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Upload book purchases, access your personalized book recommendations, and more from here. Too often they just seem silly. And Henderson himself is not an interesting character.
It may well be that he actually resembles other wastrels who have tried to escape from themselves on expeditions to far places, but, for all his bluster and ego, all his kindness and humility, all his recondite references to art, literature and history, Henderson remains only a bore cursed with the most embarrassing flow of fancy talk in a library of recent fiction. You Jane. If I tried to explain in detail it would be months and months before you even got a glimmer of what gives.
My soul is like a pawnshop. Jul 08, David rated it really liked it Recommends it for: rich white dudes on African safari, rain kings, lions.
Shelves: owned , american-literature , literary , books-to-read-before-you-die , dude-lit , africa , s , enviable-prose. Huh — so, the plot of this book, I say to myself, having chosen it at random from Peter Boxall's Books list, is a rich white guy goes to Africa to learn the meaning of life from the noble savages. Oh, I can see that this will turn out well. Coetzee who I did not love — lots of manly wangsting to the tune of Fond Memories of Vagina. Okay, let me dial do Huh — so, the plot of this book, I say to myself, having chosen it at random from Peter Boxall's Books list, is a rich white guy goes to Africa to learn the meaning of life from the noble savages.
Okay, let me dial down the snark. If you read Henderson the Rain King with your PC glasses off, it's actually a better book than I was expecting, with a certain exuberance and joie de vivre that endeared it to me. I'm pretty sure "joie de vivre" isn't actually what Saul Bellow was going for, as the protagonist is actually a rather depressive fellow, a middle-aged divorcee whose wife and kids don't understand him, a World War II combat veteran with scars of the sort that that generation never admits to, running off to Africa because despite being rich and comfortable, he can't get no satisfaction, a decade before Mick and the Stones.
Actually, Henderson's constant internal refrain is I want, I want, I want , and he spends the entire book trying to figure out what it is he wants. But there is something I liked about that big galoot Henderson, despite the fact that he goes stomping around Africa like the blundering big-nosed American he is.
He loves and respects the Africans he meets, referring to them unselfconsciously as "savages" but meaning it in a nice way, and otherwise never displaying any racial prejudices. Is he a great big schmuck? Yes, especially after his attempt to "help" the first tribe he meets goes disastrously wrong. Like the big impervious dumbass white man he is, he walks away unscathed, feeling very, very bad about it. He finds another tribe, becomes a friend and confidant of the king, becomes the Sungo, the Rain God, in an improbable feat that had me rolling my eyes okay, seriously?
You're gonna go there, Mr. That being said, just as Henderson has genuine affection for the Africans, in his oblivious, patronizing way, they have genuine affection for him — even if they are willing to literally throw him to the lions, should it come to that.
Most of the book, though, is taken up with the inside of Henderson's head, which is a more interesting place than it has any right to be thanks in large part to Saul Bellow's writing.
He held the lioness by the head; her broth-colored eyes watched me; those whiskers, suggesting diamond scratches, seemed so cruel that her own skin shrank from them at the base. She had an angry nature.
What can you do with an angry nature? Ah, why can't any SF authors write a space opera with prose like that? So this is a book about dudely dissatisfaction, yes, and it is kind of hard to feel sympathy for a millionaire who goes gallivanting off to Africa, deliberately seeking out the untouristed Africa and disappointed that there is so little untouristed Africa left. As the first tribe he meets out in the hinterlands apologetically explains to him — in English — "We are discovered. Yet I did feel sorry for poor Henderson, and I even liked the guy.
He makes a study of his own suffering, but he also tries to do right, ineptly but sincerely. And Saul Bellow paints him in big, bold colors, very much alive, very much complicated, an ultimately puny and comic human figure despite his vigorous strength and enviable wealth. My rating wavered between 3 and 4 stars, so I give it 3. I didn't love it, but would not be averse to reading another of Bellow's works. Jan 13, Alan rated it really liked it Shelves: american-lit. As I read this novel forty years ago, my comments are dated.
But every book on Africa and the West I have read since--including Naipaul's Bend in the River--must compete against this one. So far, Bellow still trumps the list. What a concept. Move a large stone, You're KIng! Henderson does, and is. For one gratifying sidelight: as King, Henderson gains--what? One hazard, the wives decide on whether he remains king. Check me on this, it's broadly correct, but I may mis-remember over th As I read this novel forty years ago, my comments are dated. Check me on this, it's broadly correct, but I may mis-remember over the four decades.
He wrote this five years before his most popular novel, Herzog, written partly in the Berkshires where I had a house for a decade--or at least, Herzog lives there, or just over the line in NY.
Updike's Bech a Book satirizes the great Jewish writer and his international artistic exchange. Henderson is delightful, provocative, satiric, and amusing cross-cultural engagement and critique. Bellow's novels come imbued with European culture, so this one dramatizes the engagement of Europe in the Third World.
Times have changed, and some of the cross-cultural jokes may be stale. I should re-read it--with maybe another hundred books. View 2 comments. Dec 17, Drew rated it it was ok Shelves: nobelles-lettres , modern-library-top So far I've only read this and Dangling Man, but I'm convinced that Saul Bellow is the most overrated American author of the 20th century.
