Mr. Sammler's Planet

by Saul Bellow

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York, is a 'registrar of madness', a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. 'Sorry for all and sore at heart', he observes how greater luxury & leisure have only led to more suffering. To Sammler--who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings--a good life is one in which a person does what is 'required of him'. To know and to meet the 'terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, American, Literary Fiction, Jewish

Audiobook

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Novels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include Dangling Man in 1944 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.

People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.

Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.

Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.

Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.

People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.

People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Sammler's Planet is one of the most powerful and prophetic novels by Saul Bellow.

Now so many highbrows have discovered that madness is higher knowledge… Power and money of course do drive people crazy. So why shouldn't people also gain power and wealth through being crazy? They should go together.

The listless hedonistic society is Mr. Sammler's Planet and it is inhabited with crazies, perverts and rogues.

A glorious planet. But wasn't everything being done to make it intolerable to abide here, an unconscious collaboration of all souls spreading madness and poison? To flush us out? Not so much Faustian aspiration, thought Mr. Sammler, as a scorched-earth strategy. Ravage all, and what does death get? Defile, and then flee to the bliss of oblivion.

Mr. Sammler survived the holocaust but now he is threatened to perish at the hands of soulless society along with the culture and humanism.
There is already enough of indifference and violence in this world but the world keeps crying for more…

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

At 75 years of age, I can safely say I have long effectively been an overly anxious clone of Mr. Artur Sammler - here, let me illustrate:

“Shortly after Dawn, or what would have been Dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.”

Why “wrong?”

I get it.

Well, if you don’t, it simply goes with the wizened - read prunish - territory of being 75 and taking in your littered book shelves and dusty papers through the eyes of the executor of one’s estate with one wary, weary glance.

Happens every day as I survey my demesne - blanketed by the drear look of désuétude, all of my possessions - after my demise.

Artur - or more chummily and curtly “Art” to the bored cop to whom “Art” anxiously reports a pickpocket on his subway line - is, like me, slightly out of sync with the Land of the Living.

Now, that’s a scary thought, isn’t it?

Well, Old age, as Art’s contemporary Mae West might have said, is Scare City, and it’s definitely “not for sissies.” Avoid it at your peril!

Add to this the sobering thought that Art’s dour depression arises - through no deed of his own other than being Jewish - from narrowly avoiding being exterminated in a concentration camp. But Arthur Sammler doesn’t see the Valueless Value of that harrowing encounter with pure Being - the hidden face of God.

God, it has been said, has long hidden His face - from all excepting Moses. For God is the pure Gainlessness, the utter non-reciprocity of Being. Being demands nothing. And gives nothing in return. Its presence is bound to its pure Lack.

Seeing this, and being thus stunned into Moses’ silent stunned retreat from that awful vision, Mr Sammler might have been healed from interminably trying to keep up on his 24 hour moral treadmill. When the law of an eye for an eye encounters the law of non-reciprocity it is silenced forever. Peace ensues.

I know, because it happened to me. I found have found a peace within my endless internal conflict.

It is rather disconcerting to me now to remember that my Mom wolfed down this book at a hot vacation spot in our early-sixties family mythology, a summer resort on the shores of Georgian Bay. She said, there, that it was now her favourite book by Bellow!

That was my Mom for you.

And surely one reason why she never wanted to live to Art’s age. She thought Saul Bellow was proffering a good bit of advice. But Arthur’s fate is not our own unavoidable sentence.

Well, and she didn’t make it to Art’s age, dying of cancer at a youthful 56…

But, somewhere way above this deafening postmodern fracas, she’s surely chuckling with me now…

As she sees this now-elderly son of hers relive old Art’s aged half-life -

And repeatedly repeat the same feeble misadventures that Art succumbed to daily, like ancient Sisyphus -

And both of us getting tired of our ersatz lives between the Ivory Gates, until finally we are freed.

Bottom line, of course, is that needless to say, we're now more than ready for the Horned Gates of Heaven!

Like where we are when the end of our lives comes... tired of all the headgames:

Spitting from the mouth
The withered apple seed.

Tell me if I am not glad!

