Jewish literature, with many of its great creators scattered throughout the world, composes an intense intrahistory of our recent time. The XNUMXth century was a kind of total denial of the chosen people and the promised land after a centuries-long diaspora turned into a condemnation of exile; a kind of assumed destiny that in the end served to preserve that identity with the powerful roots of what is desired and in turn denied.
Authors like Stefan Zweig, Primo Levi, or the most recently lost Philip Roth (with whom he had a quasi-boarding relationship) and Amos Oz they served as pens for the cause of a community. It is undeniable that this practically stateless wandering, or even the direct suffering of hatred in their flesh in some cases, aroused narrative concerns turned into literature between the existential, the chronic and the testimonial.
In the part that is up to Saul bellow (yes, I'm finally getting to him), we delve into a tragicomic aspect of this plethora of authors grouped by the same roots and the same 20th century determined to point them out as guilty of all evils.
Certainly Saul was a type of second-generation Jew who "only" soaked up his Hebrew origins through the customs and family traditions exported to the United States presented as the panacea for all types of emigrants. But even so, the Semitic background clothes many of its characters, with that reparative intention of Jews adapted to their new circumstances anywhere in the world.
Top 3 recommended books by Saul Below
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Moses Herzog is something of a Ignatius reilly condemned for his intelligence rather than his stolidity. And the extremes always end up out of range because they stand out from the middle class. But in these deviations we find, as is evident, the greatest social antiheroes, resistance in the face of imposition, hope in the face of cancellation and alienation.
We feel a similar mercy for Herzog, lamenting that inertia of the world that takes such an illustrious guy down to unmask the usual deceptions of our lifestyle and the imposed well-being between resignations and buried disenchantment.
Herzog is the loser for having won, for having discovered the quagmire of contradictions in which the cleverest profit. Only the price for clairvoyance is too expensive in practical life. Herzog has everything but is left with nothing.
And sometimes it seems as if he could only rant about a world conspired against him, like the most helpless of its opposite pole, that Ignatius Reilly ...
Humboldt's legacy
Charlie Cetrine has an interesting story to tell us about his passion for literature, a passion that in his case has led him to the summit from which he has rushed through vanities and disorientation.
Charlie's testimony is amalgamated through his reflections mainly, sophisticated but at the same time agile prose, so that you do not disengage and enjoy a well-understood erudition that justifies this immersion in the character and his circumstances.
When Charlie returns to Chicago suddenly his world falls apart, in his fifties his wife leaves him and his lover is pressing him more and more until he suffocates physically and financially.
His lifeline will be his adored poet Humboldt, with whom he shared a devotion to letters and who kept for him that transforming legacy for his existence in decline.
Henderson, the rain king
The great writer and thinker addressing a lighter allegory with large doses of humor and with that background of criticism about the very condition of the human being and its limitations.
Eugene Henderson gets bored wrapped in millions. It has reached that moment when things have temporarily (or permanently) lost their meaning. Before lying on a couch in front of a psychoanalyst to rediscover the meaning of living, Eugene decides to find himself where no one would have ever looked for him, in the middle of the African continent.
His new house will be a cabin with an African tribe in which he sees that sense that the big city and the great festivals had stolen from him. His vitality is hilarious and the villagers themselves marvel at this willful guy.
Until it gets it to rain ... that's when Eugene Henderson transforms into a heaven sent. And then everything makes sense for their new neighbors.
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