Bruno S's song - Werner Herzog's Stroszek (1977)
Herzog (Tr. Spa-Eng from a review by Pepaque)
Synopsis
Saul Bellow's novel (1915-2005), American writer, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
Moses Elkanah Herzog is descended from a modest Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia to Canada. Professor of Philosophy and History, author of a brilliant work on the problems of natural law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who has become famous through his book Romanticism and Christianity experiences his life with all its ups and downs as both a spiritual adventure and as a conflict with historical and existential philosophy. You could say that he is an existentialist.
The crisis of Herzog, who is then forty-five years old, whose decisive phase is told in the novel, feeds on an intellectual level, but the reason is certainly based on his failure to face everyday reality. His second wife, Madeleine, just divorced from him after having deceived him for many years with one of his closest friends; his children, whom he loves but has been a bad father for, as he himself admits, grow apart from him and are no longer able to meet their academic commitments; the work in the second volume of his book stalled.
Herzog feels more and more strongly the need to explain, justify, resolve, put into place, clear and repair. In his loneliness he begins to take notes on paper, fragments, nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations, and finally he engages in writing letters to living and dead, philosophers, politicians, family members, friends, and God himself, letters that he rarely ends and never sends to their recipients. They are writings where he sets out his opinion briefly or widely, interprets others' opinions, makes philosophical reflections, tries to excuse or justify and then repair the wrongs he believes he has caused to others.
Almost all of these letters contain a compact load of ideas aggressively and brightly formulated on politics, sociology, psychoanalysis, love, life and death, but each letter generates Herzog's memories about his past, his friends, his wives and women loved.
Synopsis
Saul Bellow's novel (1915-2005), American writer, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
Moses Elkanah Herzog is descended from a modest Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia to Canada. Professor of Philosophy and History, author of a brilliant work on the problems of natural law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who has become famous through his book Romanticism and Christianity experiences his life with all its ups and downs as both a spiritual adventure and as a conflict with historical and existential philosophy. You could say that he is an existentialist.
The crisis of Herzog, who is then forty-five years old, whose decisive phase is told in the novel, feeds on an intellectual level, but the reason is certainly based on his failure to face everyday reality. His second wife, Madeleine, just divorced from him after having deceived him for many years with one of his closest friends; his children, whom he loves but has been a bad father for, as he himself admits, grow apart from him and are no longer able to meet their academic commitments; the work in the second volume of his book stalled.
Herzog feels more and more strongly the need to explain, justify, resolve, put into place, clear and repair. In his loneliness he begins to take notes on paper, fragments, nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations, and finally he engages in writing letters to living and dead, philosophers, politicians, family members, friends, and God himself, letters that he rarely ends and never sends to their recipients. They are writings where he sets out his opinion briefly or widely, interprets others' opinions, makes philosophical reflections, tries to excuse or justify and then repair the wrongs he believes he has caused to others.
Almost all of these letters contain a compact load of ideas aggressively and brightly formulated on politics, sociology, psychoanalysis, love, life and death, but each letter generates Herzog's memories about his past, his friends, his wives and women loved.
Along with this mental conflict, Herzog's attempts to
correct his altered relationship with reality and bring order to his
complicated personal matters development. He deals with his lawyer about
the legal possibilities of obtaining temporary custody of his children,
he borrows money from his brother, he embarks on a journey to Chicago
to visit his daughter, is involved in a traffic accident and is arrested
because he has no weapons permission while carrying his father's
pistol, which he had taken as he had been dealing with the idea of
killing his second wife's current husband. The hours at the police
station where he feels humiliated by the rude behavior of the police and
finds himself deprived of all human and paternal authority in front of
his young daughter are at the peak of his odyssey.
At the end of the novel Herzog meets himself again in a dilapidated chalet in Massachusetts where he had also lived at first, unshaven, writing letters, eating stale bread, but now surprisingly consistent with himself, carefully re-establishing a new contact with Ramona, the only truly balanced and natural woman he knows, saved from the ideas that disturb him, not cultivating his tendency toward despair, self-pity and loneliness, and determined to use every possibility to establish human contacts. Herzog manages to emerge from chaos.
At the end of the novel Herzog meets himself again in a dilapidated chalet in Massachusetts where he had also lived at first, unshaven, writing letters, eating stale bread, but now surprisingly consistent with himself, carefully re-establishing a new contact with Ramona, the only truly balanced and natural woman he knows, saved from the ideas that disturb him, not cultivating his tendency toward despair, self-pity and loneliness, and determined to use every possibility to establish human contacts. Herzog manages to emerge from chaos.
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