Famous Lines from Famous Books

Famous Lines from Famous Books

First line: “If I am out of my mind it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog”

This line was is from the novel Herzog which was published in 1964 by the author Saul Bellow who lived from 1915 to 2005. This author is also known for other works, including “Dangling Man” and “Seize the Day”

World for word summary: Herzog is a novel set in 1964, in the United States, and is about the midlife crisis of a Jewish man named Moses E. Herzog. At the age of forty-seven he is just emerging from his second divorce, this one particularly acrimonious. He has two children, one by each wife, who are growing up without him present. His career as a writer and as an academic has floundered. He is in a relationship with a vibrant woman, Ramona, but finds himself running away from commitment. Herzog’s second marriage, to the demanding, manipulative Madeleine, has recently ended in a humiliating fashion. While still actively married, Madeleine convinced Moses to move her and their daughter Junie to Chicago, and to arrange for their best friends, Valentine and Phoebe Gersbach, to move as well, securing a solid job for Valentine. However, the plans were all a ruse, as Madeleine and Valentine were carrying on an affair behind Moses's back, and shortly after arriving in Chicago, Madeleine throws Herzog out, securing a restraining order (of sorts) against him, and attempting to have him committed to an asylum. Herzog spends much of his time mentally writing letters he never sends. These letters are aimed at friends, family members, and famous figures. The recipients may be dead, and Herzog has often never met these people. The one common thread is that Herzog is always expressing disappointment, either his own in the failings of others or their words, or apologizing for the way he has disappointed others.The novel opens with Herzog in his house in Ludeyville, a town in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. He is contemplating returning to New York to see Ramona, but instead flees to Martha's Vineyard to visit some friends. He arrives at their house, but writes a note – this one an actual note – saying that he has to leave:"Not able to stand kindness at this time. Feeling, heart, everything in strange condition. Unfinished business."He heads to New York to start trying to finish that business, including regaining custody of his daughter, Junie. After spending a night with Ramona, he heads to the courthouse to meet his lawyer to discuss his plans, and ends up witnessing a series of tragicomic court hearings, including one where a woman is charged with beating her three-year-old to death by flinging him against a wall. Moses, already distraught after receiving a letter from Junie's babysitter about an incident where Valentine locked Junie in the car while he and Madeleine argued inside the house, heads to Chicago. He goes to his stepmother's house and picks up an antique pistol with two bullets in it, forming a vague plan of killing Madeleine and Valentine and running off with Junie. The plan goes awry when he sees Valentine giving Junie a bath and realizes that Junie is in no danger. The next day, after taking his daughter to the aquarium, Herzog is in a car accident and ends up charged with possession of a loaded weapon. His brother, the rational Will, picks him up and tries to get him back on his feet. Herzog heads to Ludeyville, where his brother meets him and tries to convince him to check himself into an institution. But Herzog, who had previously considered doing just that, is now coming to terms with his life. Ramona comes up to join him for a night – much to Will's surprise – and Herzog begins making plans to fix up the house, which, like his life, needs repair but is still structurally sound. Herzog closes by saying that he doesn't need to write any more letters. Through the flashbacks that litter the novel, other critical details of Herzog's life come to light, including his marriage to the stable Daisy and the existence of their son, Marco; the life of Herzog's father, a failure at every job he tried; and Herzog's sexual molestation by a stranger on a street in Montreal.

Review

 By JULIAN MOYNAHAN

he position of the 43-year-old hero and title character of Saul Bellow’s latest and best novel is absurd. Moses E. Herzog believes in reason, but is suffering from a protracted nervous crisis, following the collapse of his second marriage, that leads him to the brink of suicide. He deplores the current vogue for crisis ethics, dionysiac revivals and thrilling apocalypses, yet is professionally an intellectual historian of the Romantic Movement who travels about with a paperback volume of Blake’s poems in his valise.

He is an urbanite from Montreal who has spent most of his life in Chicago and New York, yet the only think he owns is a decaying farmhouse in a depopulated area of the Berkshires. He believes that “brotherhood is what makes a man human,” yet he has been cuckolded by his best friend and has come to manhood in a period when six million of his fellow Jews were exterminated by the Nazis and their allies.

He sees his mission as “this great bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development,” but he has apparently failed as a father, a lover, a husband, a writer, an academic and he faces each day and each night the real possibility that his psyche is being invaded by the self-disintegrative processes of an actual psychosis.

And he sees in a last absurd paradox that his balance, if it is to come, must come “from instability.” The novel, in its almost perfect narrative art, makes us see the truth and wisdom of that paradox, not only for Herzog himself but for all of us at this point -- at this “post-Christian” point, as the book hesitantly but finally puts it -- of modern history.

