Henderson the Rain King and Herzog by Saul Bellow

Recently I joined GoodReads and I am linking up my reviews here with there as an experiment.  We'll see how this works.

I haven't read Bellow in years but I'm going to be reading him now because I bought three collections of his stories from the Library of America.  I remember in my twenties I liked him but I was frustrated by the lack of storyline.  Now I know better.  There is never really any story line in Bellow's novels, only the stream of conscious thoughts of the protagonist as he tries to figure his life out.

Henderson the Rain King

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is just a crazy book about a man, Henderson, traveling to Africa and trying to help out some native tribes. With one tribe he succeeds in destroying their only water cistern. The next tribe tries to make him their next king because he participates in some native dance which causes rain.


As is true for most of Bellow's stories, the protagonist is on some kind of journey where he is struggling to discover just who he is, what he wants, and why he is suffering the way he is. He desires something that is always out of reach and attempting to get it takes him to some interesting, sometimes terrible places, including disconcerting discoveries about himself.



 We hear Henderson's voice in the first person as he explains his life to us.  He is married once, then twice to women that are as bizarre as he is.  I cannot really figure out why he left his first wife for the second except that he was tired of her.  The second wife is a bit crazy, but she was somehow able to lure him away from the first wife through sex appeal, for lack of a better description. This is a common theme in Bellow's works.  Man thinking through his nether region as Chaucer or Shakespeare might say (or might not, who am I to presume?).

Bellow's characters do a lot of nether region thinking and tend to find themselves married to psycho-women.


Henderson runs to Africa.  He is always searching for something, but what?  He wants to be a millionaire and he gets it through an inheritance.  He buys a pig farm (Henderson is not Jewish but Bellow is and I wonder if he's trying to say something satirical) but it doesn't satisfy.


"I want, I want!" is his rallying cry and the recurring theme of this novel.

So he is in Africa and meets up with natives.  One tribe  is suffering from thirst; their cattle are dying, but not because there is no water.  Their water hole has frogs in it and the superstitions of the tribe prevent them from drinking from it or even letting their cattle drink.

Henderson is inspired to do something.  He decides to blow the frogs out of the water hole with dynamite.  He succeeds and also destroys the water hole.  He leaves.


His next encounter is with a tribe whose King wants Henderson to help him recover his Father who has been reincarnated as a lion.

Before this episode, however, Henderson must participate in a dance that will make it rain. He does and it rains.  He also moves a statue of the tribe's goddess.  Frankly I did not understand a whole lot of what was going on here.  Why did he need to move the statue?

Or why did he need to learn how to act like a lion, other than to communicate with the King's father?  It does not turn out as planned and the lion kills the King and Henderson is next in line to be King.


But he does not want to become king.  Upon first arriving at the tribal land he stays the night in a building wherein is a dead man.  Who this man is is a mystery but not forever.   Henderson realizes that the dead man in the building was the previous king to the current one and it doesn't take a brain surgeon, or any kind of surgeon, to realize what the future will hold for him.

So Henderson escapes and returns to his family and his pig farm.


I have to admit that while I like reading Bellow's style, I really did not understand this book at all and I must say reading about Henderson roving about Africa  was not terribly interesting.


Herzog by Saul Bellow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Unlike Henderson the Rain King, Herzog is written in the third person limited narrative. We hear only Herzog's thoughts, see things from his perspective...this is normally how Bellow narrates his stories.

Herzog (like Henderson) has left his first wife and young son for a seamy siren whom he marries and with whom he eventually has a young daughter. Again, like Henderson's second wife, Herzog's second wife is nuts. She leaves him for one of Herzog's friends (always an especially low blow) and tries to keep him away from their daughter.

Herzog spends a lot of time thinking to himself. He thinks about his wives, his friends, famous people, their actions, how these actions affected him, how his participation fit in with everyone else's behavior. He decides to write letters to every single one of these people and explain to them their role in his life and his opinion of them and himself.

While he recovers from his wife's betrayal, he meets another woman, Ramona, who is gorgeous and eager. She carefully prepares her apartment, culinary talents and personality, not to mention her talent as a sex partner to dazzle and completely him win over.

She is a woman in her thirties who is running out of time.

Herzog enjoys all she has to offer but there is something inside of him that says, this is a little too artificial. Hadn't he been here before with the last wife? Another part of him wants to believe that this next chapter is going to erase the misery of the previous chapters of his life.

The story ends with us not knowing where Herzog is going.



