"Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger," the eponymous Herzog wrote in the last throes of his letter-writing mania, "I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall into the quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?" Herzog's epistolary frenzy had been precipitated by the discovery that he was being cuckolded by his best friend, and the demented, learned letters - demanding explanations not only from his wife, her lover, her psychoanalyst and parents but from the likes of Heidegger, Schrödinger and, finally, "[t]o God he jotted several lines" - had made me weep with laughter. Man oh man, what a stroke of inspiration to haul those luminaries down into Herzog's - Bellow's - our! - farce and sorrow. Once it had been done, you realized that somebody, necessarily, had to do it. - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for The Los Angeles Times