Over the past 10 or 15 years, Jewish writers -- Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia -- have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. “Herzog,” in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced (unless Henry Roth’s magnificent try at a masterpiece, “Call It Sleep,” written in the 1930s, can somehow be brought into the picture), and it is Bellow’s most Jewish book. There are no gentiles in it. It is full of Jewish wit, humor, pathos, intellectual and moral passion, hipness about European social thought and foreign literatures. Like the prophets, Herzog cries out for “a change of heart,” and like all Jews in this generation, he feels himself to be a survivor with the responsibility of testifying to the continued existence of values which the Eichmanns had tried to send up in the smoke of burning flesh.

“Herzog” is a great book because it has great characters. First, Herzog himself. He wanders about, distracted, charming and nervy, a kind of intellectual Oblomov on the run, a Pierre Bezhukhov of the thermonuclear century. His mood shifts in great swoops and glides; he revisits imagination the scenes of his broken marriages, his broken career, his childhood. He disappears from New York, turns up in Vineyard Haven, flies to Chicago, where, gun in hand, he spies through a window his ex-wife’s lover bathing Herzog’s own small daughter and realizes he can never seize the swift logic of the assassin.

At the last he comes back to the Massachusetts farmhouse where owls roost on the posts of his former marriage bed and the toilet bowl contains the tiny skeletons of birds. Throughout his mental and physical journeying, he has been composing letters -- to friends and enemies, professional rivals and colleagues, to General Eisenhower and Friedrich Nietzsche, to his second wife Madeleine, to a woman named Wanda with whom he had a brief affair during a foundation-sponsored lecture tour in the Iron Curtain countries.

The letters are cranky, brilliant, poignant and, of course, they are never sent. As the electricity at the farm is switched on by a local handy man, Herzog at last quiets down: “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.” He is written out for the time being, like his creator: he is bare but not barren. The book, composed throughout in the tonality of Herzog’s voice and consciousness goes silent. But we know that the voice, which, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness is the voice of a civilization, our civilization, has been recorded for posterity.

Madeleine is a great character. She is beautiful, brilliant, cracked, and is working for a doctorate in Russian church history with the aim of rising like a phoenix from the ashes of her former husband’s scholarly reputation. A slut in the home, she is a bitch in bed, a dazzler in conversations with free-floating intellectuals about Soloviev the younger, and she is very touching because she is so fully and roundly drawn. Herzog is all for justice, while Mady’s passion is for justification: the marriage has been a tragedy and a farce. Her lover, Valentine Gersbach, a red-headed knave who poles himself along on a wooden leg like a Venetian gondolier, is a great character. He is full of schmaltz and spouts the latest stencils of psychology while he takes dishonest advantage of a friend. The author draws this modern Tartuffe with love, hatred and a racy vividness.

The narrative movement of “Herzog” has a beautiful fluidity. Plot, in the skeletal. Aristotelian sense dissolves back into an all-encompassing awareness -- the container becomes the contained -- and the book is structured with great subtlety, by the “whim” of mood and memory.

Two devices in particular are worth mentioning. The narrative line flows to and fro between first and third person report with complete verisimilitude and no typographical fuss whatsoever. Here I think Bellow owes something to J.P. Donleavy, whose peculiar fictional methods and merits still remain a largely unacknowledged influence in American writing, and behind Donleavy stand the Leopold Bloom chapters of “Ulysses.” In “Herzog,” this blending permits the author to combine a kind of passionate autobiography with a more objective “history.” Moses E. Herzog is at once an object lesson called “He” and a suffering self called “I.”

The other device is the letters, which crop up constantly by wholes and by fragments, and which are set in italic type. Anyone who has ever written a novel knows that when the form of a book establishes itself, it immediately becomes impossible to say many things that one wants to say without fouling the esthetic nest. Form channelizes, preventing the dissipation of imaginative energy; but, by the same token, it also constrains or may even eliminate a writer’s opportunity to make direct statements.

Now Bellow is a very intelligent man who has read all the books in all the libraries and has thought hard and bravely about the central problems of our society and culture. “Herzog,” which, incidentally, is also the pay-off for letting creative writers into our university communities over the last couple of decades, uses the letters as a part of the total form to address the intelligence of the reader direct, and it does this without pedantic asides and without inflicting on us the longueurs of Shandean footnotes. After “Herzog” no writer need pretend in his fiction that his education stopped in the eighth grade. Our redskins can wash off the greasepaint and let the pale cast of thought glimmer through without committing esthetic solecisms.

