Word: hendersons
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...HENDERSON, THE RAIN KING (341 pp.) -Saul Bellow-Viking...
Without some such mental preamble, the saga of Eugene Henderson, the quixotic hero of Saul (The Adventures of Augie March) Bellow's new novel, is apt to seem little more than the portrait of one of nature's fall guys, a well-heeled goof. When readers first meet Henderson, he is (a) rich, (b) not a knight, (c) 55, (d) has nothing to do except raise pigs as a hobby and dream about Sir Wilfred Grenfell and Albert Schweitzer. Suddenly he acquires "a form of madness . . . the pursuit of sanity." He flees his wife and family...
Want, Want, Want. All his life Henderson has tilted at destiny and lost. His father was disappointed in him; his wife tricked him into marrying her; his children do not understand him. His idealistic urge to be a physician was stillborn. A hulking six-footer weighing 230 Ibs., Henderson is a kind of Herculean wreck with a bad leg from a World War II wound, a deaf ear, a bridgeful of false teeth and a nose bulbous from overdrinking. All he has is $3,000,000 and a demonic inner voice that says "I want, I want, I want...
Unimpaired Spirit. Henderson's book not only introduces haiku in the clear accompanying text, but is the first really successful attempt at haiku translation. Through it, haiku may well become a fad on U.S. campuses. A professor of Japanese at Columbia University before his retirement four years ago, Henderson inherited from his father a love of Japanese art and literature, nourished by several long visits to the country. Existing haiku translations dismayed him. Most of his 375 translations rhyme, on the very reasonable premise that Japanese haiku might rhyme too but for the limitations of a language in which...
Above all, Henderson's patient translations (one took him 25 years) capture, unimpaired, the evanescent haiku spirit, which has enchanted Japan for untold centuries...