundle-wise in the store, a rancid sugar smell, cheese, soap ... "
"Simkin sat in his office under endless rows of juridical books in a big armchair. The person is born to become an orphan and to leave orphans, but an armchair like this armchair is a big consolation if one can afford him."
This quotation from the novel "HERZOG" has been remembered to me more than 40 years - and, among the rest, has led of course to the fact, that I have procured a nice comfortable ear armchair in the Oxford style for myself. The small passage at the beginning of the novel already rescues in itself the whole message: Not totally despair as it is in vogue in certain intellectual layers over and over again, but enjoy that there are in the life also over and over again small things which give consolation, courage and even joy.
In this case the erotic situations - count to it RAMONA (from Buenos Aires; "she went with quick firmness and clattered with the sales in vigorous, Castilian kind. She entered a space challenging, with light swaggering" ...) - and the smaller joys of the everyday life: child poems, music, the visit of a fish business: all this is only because by this method of story telling all those positive childhood-recollections come to life again with all the smells and noises :
"My mother has spoiled me certainly. Once, at night she has moved me on a sledge about crusty ice and the small glitter of the snow. Near the old grocery we met an old Baba who said: "WHY DO YOU PULL HIM, DAUGHTER?" Mummy, dark rings under the eyes. She breathed hardly. She carried the sharpened lake dog coat. Dry fish hung bundle-wise in the store, a rancid sugar smell, cheese, soap ... "