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third or fourth reading. Published in 1970, when New York was on the precipice of bankruptcy, I felt the pessimism of the early sections—and Sammler has every right to his pessimism, being a Holocaust survivor—so readily echoed the present that I was thrown. New York, of course, was in shambles at the time. There wasn’t money to paint the bridges. There wasn’t money to pay the sanitation workers. Crime was rampant. You had this immense infrastructure crumbling etc. It was the time of the Sexual Revolution. There was no HIV. Even so today the degradation isn’t physical as much as moral. It seems the rot was only briefly allayed and then shifted to the global stage. We always have this work to do, this getting out from under. To read Sammler is to reflect on just how perennial the problem is.

Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Samuel entertained the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but liberal beliefs did not seem capable of defense, and you could smell decay. (p. 33)

So what at first appears to be dated fiction is in truth just a one period-specific cycle in the long unwinding history of human suffering. C.f. Aeschylus, Edward Gibbon et al. Let’s call it the American chapter. Collapse twice? What is it but one in an ongoing and unending series of collapses? See Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. You may also want to check out Acemoğlu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail.

To old Sammler . . . It was plain that the rich men he knew were winners in struggles of criminality, of permissible criminality. In other words, triumphant in forms of deceit and hardness of heart considered by the political order as a whole to be productive; kinds of cheating or thieving or (at best) wastefulness which on the whole caused the gross national product to increase. (p. 75)

One thing, though, the disciplined hate the undisciplined to the point of murder. Thus the working class, disciplined, is a great reservoir of hatred. (p. 147)

Great cities are whores. Doesn’t everyone know? Babylon was a whore. Ô La Reine aux fesses cascadantes. Penicillin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping noseholes as in ancient times. (p. 163)

Brilliant use of third-person limited POV. Sammler, a gentleman, is appalled by the Sexual Revolution, especially as he sees it in Angela, his niece, and daughter of his wealthy protector, Elya. His interstitial musings are of great interest. His is in essence a critique of the youth culture. Before the war he managed to get to London where he met the Bloomsbury gang and befriended H.G. Wells, an adulterous hound. Sammler’s not a hater, but a relentlessly curious-minded man who crawled from a Nazi mass grave in Poland in which his wife remained, and slowly—they thought he was dead—limped through a fetid bog to a cemetery where the groundskeeper hid him for months in an ornate mausoleum feeding him bits of bread. He ate like a bird. So his varied experience, and vast reading, not to say his years as a partisan, give him a special perspective on America’s age of excess.

They drove out on the Westside Highway, along the Hudson. There was the water—how beautiful, unclean, insidious! and there the bushes and the trees, cover for sexual violence, knifepoint robberies, sluggings, and murders. On the water bridgelight and moonlight lay smooth, enjoyably brilliant. And when we took off from all this and carried human life outward? [The U.S. moon landing was imminent.] Mr. Sammler was ready to think it might have a sobering effect on the species, at this moment exceptionally troubled. Violence might subside, exulted ideas might recover importance. Once we were emancipated from telluric conditions. (p. 181)

The failure, though, to allow women to enjoy sex, feels stifling. Women are guilt tripped here by the men. It’s not even Sammler so much who expresses this misogyny, but the Gruner family member’s themselves, the males, against sister and daughter, Angela. Naturally it’s not the men whose sexual exploits end up under review, though it’s clear they’re getting theirs. Sadly, this was the age. Like so much else of the time, Bellow dutifully evokes it (Though it’s not like Bellow doesn’t have a dog in this fight. He married five times.)

If you like the book with all its vivid scenes, and highflown philosophical sections, you will enjoy the discussion late in the book when Sammler gets to meet Dr. Govinda Lal, a scholar of Indian origin. Poor Sammler, he’s so alone with his fascinating mind. But with the appearance of Dr. Lal he finally meets an intellectual peer. They talk at length about humankind’s journey into space; is it rational, or PR? Why does power destroy the sanity of men? (Barbara Tuchman has a wonderful book about this phenomenon, it’s called The March of Folly.) I found the discussions with Lal enormously satisfying. Bellow is a master without, I think, a dud in his vast oeuvre. Please read him.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

In another amazing and moving tour de force, Bellow explores themes of mortality and morality through a 48h period with his Shaoh survivor Mr Sammler. All the characters are carefully drawn from Sammler's perspective and the action of the novel forms a perfect circle. The philosophical ruminations are treasures as are the descriptions of Manhattan. And naturally, the descriptions of Lodz, etc are terrifying. The main thrust of the story - and an overriding theme in Bellow's works - is the strength of human character to cross seemingly impossible hurdles just for the desire to live and breath (and be in New York or Chicago one could be lead the think). I rank this up there with Augie March, Herzog, and Seize the Day as masterpieces of American literature. Another must.

