Henderson the Rain King

by Saul Bellow

Book Overview

"It blazes as fiercely 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) A Penguin Classic Saul... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140189424
• ISBN13: 9780140189421
• Release Date: June 1996
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Powerful, funny and lovely

I've purchased many copies of this book to give out to people. Readers and no-readers a like. This one may change you.

A Completely Different Perspective and Style for Bellow

I am a Bellow fan and have read most of his novels. After a while his books become like old friends. This is an excellent novel, and if Bellow's name was not on the cover you would have a hard time telling that he wrote it. This was written in the 1950s, before his famous and brilliant book "Herzog," and Bellow seems to be experimenting with his writing. This is an excellent read but very different for Bellow. There are no mentions of Jewish roots, and it involves a slightly farfetched story of a macho man, Henderson, wandering around the African wilderness with a gun and camping gear. He manages to integrate himself into two tribes and become friends with one king and his lion. Hence the picture of the lion on the cover. Unlike other Bellow characters, Henderson prizes personal experiences and self confidence above reading and philosophy, but Henderson has a strong emotional side as well. He spars verbally with various African characters in an exchange of values and life experiences. Bellow draws on his study of Africa for the background material and uses a landlord to model the character Henderson. In case you are new to Bellow, his novels reflect his intellectual life, his writings, and his five marriages during his six active decades of writing. He hit his peak as a writer around the time of "Augie March" in 1953 and continued through to the Pulitzer novel "Humbolt's Gift" in 1973. He wrote from the early 1940s through to 2000. His novels are written in a narrative form, and the main character is a Jewish male, usually a writer but not always, and he is living in either in New York or Chicago. The novels are mostly about urban life and involves his life, the wives, lawyers, judges, accountants, criminals, book publishers, and other peopel. Bellow wrote approximately 13 novels and plus other works. Bellow's style progressed a long way as a writer over the five decades. Some compare his style in "Dangling Man" - the first novel - with Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground." Having read both I would say that "Notes" is brilliant while "Dangling Man" is at best average and sometimes a bit boring. His novels became more colourful such as "Augie March," or brilliant in "Herzog" or expansive and entertaining such as in "Humbolt's Gift." Some of these novels have a warmth and charm, and have a certain tongue in cheek approach in describing the trials and tribulations of the narrator. The humour is mixed in with the meaning of life and the future of our souls. Along the way there are a few diversions such as "Mr. Sammler's Planet" or "The Dean's December" where we see a much more serious individual, but again there is a bit of humour with the character Sammler. That bring us to the present book, which breaks the form of most of his other novels. This is an early novel. The style is a fast paced and almost light read - compared to the earlier novels. It lacks most of Bellow's trademark features found in the later books. Rather than describing th

One of Bellow's most comic works

This is one of the most comic of Bellow's novels, and one of the few that has an apparently non- Jewish hero. The internal cry of his hero Henderson , the 'I want, I want" that drives him to escape himself and search for another kind of world in Africa is the restlessness of the rich American who has everything materially but who seeks something more. Yet there is something likeable as well as comic in the huge and hugely appetited Henderson that gives the book a lighter spirit than Bellow's best works , " Herzog " and "Seize the Day". And it is a wonderfully enjoyable read. s

Hooray for humanity

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.

The perfect example of how life should be led

HENDERSON THE RAIN KING holds a special place in my heart: It is the first novel that was assigned to me in an English class that I didn't think was boring as hell. Not to put down English, it's a valuable course, but sometimes you can't help but wish for a book that's not only 'important', but also 'fun to read'.HENDERSON follows the titular character through a few months of his life, as he decides to drop everything to travel through Africa. That sums up the plot, but it doesn't do justice to either Saul Bellow's prose, or the character of Henderson himself.Henderson is an original, a huge mountain of a man who is so full of himself, and yet so full of zeal for life, that you can't help but admire him. Henderson does not go at things half-heartedly. He goes full-bore through life, often leaving innocent bystanders in his wake.The thing is, Henderson is SO overblown, SO pompous, SO egotistical, that you cannot believe, by the end, that you actually like the guy. This is where Bellow's talent really shines through. He has taken an individual who would tire you out within two minutes in real life, and has somehow made him endearing. It is a terrific feat of writing, on par with John Kennedy Toole's hero Ignatius Reilly in A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Although to be fair, Henderson is not nearly as unlikeable (in theory) as Ignatius is.HENDERSON is not a saint. Thank God. He'd never let good sense stand in the way of a good time. But he's not an idiot. He does care for others, in his way (unlike Ignatius). He's destructive, but intensely well-meaning. He's one of the most remarkable characters in modern literary fiction, keeping company with Ignatius, Garp, and Quoyle. Those true readers out there know who these guys are.

Henderson the Rain King

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.