Saul Bellow 1915-2005

"Herzog" é um grande livro, daqueles que mesmo quando você termina de ler a última página, você sente que o livro não acabou, que aquele livro será levando com você por muito tempo, você continuará remoendo as inquietações do personagem. Aliás, por alguns momentos você se transforma no maluco do Moses Herzog. Durante a leitura, comecei também a ter a mania de fazer algumas anotações de pensamentos em pedaços de papel ao meu redor. Saul Bellow, para mim, é um dos grandes da literatura americana, junto com Faulkner, Hemingway e Fitzgerald. Ler a notícia de sua morte, é bem ruim. Fechou-se uma grande porta da literatura.

At that time he had been giving adult-education lectures in a New York night school. He was clear enough in April but by the end of May he began to ramble. It became apparent to his students that they would never learn much about The Roots of Romanticism but that they would see and hear odd things. One after another, the academic formalities dropped away. Professor Herzog had the unconscious frankness of a man deeply preoccupied. And toward the end of the term there were long pauses in his lectures. He would stop, muttering "Excuse me," reaching inside his coat for his pen. The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hand; he was absorbed, his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything - everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative - he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mounth made everything silently clear - longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all. The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent.

Herzog, Saul Bellow