[Vessey · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who has lived to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell."

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind


When I think of Mr. Sammler, do I see a hero or a villain or a victim or all at once? Does he see the world clearly or is he drowning? Is he realist or pessimist? Is he a man of yesterday, of today or of tomorrow? And does it really matter? When we start to realize that the world of today is only a fraction of a bigger reality that sweeps all that is good and leaves us only with memories of what it was and, what is even worse, of what might have been, do we remember to look back with a clear consciousness or do we persist in our determination to settle a score, to drive away the demons, to pretend that we are more or less than what we are? Mr. Sammler doesn’t live in the world of today, but does he belong to any world? Does he belong to himself? It is in our power to remember and to forget, it is in our power to hope and to let go, but it is not in our power to belong. With our ability to remember and to hope and to learn and to be afraid we belong to all ages and times and to none.


"And mankind had never lived without its possessing demons and had to have them back! Oh, what a wretched, itching, bleeding, needing, idiot, genius of a creature we were dealing with here! And how queerly it was playing with all the strange properties of existence, with all varieties of possibility, with antics of all types, with the soul of the world, with death. Humankind could not endure futurelessness."


We are all nomads. We roam through time’s realms, restless and ever searching for more, but is there always more? Does the human spirit have its limits? And when it reaches those limits, is this a sign of contentment or resignation, loss of faith maybe? Mr. Sammler, like most of us, keeps the wheel turning, but has given up on the journey.


"But for himself, at his time of life and because he had come back from the other world, there were no rapid connections. His own first growth of affections had been consumed. His onetime human, onetime precious, life had been burnt away. More green growth rising from the burnt black would simply be natural persistency, the Life Force working, trying to start again."


But does his mundane, day to day life strip him of grandeur or does it keep it in its place, unmovable, inexorable, very much like the cold within his tortured soul?


A few may comprehend that it is the strength to do one's duty daily and promptly that makes saints and heroes.


I asked once a person many years ago “Why do you always criticize me when I’m doing bad, but never praise me when I’m doing good?” I was told “Why should I praise you for something that is merely the way it should be?” I have always thought that if something is important enough to be chastised about it, when it’s not going right, then it is important enough to be given an encouragement when it is. Because doing the right thing, keeping it together, being strong and reliable isn’t something that happens on its own. It is a choice we make. A choice that deserves others’ support and our own faith. My friend Jeffrey told me about his family “We aren’t big with praise, but not hard with condemnations either” I think that’s valid for Mr. Sammler as well. He spares you the desert, but also spares you the broccoli. And maybe this is the reason for his status among those who care for him:


Mr. Sammler had a symbolic character. He, personally, was a symbol. His friends and family had made him a judge and a priest.


Some may see him as devoid of passion, of colour, of life, but amongst all the fear and frustration there is a glimmer of hope that sticks with him. Because when there is fear, there is also hope. If we are afraid, then we have something to lose. If we have something to lose, then we have something to hold on to. But is he as gentle with himself? He remembers clearly the man he was when he relished taking a human life, but what does he feel toward this man? It is not anger that leads him anymore, it is not a bloodlust, it is not even a desperation. Maybe not even hope. Despite the fact that he still has some of it, generally he is really beaten down. He has lost his will to live. Many would say that this makes him the ultimate pessimist. I would say that it makes him, in a way, the ultimate optimist. Because just like true saints and heroes are not just those who do miraculous and extraordinary deeds, but those who adhere to their duties stalwartly, the true optimist is not only the one who believes and hopes against all odds, but the one who has lost his happiness, his passion, his spark, his will to live, but goes on living anyway. Because he has to, because it is his life. The one who thinks about and cares about things and people despite having lost his faith in them, because they are his, because they are a part of him in very much the same way he is part of them. A man who doesn’t want to be part of the world, who doesn’t believe in it and its future, yet, he will not abandon it and he will not stop caring for it. In Grey’s Anatomy Meredith Grey’s therapist told her…Well, I cannot provide an exact quite, but the gist was basically this: “The goal of your sessions isn’t happiness. Life is scary, terrible things happen. It is hard to be happy. What you need to make sure of is that you won’t die because of them” Meredith herself said “If at the end of the day you are still able to stand on your feet, this is a reason enough to celebrate” This might be a too gloomy outlook, but I see a lot of sense in it and a lot of courage. I think everyone should hope for more than mere surviving and sanity, but I also think that we need to remember that happiness isn’t granted. It is there for us to look for it and hopefully find it. If we think that it should be there in order for us to go on, we may never find it. I will end this review with something I read in an interview a while ago. Life is not about avoiding suffering. It’s about creating meaning.

