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"It blazes as fiercly and scintillatingly as a forest fire. There is life here; a great rage to live more fully. In this it is a giant among novels." (San Francisco Examiner)
Saul Bellow evokes all the rich colors and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this acclaimed comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson’s awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life win him the admiration of the tribe—but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah. A hilarious, often ribald story, Henderson the Rain King is also a profound look at the forces that drive a man through life.
This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Adam Kirsch.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Sales Rank: #110846 in Books
- Published on: 2012-12-24
- Released on: 2012-12-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.70" h x .59" w x 5.00" l, .53 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Bellow's classic novel of a dissatisfied American millionaire finding himself in Africa has been newly recorded in time for the novel's 50th anniversary. Joe Barrett reads the seriocomic tale of Eugene Henderson, who flees workaday American anomie for the freeing chaos of Africa. Barrett's voice is pleasingly gravelly, rimed with experience and rising to a growling screech at particularly heated moments. Every audio recording should be so lucky as to work with Bellow's prose, but this version, directed by Keith Reynolds, is more than adequate. Barrett is to be commended for sounding like a man of Bellow's era, not his own; one can almost picture Bellow's voice emitting a similar blend of assurance and self-conscious anxiety. A Viking hardcover. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"A kind of wildly delirious dream made real by the force of Bellow's rollicking prose and the offbeat inventiveness of his language."
—Chicago Tribune
"It made me dance."
—Henry Miller — Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) is the author of nearly twenty works of literature, including Seize the Day, The Adventures of Augie March, The Victim, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift. He taught at the University of Chicago and Boston University. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.
Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at the New Republic and a columnist for the Tablet. He lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
66 of 72 people found the following review helpful.
Henderson the Rain King
By Patricia C. Mack
This is the BEST book I've read in ages. I found it so thoroughly engaging, I couldn't put it down! Eugene Henderson, a great (often) drunken oaf of a man--rich, somewhat crass, a man who does not suffer fools gladly and makes life for his wives and children difficult--chafes at the restraints of a sophisticated, civilized existence in New York and makes his way into Africa. Once there, all his innate qualities--sheer strength, his instincts, rashness,while drawbacks in an artifical social world--serve him well in the natural world. He encounters princes, kings and hired guides, who he treats with equal respect. Africa gives him an arena to test himself, quench his thirst for an answer to the internal (and for him, eternal) question that eludes him throughout his life: I want, I want, I want. Through his journey, he finds out what he really wants to do with the rest of his life and comes out of this adventure with a greater sense of who he really is. Saul Bellow makes Henderson and his experiences so real, the reader feels as though he or she is there, seeing it all through Henderson's eyes. I think this book is a gem, a completely entertaining read.
64 of 74 people found the following review helpful.
What Makes Life Meaningful?
By Gregory N. Hullender
Gene Henderson, a 50-something millionaire living in 1950s America, decides to take a trip to Africa to try to quiet the voice inside him that keeps saying "I want, I want." Since Henderson already has everything material he could want, he can't find any way to satisfy that voice, and he has already tried several other things prior to his African trip. I'm not sure what Bellow intended, but as I read it, Henderson represents America - huge, crude, often well-meaning but causing destruction nevertheless. Bellow's imaginary Africa would then be the entire developing world - or even the whole world outside America. It's hard to like Henderson at first; even his own first-person narration casts him in a bad light. As his attempts to help the people in the first tribe he meets end in catastrophe, he seems to represent the American ignorance and arrogance that led to so many disastrous overseas projects in the 1950s and 1960s. Subdued by his first failure, Henderson allows himself to learn from the second tribe, and although he ultimately barely escapes with his life, he comes away with the inner peace he had sought, with a new wisdom, and with a determination to become a healer. The message seems pretty obvious.
An alternative way to read it makes Henderson representative of anyone who no longer has to work for a living and who searches for something to give life meaning. This should resonate with any young dot com millionaire as much as with any healthy retired person. Either way, the book reads smoothly and moves along briskly. Read it long enough to get past your initial dislike of Henderson, and it will reward your efforts.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Hooray for humanity
By A.J.
The title character of Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King" is one of the most remarkable personalities in modern literature. Most first-person narrators just kind of lay on the page, passively hoping the reader will sympathize with or care about them; but Eugene Henderson is a three-dimensional creation, arrogant, energetic, restless, engaging the reader with his lively banter and gleeful impudence.
55-year-old Henderson is a millionaire by inheritance, aimlessly sleepwalking through life, married to a ditzy wife, and channeling ancestral spirits by playing his dead father's violin. Needing a vacation from his family and his dreary normal existence, and feeling that "...it's the destiny of [his] generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life," he travels to Africa and impulsively decides to go off into the wild.
A hired guide named Romilayu leads him to two remote villages. The first is inhabited by a tribe called the Arnewi. He observes with delight that the Arnewi village must be older than the city of Ur -- this is what he was looking for, the cradle of civilization, unblemished by the advances of modern society. Here he finds the natives in a crisis: their precious cattle are dying of thirst because the water in the village cistern is undrinkable. On his own initiative, he tries to solve their problem; but his plan fails disastrously, and he and Romilayu leave the village in shame.
They go to a second village, inhabited by a larger tribe called the Wariri, ruled by a king named Dahfu. The Wariri are suffering from a drought and go through elaborate rituals in order to conjure rain. When Henderson unexpectedly helps them bring a deluge, Dahfu proclaims him the "Rain King" and the two become close, almost brotherly, friends. Henderson learns that Dahfu cannot have complete sovereignty over the tribe until he captures the lion containing the soul of his dead father, the former king, and Dahfu asks Henderson to help him in the hunt. But human corruption knows no geographical boundaries, and Henderson and Romilayu soon find themselves in a dangerous situation from which it will require all their physical and mental capacities to save themselves.
More refined and terser than "The Adventures of Augie March," "Henderson the Rain King" offers a wonderfully balanced mixture of philosophy, suspense, and humor. While Augie wandered through life looking for a purpose, a goal, Henderson seems to find his, affirming it through his own adventures and taking the reader along for the exhilarating ride. You'll be cheering for the guy, not because he's the hero, but because he's more human than most of the people you know.
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