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As I Lay Dying (1930) and The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner

Back in the nineties, one of my sisters completed her Master's Degree in English Literature, boxed up all her books, stuck them in a closet in my parents' house and moved to France.  While she was away I took the boxes out and carried them to my apartment.  I read all of her books except those of a particular author.

 It's not that I didn't try to like William Faulkner,  I simply couldn't make head nor tails of what he was saying.  He was  so weird, obscure, and gruesome.

My sister hated Faulkner so I didn't receive any encouragement from the English Lit expert.

I don't know what motivated me to start reading him lately.  Could have been the book covers.  The Vintage paperback editions are particularly appealing.  Maybe it always ningled me that I tried to read a literary great and failed.

Anyway, I checked As I Lay Dying out of the library and found myself slowly sucked into the story the way a rodent is hypnotized by a snake.  I couldn't stop and, in a dark way, enjoyed the story.



As I Lay Dying is a grim, surreal story about a backwoods family in the deep South.  They are trying to bury their wife and mother in Jefferson, a town far enough away to make it a real journey.  Floods, overflowing rivers, dead mules, a decaying corpse... nothing deters this family from fulfilling the mother's dying wish. There's a zinger at the end but I won't tell you what.

Each chapter is narrated by a different character in the story.  It also jumps back and forth in time so that the reader sees a particular scene through various viewpoints.  This is helpful in understanding what is going on.  What is only peripherally understood by one narrator is made clear through the eyes of another. 

Of course, it's all perceptual.  Some of the narrators are young and don't understand what's going on themselves.  Others possess disturbed minds and see things through a filtered lens.  

One chapter is  told by the dead woman (back when she's alive-time is not concrete in this novel).  Apparently she hates (hated) all of her family members.  The reader isn't sorry she's dead and wonders why any of her relatives would be.

 Faulkner captures the spirit of a bygone South that I'm not sure exists anymore.  If it ever existed.  The characters, for all their diversity, were products of Faulkner's mind.  How reliable an observer was he?

My sister would call him an unreliable one.  What she learned about Faulkner was that he was bitter toward certain  families in his Mississippi hometown who thought they were too good for him.  According to her, his novels were his revenge against them.





It's not the plots so much that interest me in Faulkner's stories.  It's the way he tells the story.   It's like a puzzle.  Who is talking and what is it they're saying?  Faulkner refuses to help the reader out.  Here's how The Sound and The Fury starts out:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.  They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence.  Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree.  They took the flag out, and they were hitting.  Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit.  Then they went on, an I went along the fence.  Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

Any idea what's going on?  I didn't.  My smarty husband immediately guessed that the narrator was watching a golf game but that was not obvious to me.

Furthermore, the narrator, Ben Compson, is either mentally handicapped or autistic.  The first quarter of the book is narrated by him.  He is not an omniscient narrator.  He only says what he knows as far as he is capable of understanding what is happening. 

But he does accurately quote the other people around him.  This includes siblings, his mother, and the black servants that care for him.  Through Ben's concrete observations of what is happening to himself and what he see and hears, the reader is able to figure out character names and their relationships with each other.

Of course, Faulkner doesn't make it easy for you. Halfway through Ben's narration we find out that Ben's name was originally Maury.  His mother changed it for complicated reasons.  So when he's talking about Maury in the past he is actually talking about himself.  Except when he's talking about his uncle whom he was named after.  Insert a smile and a wink here.

Then there's Quentin.  First, Quentin's a he, then Quentin's a she, then back to he, etc... I'm thinking what in the blazes is going on here?!?  Finally in the last half of the book we discover there's two Quentins.  Quentin Compson is the brother of Caddie who ran off, got married, and named her daughter after him.  Since everything is from inside different people's minds, they simply think about what's going on, and what they think about what's going on, without offering the reader any information they don't have to explain to themselves.

There's only four chapters to the book.  At 321 pages, that makes for long chapters.  The first and last two chapters take place only a couple of days from each other.  Naturally they're not in chronological order.  That last two chapters are separated by one day.  That day belongs to the first chapter.  The second chapter is narrated by the brother Quentin eighteen years earlier. 

The storyline?  Not complicated.  An old Southern family, the Compsons, is in its final decay. There is quite a list of characters but they mostly exist in the narrators' minds because they're either dead or have run away. 

 All that's left is one brother, Jason, Quentin-Caddie's daughter, Ben and the mother.  The mother stays in bed most of the time demanding to be waited on hand and foot by Dilsey, the old family servant, and Dilsey's son, Luster, who also is in charge of Ben.  