Read count: 1

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non sono un’assidua ascoltatrice di programmi televisivi. Anzi la televisione la guardo pochissimo. Qualche sera fa, era molto tardi, mi è capitato casualmente di vedere la sigla di un telefilm che si intitola “survivors”, che, mi è sembrato di capire da poche scene che ho guardato prima che il sonno mi vincesse, racconta di un gruppo di persone che sono sopravvissute a un virus che ha decimato la popolazione mondiale. Ebbene, guardando la sigla di questo telefilm ho pensato a Bellow. C’erano tante persone che camminavano seguendo invisibili percorsi e aspirando a raggiungere mete indeterminate, le cui strade si intersecavano, si incontravano; si scontravano gli uni con gli altri ed apparentemente ognuno aveva una meta finale da raggiungere. Quelle immagini mi hanno fatto pensare all’umanità come viene vista dal monocolo Mister Sammler :“la maggioranza se ne andava in giro come sotto l’effetto di un incantesimo, sonnambuli, circoscritti, nella morsa di secondarie attività nevrotiche”.
Artur Sammler mi ha ricordato la figura dell’inetto europeo descritto da Svevo e Joyce: è un anziano intellettuale ebreo di origini polacche, vissuto fino a 40 anni a Londra a stretto contatto con eminenti esponenti della cultura britannica, che vive a New York, una città che fa pensare a Sodoma e Gomorra, dal 1947 e trascorre il suo tempo a guardare con attenzione, attraverso il suo unico occhio vedente, il paese che lo ospita, gli Stati Uniti della fine degli anni ‘60, popolati da giovani regrediti a un livello quasi di barbarie (definiti come “le scimmie negli alberi intente a defecare nelle loro mani, per poi bersagliare tra le urla i sottostanti esploratori”), un paese dove “bisogna riuscire ad addestrarsi per affrontare a viso aperto gli effetti della contemporaneità”. Le sue vicende, animate dal contorno di personaggi a dir poco bizzarri, vicende peraltro grottesche e narrate sempre con un sorriso di sottofondo, sono occasione per riflettere sulla crisi lacerante di un’intera civiltà, invasa dalla follia.
Mister Sammler è un sopravvissuto: egli ha attraversato gli orrori dell’olocausto ed ha fatto ritorno dalla morte, si è ricongiunto alla vita. “Un’esperienza di questo genere deforma”: deforma l’anima e la mente che, nei suoi percorsi di continui monologhi con sé stessa, tende ad estraniarsi dalle angustie e dalla problematicità della vita, allo scopo di alleviare il dolore con il quale si è costretti a convivere ogni minuto della propria esistenza.
La conclusione cui Mr. Sammler – Bellow porta il lettore è che la vera saggezza non sta nel chiudersi nella “turris eburnea” dello spirito al riparo dal mondo, è nel comprendere che morte e vita sono inscindibilmente connesse, che la morte è iscritta nella vita, è implicita al destino umano.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Sammler And Meister Eckhart

In Saul Bellow's National Book Award winning novel, "Mr Sammler's Planet", Artur Sammler, a 74-year old Holocaust survivor, is a devoted reader of the medieval German mystical philosopher, Meister Eckhart. Sammler's love of Eckhart immediately established a bond with me. We are both Jewish, of the same age, and devoted students of the Meister. As the novel opens, Sammler travels every day from his west side New York City apartment to the 42 Street Library where he reads Eckhart's Latin works. Late in the novel, Sammler remembers how, returning from a trip to Israel, he was in his accustomed place in the library reading the following passage from the Meister.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit. Poor is he who has nothing. He who is poor in spirit is receptive of all spirit. Now God is the Spirit of spirits. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, and peace. See to it that you are stripped of all creatures, of all consolation from creatures. For certainly as long as creatures comfort and are able to comfort you, you will never find true comfort. But if nothing can comfort you save God, truly God will console you." (209)

Sammler observes that he does not literally believe what he reads. Still, after a lifetime of voracious reading, Sammler finds that he does not find the need to read anything else beyond Eckhart.

