Herzog's women

She will tirelessly pursue men. She will resourcefully manage to find the types she likes : the artists, the writers, all the creative and intellectual sorts.  She will hoard men like a mother squirrel stashes away her nuts. She will move on from one to the next, like a whirlwind, like a brilliant sea-storm, till she turns thirty-eight and stops to think. While you will rot in your neurotic delusions. There will be no method, no discrimination in your pursuit of women. You will be like a beggar dog, that seeks furtive gratification in any damn thing that comes its way. Don't you see the hopeless inequality of your positions? If this is a race, you weren't meant for it. You were built for isolation and creation, not passion and domination.

Pardon the melodramatic effect that  reading "Herzog" has had on me.  This is one of the most oppressively depressing novels I have read, and the fact that I can in some ways relate to its unfortunate protagonist doesn't lighten my mood in any way.  If you were wondering what the above lines mean, that's essentially what the novel is about : the middle-aged male protagonist obsessing over the fact that his wife has left him instead of moving on, and choosing one among the several other women that come his way. Along with it, perhaps naturally so, comes an excessive tendency to idolize this ex-wife. In his incessant recapitulations, she was brilliant, beautiful and manipulative, superior to him in matters of practicalities and relationships, while he sees himself as the impotent cuckolded scholar clinging to little else but a certain intellectual vanity to survive.  Making up the supporting cast is an eclectic set of Jewish American characters, and an attendant recreation of a somewhat exclusive and stifling east European Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrant culture in the US. Indeed, this milieu has fed so much of American art and culture, including Woody Allen's neurotic humor. Saul Bellow is my kind of writer. And I am told he won the Nobel too.