Some of Herzog’s letters are playful, some are pixilated; but all of them are, in the last analysis, responsible. Taken together they compose a credo for the times. Through his nervous and distracted hero Bellow appears to me to be saying this:

The age is full of fearful abysses. If people are to go ahead they must move 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. The book reserves its sharpest criticism for those people -- and no doubt they are to be found among public men as well as among theologians and artists -- who try to cope homeopathically with the threat of violence under which we all live by cultivating an analogous, imaginative violence or intemperate despair. As Moses E. Herzog says in his manner of “strange diatribe”:

“We love apocalypses too much...and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no, I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.”

And of course laughter still counts. Dr. Strangelove’s cry, “Look, mein fuehrer, I can walk!” has reminded people that a sick joke in a sicker world may act as a healing medicine. So it is with Herzog. He is sick and he makes for health.

What I have given is a crude paraphrase. Bellow’s argument is new and perennial. The book is new and classic, and its publication now, after the past terrible year, suggests that things are looking up for America and its civilization.

 

 

Ending Line: This not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

This line is from the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, which was published in the year 1980 by the author john Maxwell Coetzee who lived from 1940 to --. This author is also known for other works including “Dusk land” and  “Age of Iron”

Word for word summary: A magistrate in charge of administering the law in a colonial town witnesses the torture of the invaded indigenous population. The colony or the place is unspecified. Most characters have no names, although the circumstances surrounding the events indicate that the colony is South Africa while the barbarians indicate the black population. The magistrate is of unspecified age although he refers to himself as approaching retirement. At first loyal and dutiful the magistrate becomes skeptical about the legal system he represents. He questions its effectiveness, but if he were to leave his successor could be more ruthless.

Review:

By: the New York Times

 

 A GREAT commanding subject haunts the South African imagination, yet this subject can also turn into a kind of tyranny, close, oppressive, even destructive. Imagine what it must be like to live as a serious writer in South Africa: an endless clamor of news about racial injustice, the feeling that one's life is mortgaged to a society gone rotten with hatred, an indignation that exhausts itself into depression, the fear that one's anger may overwhelm and destroy one's fiction. And except for silence or emigration, there can be no relief.

About all these matters J.M. Coetzee, a South African writer in his early forties, has evidently thought deeply. His earlier novel ''In the Heart of the Country'' was a study of social and sexual entanglements between whites and blacks that showed patches of high talent but finally broke down under the weight of emotionally overwrought Faulknerian prose. But in his new novel, ''Waiting for the Barbarians,'' Mr. Coetzee has found a narrative strategy for controlling the tension between subject and author.
Text:

Mr. Coetzee tells the story of an imaginary Empire, set in an unspecified place and time, yet recognizable as a ''universalized'' version of South Africa. This allows Mr. Coetzee some esthetic distance from his subject, for even while remaining locked with the history of his moment, he isn't completely at the mercy of its local chaos and ugliness. The result is a realistic fable, at once stark, exciting and economical.

The Empire is fabulous, everything that happens in it realistic. At the Empire's edge live barbarian tribes, nomads who visit the border towns only for trade or medicine. The Magistrate of one of these towns - ''a responsible official ... serving out my days'' - is Mr. Coetzee's unnamed central character. The Magistrate's voice, the voice of a moderately corrupt yet not brutal man who surveys his realm with a lax good nature, fills out the book in an unbroken present tense. This Magistrate serves two purposes, as the eye that sees the action and as a voice that comments. When he is simply a convenience of vision through whom the story is witnessed, he functions admirably; when he expresses his own quavering judgments, one suspects that we are really getting the opinions of Mr. Coetzee.

At the outset the Magistrate is confronted by Colonel Joll, a heartless bureaucrat sent by the Empire's secret service, ''the Third Bureau.'' And at the outset we also realize that this is to be a novel not about nuances of character but about a clash of moral styles, a drama of representative ways of governing.

The Third Bureau claims that the barbarians are preparing to mutiny; the Colonel leads an expedition in search of rebels and returns with a group of nomads in chains, terrified and mute. Although the Magistrate argues that the barbarians are harmless, the prisoners are tortured in accord with that ''modern psychology,'' which is the mark of all the secret police in our time. The possibility that the barbarians may be innocent of any revolutionary plans is brushed aside by Colonel Joll in a remarkable description of how he conducts an interrogation:

''First, I get lies, you see -this is what happens - first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth.'' Or as the Magistrate sardonically restates the torturer's creed: ''Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.''