Eckhart and his teachings of spirit and detachment form only one point of departure for Bellow's rich, philosophical novel which considers the relationship between detachment and spirituality and human connection in the person of Artur Sammler. The novel is set over a three day period in 1969 in New York City with many flashbacks to Sammler's earlier life as a Jewish-Polish emigre in London, where is was a friend of H.G Wells, and then to his wartime life in the Holocaust where his wife and many others were murdered before his eyes and he literally faced death from both the Nazis and the Poles.

The book includes extensive dialog and the reader hears the voice of Sammler together with the voices of many others. However the novel is written in the third person through an omniscient narrator who seems to understand all his characters' inward thoughts and whose voice often blends with theirs, particularly Sammler's. The third person narration allows the reader to distance from and to reflect upon the voice and thoughts of Sammler.

The novel is set against the backdrop of what was once termed the sexual revolution and also against the rise of the student protest movement and the New Left. Technological advance and the landing on the moon also form important parts of Sammler's reflections in the novel, as do the crime-ridden, violent streets of New York City. Sammler reflects on his surroundings in interior monologues, but more so in conversations with others. Bellow introduces many of Sammler's relatives and acquaintances. Sammler's relationships and responses to them shape the book, which is a mix of interiority and action. Here follows some of the primary characters in the story.

Sammler had been rescued from a displaced persons camp in 1947 by his nephew, Gruner, a successful physician and investor, who has largely financially supported Sammler throughout his life in America. Gruner has two adult children, a daughter who is sexually promiscuous and a son who is intellectually gifted but a drifter perpetually on the make. Sammler is uncomfortable with the lifestyles of both Gruner's children.

Gruner had also rescued Sammler's daughter Shula, known as Shula-Slawa who had in her turn been rescued by nuns and lived in a convent during her teenage years where she absorbed Catholicism in addition to her Jewish birth religion. Shula-Slawa has been in an abusive marriage in Israel. Sammler rescues her yet again and brings her back to New York City. She steals a manuscript from an Indian biophysicist, a theft which leads eventually to a lengthy and important philosophical discussion between the scientist and Sammler.

Sammler lives with his widowed, lonely niece in a west side apartment. In the course of his bus trips from the library, Sammler observes an African American pickpocket. The pickpocket, noticing Sammler's attentions, follows Sammler home, leading to a pivotal scene and confrontation.

Sammler lost an eye in the Holocaust. This partial blindness is a crucial metaphor in the novel as it encourages the reader and Sammler himself to reflect on the possible limitations of Sammler's opinions and perspectives on what he sees. As the book progresses over its three-day course, Sammler seems to move from his internalized, isolated critical perspective on himself, American society and his family and acquaintances to a less critical perspective recognizing the importance of human bonds and commonalities. With all the emphasis he places on God and on detachment, as indicated in the quote earlier in this review, Eckhart's mysticism also recognizes the importance of life in the world. Sammler comes to deepen, in my view, rather than to reject, his understanding of Eckhart's spirituality and to appreciate the importance of human loyalty and to fulfilling what he calls the "terms of his contract".

Bellow's novel provoked conflicting responses upon its publication, and it continues to do so. The novel has been subjected to a great deal of scholarly, critical attention, as is appropriate for its intellectual and human depth and for its themes. The book is not light reading. "Mr Sammler's Planet" will bear repeated reflection. Readers will have different views about Sammler and about whether they agree with his various positions about the America of his day and our own. The book encouraged me to reflect, as only great literature can do, upon my own "contract" and my own thoughts and my engagement with life.

Robin Friedman

[Harris Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the first time I've read Saul Bellow.

