These two novels trace different stages in a history of outward movement away from the selfenclosure of discursively contructed consciousness to the otherness of the world. In this movement his main characters return to at least the possibility of moral action. But the movement itself may confront them with the reductive and negating otherness of evil, an otherness that calls the whole ethical project into question. The impulse that drives this movement is an attention that does not seek to assimilate others and the world to self-securing discursive structures. It may be a recollection of the benign attention of childhood that moves a character forward, as it does Herzog, or it may be the brutally inescapable attention of a Sammler on the brink of a mass grave. Bellow is in no doubt about the course that his characters need to follow. But he can offer no guarantees...