Unable to control the emissaries of the Third Bureau, the Magistrate wants to dissociate himself from their methods even as, in honesty, he has to admit that he and they are both servants of the Empire. Not that he becomes a critic of imperialism or a romantic defender of barbarians; he simply wants to continue in his slothful ways, spending his time in ''old recreations,'' keeping a barbarian girl ''for my bed,'' reading the classics in the evening. Weak, guilty, perhaps obsolete, he is at least human.

The barbarian captives are broken by torture and then released. One of them, however, an impassive girl with straight black eyebrows and glossy black hair, remains behind and is taken in by the Magistrate. He wants to shield and nurse her, but also perhaps to dominate her. The girl yields silently, but the Magistrate, his mind disarranged by the brutality of the Third Bureau, does not simply take her. Instead, he uses her by tending her wounds, washing her broken feet and legs, rubbing her body with almond oil. It is, seemingly, an improvised ritual of domineering guilt, the confused gesture of a confused man.

THERE follows the most brilliant part of the novel, a setpiece of austere prose in which the Magistrate, troubled by his uncharted feelings about the girl, decides to take her back to her tribe. Accompanied by two soldiers and a guide, the Magistrate and the girl ride off on horseback on a dangerous journey into distant regions, an ordeal of cold, hunger and fear described with such dazzling vividness that it reminds one of certain grueling journeys in T.E. Lawrence's ''Seven Pillars of Wisdom.'' If Mr. Coetzee is still insecure in the description of inner states of being, he has become a master in the description of outer event.

Back home, the Magistrate is charged by the Third Bureau with treason, ''consorting with the enemy.'' He is imprisoned in the same barracks room where the barbarians were interrogated. He is reduced, through humiliation and torment, to a subhuman level. And, as he later reflects, he learns the great lesson of the 20th century:

''When (the torturers) first brought me back here ... I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it. ... They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.''

TO search and destroy the barbarian enemy, the Third Bureau sends troops into the land beyond the frontiers of the Empire. At first, reports of victory; then, a nervous silence; finally, the troops return, dazed and bedraggled. ''We were not beaten,'' says a survivor, ''(the barbarians) led us out into the desert and then they vanished! ... They lured us on and on, we could never catch them. They picked off the stragglers, they cut our horses loose in the night, they would not stand up to us!''

Colonel Joll and his men retreat; the Magistrate resumes his old authority. The Empire fades; the barbarians remain. Or is it only the specter of the barbarians? The town waits, apprehensive and helpless, expecting attack. Only now, in this bitter ending, do we grasp the full force of Mr. Coetzee's title, adapted from some lines by the Greek poet Cavafy: What does this sudden uneasi ess mean, and this confusion? ...Because it is night and the barbarians have not come, and some men have arrived from the frontiers and they say that there are no barbarians any longer and now, what will become of us without barbarians? These people were a kind of solution.

''Waiting for the Barbarians'' is a distinguished piece of fiction, and what Mr. Coetzee has gained from his strategy of creating an imaginary Empire is clear. But are there perhaps losses too?

One possible loss is the bite and pain, the urgency that a specified historical place and time may provide. To create a ''universalized'' Empire is to court the risk - especially among sophisticated readers for whom the credos of modernism have become dull axioms -that a narrative with strong political and social references will be ''elevated'' into sterile ruminations about the human condition. As if to make clear what I'm getting at, Mr. Coetzee's American publishers quote from a London review of the novel by Bernard Levin: ''Mr. Coetzee sees the heart of darkness in all societies, and gradually it becomes clear that he is not dealing in politics at all, but inquiring into the nature of the beast that lurks within each of us ...''

This is a profundity very much in the spirit of our time, but perhaps I'll be forgiven if I say that it's a shallow profundity. Why should we suppose that it's a virtue in a novel such as ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' that it not deal ''in politics at all?'' Of course, it deals in politics: what is Colonel Joll but the representative of one kind of politics and the Magistrate another? Nor is politics, as Mr. Levin seems to imply, some sort of surface triviality, a mere scum on the waters of life; politics is a fundamental human activity, the way we structure our shared existence. To scant the politics of Mr. Coetzee's novel is to pull its teeth.

THAT ''a heart of darkness'' is present in all societies and a beast ''lurks within each one of us'' may well be true. But such invocations of universal evil can deflect attention from the particular and at least partly remediable social wrongs Mr. Coetzee portrays. Not only deflect attention, but encourage readers, as they search for their inner beasts, to a mood of conservative acquiescence and social passivity.

I cannot believe this was Mr. Coetzee's intention or, perhaps more important, that it is warranted by his novel itself. True, the Empire is abstract, timeless, placeless; but through the scrim of Empire, ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' renders a moment in our politics, a style of our injustice. Precisely this power of historical immediacy gives the novel its thrust, its larger and, if you wish, ''universal'' value.