I will say this for it: the main character is complete, and very real-seeming. I almost feel like I've met him. But that is just about the only good thing I can say about this book, apart from a few bits of all-right prose. The main difference would be that Saul Bellow creates a schlemiel to do it, whereas Gilbert is the schlemiel herself On the plus side, though, if you're one of the inexplicably huge number of people who enjoyed E.
This lion roar of a novel, by turns deeply felt and comic, certainly ranks with Saul Bellow's best. In "Henderson the Rain King," American Eugene Henderson, a very big man with a very big appetite for life, leaves his wife behind for a questing African adventure, trying to satiate a familiar voice saying, "I want, I want, I want!
Henderson, who approaches the continent and its people as a sort of supplicant, first wins the admiration of a community of Africans country unnamed through a wrestling feat, but later overreaches in his zeal and love for these people and causes a disaster. Henderson and his guide, Romilayu, eventually land with another faraway tribe, where Henderson comes to admire its king and ascends to his own glorified position of the title through the most-welcome consequences of another feat of strength.
Henderson deeply admires the king, Dahfu, and his growing, complicated relationship with this man who's not entirely loved by his people forms the heart of this novel. Henderson, filled with Yankee bluster but seeking to become the artist of himself, has long, deep discussions with the college-educated-abroad, English-speaking king, and these scenes, where nothing technically happens, let the novel soar.
Henderson spends time with a lion that Dahfu keeps deep in his palace, in a spiritual sense trying to become one, and the American is deeply involved in Dahfu's own quest that has his continuing power and very life in the balance. But and this seems often to be the case with me; do I not have a good humor sensor?
I found it more serious than most people seem to, and thought it best when it got most deep. But we carry around these hearts, these spotty damn mangoes in our breasts, which give us away. It's a good portent of what lies within.
Jan 13, Mitchel Broussard rated it did not like it Shelves: for-college. I imagine that chick from Eat Pray Love owes a lot to this book. Some rich and successful but oh-so-depressed dillhole decides to go to Africa because, you know, foreign countries have ALL the answers because they're SO mysterious! I don't even feel like explaining. Henderson is a grade A asshole, even when he starts to "become" or whatever the fuck that means.
I didn't care about him. I didn't care whether he "became" and I didn't care whether that baby tiger he takes home with him on the plane I imagine that chick from Eat Pray Love owes a lot to this book.
I didn't care whether he "became" and I didn't care whether that baby tiger he takes home with him on the plane retaliated against his captors and devoured everyone on board. Okay, maybe that would have made me like it a bit more. The way it's written is almost stream-of-consciousnesses so Henderson constantly jumps back to compare events that are going on in the present with stuff in the past that we as readers don't even know about yet.
After a while, I skimmed most of it, honestly, and got the plot holes filled in by sparknotes, and will be ready to put the words "I want, I want" as much as possible on my quiz in school. If there is one thing it does well, it rockets boredom to new frontiers.
And I now know that everyone that "loves" this book, like The Sound and the Fury , is either A Trying to impress someone into thinking they are a literary scholar who totally love existential crises in fiction because it really shows off our bare-bones human nature, ya know?
May 16, Stacie rated it it was amazing Shelves: books , i-own. But the pursuitof sanity can be a form of madness, too. This book is filled with little gems like these. This is, by far, my favorite Bellow. He plots out the self-exploration of a millionaire with wit and humor, a look at what it is to love and be loved, and most importantly, the difference between what it means to be and become.
We are all looking for the truth, but in that search do we become slaves to our own f We are all looking for the truth, but in that search do we become slaves to our own falsehoods about ourselves and the world around us? This is just one of the questions that Bellow brought to the fore in the book I think you should read it. I think everyone should read it. Feb 23, Marc Gerstein rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics. Literature has no shortage of male protagonists suffering existential crises and somehow or other trying to find meaning in their lives.
But Eugene Henderson, the unfulfilled scorned son of a wealthy father who still left him plenty of money is a seeker with a difference. This picaresque fantasy of an American WASP millionaire's quest for wisdom in the nameless heart of Africa was once a widely beloved and popular novel. It was a favorite of the Swedish Academy when they awarded Bellow the Nobel Prize in , and it was his highest-placing work, at 21, on the Modern Library's famous list of the 20th century's greatest novels.
The poet Anne Sexton said she would rather read it than breathe, while, as Wikipedia records, Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, and the Countin This picaresque fantasy of an American WASP millionaire's quest for wisdom in the nameless heart of Africa was once a widely beloved and popular novel. The poet Anne Sexton said she would rather read it than breathe, while, as Wikipedia records, Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, and the Counting Crows wrote songs inspired by it.
The reason for this book's reduced prominence in the 21st century is obvious enough not to belabor. Dem no so good people like Arnewi. All true. There's little point in arguing, as Adam Kirsch does in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, that "the intention of the novel is plainly the opposite of racist," though this, despite Bellow's later rumination on the Tolstoy of the Zulus, is true too.