Jason has a small business but he's about the nastiest and meanest of the whole bunch.  One thinks that Caddie and her brother Quentin escaped to get away from him.  Caddie gets divorced and sends her baby back home.  She sends money for her keep.  Quentin never sees the money because Jason keeps it squirreled away for himself.  

The last two chapters are mainly narrated by Jason and a angry little mind he has.  His whole life seems to be bent on domineering his niece and cheating her out of her money.  She knows this and finally breaks into his safe, steals the money, and runs off with a carnival hand.  Jason demands police intervention but it seems there are no secrets in this small Mississippi town.  The police chief insinuates that the person who may need to be arrested is Jason himself. 

Even though Jason is a nasty, spiteful person, his mental narration is the most interesting.  In all the venom, one hears the cry of despair over forsaken dreams, ambitions and frustrated plans.  He's the most real of all the characters and the most poignant. 

Well, not the most poignant.  That would be the servants.  Serving selfish people, having to care for a thirty year old man with the mind of a toddler, they show the most dignity and strength.  Faulkner in his end notes says, 

And that was all.  These others were not Compsons.  They were black:

Luster.  A man, aged 14.  Who was not only capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size, but could keep him entertained.

Dilsey (the housekeeper). 

They endured.

Should you read Faulkner.  For all the chaos, obscurity and grimness, I can honestly say I have found him to be a rich and rewarding read.  A guilty pleasure in fact.  I've only lately confided to my sister that I like reading him.

She doesn't approve. 

The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories edited by Alan Ryan

As I said in the previous post, even though these book reviews are being published in November, these are the stories I read throughout the month of October.  Autumn is the perfect season for scary stories, although I suppose the dark wintry days and nights in January would also suffice.

The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories is another anthology of stories dating from 1816 (The Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron) to 1984 (Bite Me Not by Tanith Lee).  If one starts reading at the beginning and works his way to the end, he can see a transformation of the idea of Vampirism and the stories change accordingly.

Lord Byron wrote his fragment as a part of the contest that also included Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.  Whether Byron's story would have ultimately beat Shelly's will never be known because he quickly lost interest in writing it and took off for Europe with his companion, John Polidori.  This friendship deteriorated as well and Polideri and Byron parted ways on such acrimonious terms that Polideri wrote a Vampire story to its completion and to anyone who has read it, it's obvious who the Vampire is.  Hint:  Mysterious aristocrat appears at all the wealthy parties, seduces woman, and destroys their lives.  Not because he's a playboy, but because he's a Vampire(!) and sucks their blood for a living.

This collection also includes Good Lady Ducayne, Carmella, For the Blood is the Life as well as M.R. James An Episode of Cathedral History.  All of which deservedly have their place in the Hall of Greatest Vampire Stories Ever Told and been reviewed in my previous post.  That is the difficulty with anthologies.  One tends to come across the same tight circle of stories by the same authors.

 M.R. James' in 1919.  After that there is a jump of some years to 1931 and the stories develop into Science Fiction.  No longer is the Vampire simply evil.  He now is a predator, perhaps from another planet or a spiritual predator.  This last type is in perfect keeping with the older ones that were allegories of good vs. evil or the Christian being attacked by Satan.

The best example of the latter is The Mindworm (1950) by C. M. Kornbluth.  His vampire feeds off people's thoughts but is waylaid by a surprisingly old fashioned method. An example of the former would be Shambleau.  It takes place on another planet where a spaceman Spiff type character meets a strange woman creature who turns out to have her roots in the legend of Medusa.

I must confess the last few stories didn't interest me at all.  They were written after 1950 and have a definite modernist viewpoint.  By that I mean that the vampire is no longer a bad person.  Oh, he or she still preys on people, sucks their blood and all that but now it is an expression of their love. Or simply their nature and since right and wrong doesn't exist anymore, who are we to judge? The straw characters who are set up to judge in these stories are very stupid, narrow minded people indeed.  At least that's how they're made to look in these stories.

  I think one of the best stories is Carl Jacobi's Revelations in Black.  A man finds an old book in a bookstore, brings it back to his apartment to read it but finds that by reading it, he has unbound the "people" that were imprisoned by it.  I like the gradual revelations the story produces and the imagery it provides.  The man's escape is very narrow and exciting for the reader.

The editor provides a brief biography of each author and other works they wrote.  As a result I've enlarged my library-especially my Kindle- with more collections by these same writers.  The good news is because of the age of these writers most of their works are in public domain.

Dwellers in the Hills by Melville Davisson Post

Artist: Thomas Moran of the Hudson School, 19th century

I can’t remember how I came to learn about Melville Davisson Post, but something I read somewhere intrigued me (is that vague or what?).  A writer from the early twentieth century, Post is known for preserving the culture of West Virginia at the turn of the last century in his mystery novels. 