Bellow is obviously writing back to Conrad and Hemingway with the apparently novel idea that a white man could go to Africa not to hunt its fauna but to learn from the people who live there; moreover, the old-stock aristocratic hero is not exactly the Jewish working-class immigrant author though Bellow did once name Henderson as the protagonist of his he most identified with.
And if Henderson draws too deeply from the colonial well of "savage" imagery in the African setting, it's worth mentioning the wild, irrational violence that obtains almost equally in the novel's American and European settings, as Kirsch also notes.
There is also, admirably, no noble savagery in this book despite its premise; the novel's major African character, King Dhafu of the Wariri tribe, is not only wiser than the white protagonist but also more erudite, which is why he becomes his mentor and soul-physician. Henderson reflects on how Dhafu's distinction reverses what he'd prejudicially expected: I suppose there must be few native princes left who are not educated, and all the polytechnical schools enroll gens de couleur from all over the world, and some of them have made prodigious discoveries already.
Of course it was possible that he was in a league all by himself. Dhafu is exceptional in the way that Henderson—or Bellow—is: he seeks wisdom and understanding without respite. For the contemporary reader, though, the novel's very gambit is inherently illegitimate, despite the complicating details; even relatively flattering exoticism or mostly benign cross-cultural fantasy is proscribed, as Bible stories were banned as blasphemous from the English stage.
Yet Henderson the Rain King is a strange, funny, and beautiful novel, and you can see why people write songs about it. It begins with year-old Eugene Henderson's disordered American life. Despite his wealth and privilege, he's on his second turbulent marriage to a woman named Lily, is partly estranged from his five children one of whom at the age of 15, Ricey, tries to adopt an abandoned baby , and is often drunk and furious.
His elder brother—his scholar father's favorite—drowned in youth after being chased across a river by police for firing a gun in a diner while high on marijuana, a crazy episode that leaves the family's distinguished legacy to the wandering second son.
In early middle age, Henderson enrolls in the war effort and fights in Italy; in late middle age, he can't quiet the voice in his chest that says " I want, I want. He raises pigs—motivated to do so after he'd taunted a Jewish army mate who boasted of planning to open a milk ranch with the unkosher prospect—and he encounters death in the visage of an octopus at a French aquarium: I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular—blanched, speckled.
The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head with its speckles, and the Brownian motion in those speckles, a cosmic coldness in which I felt I was dying. Death is giving me notice. You, too, will die of this pestilence" and accompanies a friend on a honeymoon to Africa. Once there, he sets off to the interior accompanied only by a guide named Romilayu. His first adventure is among the Arnewi tribe, whom he initially impresses with a feat of strength—the bulky and bulbous Henderson defeats the tribe's prince in ritual combat—and the Arnewi's queen observes his "grun-to-molani," his desire for life, a phrase that becomes a refrain in the novel.
The Arnewi are suffering a drought, however, which is killing its sacred cattle, and Henderson vows to aid them by clearing their cistern of the frogs plaguing it—more marine life, like the octopus, standing coldly for death and the inhuman.
Henderson improvises a bomb that not only kills the frogs but also blasts the cistern's retaining wall and drains the water supply, leaving the Arnewi in a worse situation than before this would-be white savior had arrived.
Penitent, he flees with Romilayu, and they venture deeper into the interior, where they come upon a less immediately hospitable tribe, the aforementioned Wariri. Henderson, now suffering tropical fever, gets drawn into the Wariri way of life when he participates in a ceremony meant to bring on rain.
He wagers with King Dhafu that the ritual will not produce the desired rainfall, and promises that if he loses, he will stay with the Wariri at the king's pleasure. Despite his skepticism, he again asserts exceptionality when he proves to be the only person present who can move the giant icon of Mummah, the cloud goddess, during the rite. The language with which he narrates this feat vindicates the skeptical reader with its jocularly semi-sexual conquest of blackness and femininity at once: Never hesitating, I encircled Mummah with my arms.
I pressed my belly upon her and sank my knees somewhat. She smelled like a living old woman. Indeed, to me she was a living personality, not an idol. We met as challenged and challenger, but also as intimates. And with the close pleasure you experience in a dream or on one of those warm beneficial floating idle days when every desire is satisfied, I laid my cheek against her wooden bosom.
The Wariri jumped up and down in the white stone of their stands, screaming, singing, raving, hugging themselves and one another and praising me. When the clouds subsequently open up, Henderson has the eponymous title conferred on him and finds himself in Dhafu's confidence.
Dhafu, it transpires, has not fully certified his kingship because he has failed to find the lion in which his father, the previous king, has been reincarnated each Wariri king ends his term by being strangled by an executioner when he is unable to sexually satisfy his harem and then reborn as a lion.
Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Henderson, the rain king. Henderson has come to Africa on a spiritual safari, a quest for "the truth. Read more Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Be the first. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Tags Add tags for "Henderson, the rain king : a novel". Africa -- Fiction. Fiction in English, Texts. User lists with this item 6 Favorite list 59 items by dongxiao updated All rights reserved.
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