His writing has a definite archaic style to it and at first I wasn’t sure I was going to bother finish reading the story.  He is of the “only show never tell” school, which can make it hard at times to figure out what is going on.  Also, I’m really not a fan of writers who think that have to paint every detail of a picture for me.  At one point the first person narrator describes his descent from a mountain on the back of a horse at break neck speed.  I really could not care less how fast the trees whizzed by or how each blade of grass looked, how your horse frothed, or how you felt.  Just tell me that you rode a horse as it galloped down the mountain. That’s good enough for me. I can imagine the rest for myself.

But, at one point near the beginning of the story (I believe it was after the narrator arrived at his destination from the mountain) the characters and the plot provoked my interest.

Quiller, the younger brother of Ward, a cattleman, arrives home to discover that Woodford, a rival of his brother’s is there to claim some cattle that his brother had agreed in a contract to sell to him.  Prices had dropped and Woodford, was demanding the cattle immediately.

With Woodford is Cynthia, a woman who possessed beauty and charm enough to have almost magical powers over Quiller simply because his brother, whom he idolized, adored her.  But here she was, sitting and laughing with his brother’s rival.  Feeling his brother betrayed, Quiller’s admiration for Cynthia is instantly turned to hatred.

Ward is laid up from being thrown from his horse so he is unable to round up the cattle, which are a day’s journey away.  This leaves the job up to Quiller and two ranch hands:  Jud, a giant of a man, and Ump, an old bewizened man with a hunch back. 

Quiller speaks often of his youth and inexperience and at first I imagined him to be a youth of no more than ten or eleven.  As the story progressed I began to gather that he must be a teenager.  This confusion is a result of aforementioned “showing only” strategy.  Since the entire story is told from Quiller’s point of view, the reader has to figure out as best he can what’s really going on from different comments he makes.

Yet, it is not an entirely ineffective strategy because Post does not make Quiller omniscient or objective.  The reader becomes persuaded to believe certain things due to Quiller’s personal prejudices and limited understanding of the bigger picture.  This allows the reader to become as shocked or surprised as the narrator when certain truths are discovered.

After this initial set up begins the story, which is basically a race to get one hundred head of cattle back home in order to sell them before the prices drop, which is why Woodford wants the cattle now.

As challenging as rounding up a hundred cows would be, it is made even harder when Quiller, Jud, and Ump realize that two of Woodford’s men, Lem Marks and Parson Peppers, are ahead of them sabatoging their efforts.  This is the basic outline of the story.  On the way to the cattle and on bringing them back, Quiller, Jud, and Ump have to overcome the hurdles Marks and Peppers throw in their way. 

Even though the formula is transparent, it creates a level of suspense in wanting to know just how the three men are going to get to their cattle and back.  As the story transpires, the reader discovers, through Quiller, that Ward’s accident was due to someone shooting at his horse while he was riding it.  Then the black smith purposely nails corrupt nails into the shoes of their horses to impede their ride and finally, the ferry boat, which is cut loose overnight requires Quiller and the others to force the cattle to swim across a rough river and risk their drowning.

It doesn’t sound very interesting the way I write it, but Post’s descriptive powers do help create a vicarious experience that allows the reader to enter into the story.

The ending is a little strange in that Post seems to randomly throw in the fact that the Civil War is going on, something not revealed until the last paragraph of the book. But then again maybe it wasn’t random.  Maybe it’s supposed to pack a punch and throw the whole story in a new context.  It certainly left me wondering what was really going on after all.

Another aspect of the book is the insertion of old Celtic mythology.  Quiller informs the reader of the lore of the dwarfs, the “dwellers in the hills.”  They made the bridge that the ranch men have to cross at one point.  He gives a little history as to the relationship these hill dwellers had with the people who settled the land.  I’m not sure how the dwarfs fit into the story.  It made me wonder if I was mistaken about the location of the story and if it was not in fact in Scotland.  I suppose the dwarfs made it across the ocean with the Scots who colonized the Appalachian mountains. Perhaps this was a part of Southern culture that I am not familiar with.  I know Southern culture has its roots in English and Celtic traditions from singing to story telling to art.  I just had never heard stories about dwarves. 

Considering the time period Post wrote his stories  I believe that there was more to Southern culture than I realized and can learn a lot from reading his stories.

 Melville Davisson Post

1869-1930

$6.74

Further information on Melville Davisson Post:

Clerical Detectives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melville_Davisson_Post

America's Greatest Mystery Writer