Mr. Sammler's Planet reminded me of Joyce's 'Ulysses' with its unremitting stream of consciousness that flits around like a butterfly from one philosophical nectary to another; tracts of thought are sometimes quite obtuse and rattle along quickly, one after the other. In this respect, it also made me think of Huxley's 'After Many a Summer ', and strangely, Jack Lemmon in 'The Out of Towners'—a 1970 manic cinematic escapade across New York, where Lemmon has to attend a job interview that will enrich his perfect suburban life, the city strewn with every type of obstacle and delay. Apart from a similar premise (Mr Sammler is struggling to cross New York to see his friend who is dying in a hospital), mordant wit, and underlying slapstick, this is no Neil Simon rib-tickler.

The prose is dense, with one belief, judgment, or thought quickly following another; the distinction between successive opinions blurred, and meaning can dissolve in a nebulous fog of abstraction. I began to believe that my own hitherto undiagnosed dyslexia, or a brain fog, had descended over me. The forensic critique of New York in the seventies is frequently not easy to parse, often effortless to disagree with, and arguably tinged with racial stereotypes, homophobia, and misogyny.

For example, when so close to finally arriving at the hospital to visit his friend, Sammler observes his business associate fighting in the street with a pimp-like character, who features in parts throughout the story. Here, Bellow stands accused of presenting a stereotypical black man: morally disreputable, with golden jewelry and a camel-hair coat, a thief with a large penis that he uses for intimidation. Eager to stop the altercation, Sammler encourages his volatile ex-son-in-law, Eisen, who is standing nearby, to break up the fight, but regrets it. Much to Sammler's horror, he goes too far. The powerful scene is well nuanced. Eisen, 'amused at Sammler's ludicrous inconsistency', mitigates hitting the black man (now prone and bleeding profusely) with a bag of heavy weights, saying, 'You can't hit a man like this just once. When you hit him, you must really hit him. Otherwise, he'll kill you. You know. We both fought in the war. You were a Partisan. You had a gun. So don't you know?'

Unsurprisingly, this urban landscape of the new decade makes Mr Sammler melancholic and curmudgeonly, as he confronts modern America with all its unpleasant vicissitudes, out of step with the youthful culture, fashion, and movements of the time.

Despite the many digressions of philosophical content, there are a handful of storylines that make this an interesting read: a hippy-dippy daughter who steals a valuable manuscript, the pimp-like character who is also a pickpocket and asserts dominance by exposing himself, the extremely louche daughter of his dying friend, and among others an Indian academic who has written an unpublished book on colonizing the moon, whom his adopted neice and daughter have fallen in love with. Pondering on mixed marriages and again with accusations of racial stereotyping, Sammler says he has, '... not the slightest objection to an Asiatic. There is much to be said about exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover it, in French.'

Contrary to his orthodox attitudes, in the era of Apollo moon landings, Mr Sammler is eager to discuss the author's writing, fascinated by the possibility of escaping a New York City not just mired in drugs, prostitution, municipal mismanagement, but also rudeness and a lack of consideration for others. Yet, with a gloomy outlook, Sammler sees no difference, believing we'd take our urge for destruction to any place we go. Naturally, he concluded we'd only create dysfunctional cities on the moon or Mars.

Interestingly, the Arab-Israeli wars were also a topical issue at that time (The Yom Kippur War was only a few years away), and Mr Sammler recalls being a seconded journalist to view the conflict.

'Anyway, there he was. He was one of the journalists. He walked about in conquered Gaza. They were sweeping broken glass. In the square, armor and guns. Just beyond the cemetery walls, the domes of white tombs. In the dust, scraps of food baking, sour; odors of heating garbage and urine.'

Poignant within the context of the current situation.

So you can read this skipping over the philosophical tracts. It would be difficult but not impossible. There's a lot of Bellow's postulations and the story, though charming, witty, and full of fascinatingly strange characters (Bellow is an artful storyteller), is really there to create a thread for Bellow's prognostications on the future of the planet and feeds integrally into all the story lines. Mr Sammler's Planet was a book I enjoyed, but it took supreme effort and concentration to finish it. Forget reading it when feeding the baby, rustling up some lunch, or with one ear to the news program on the television. Some paragraphs need to be read sometimes more than once, even twice.

I'm interested in reading more of Bellow, but maybe next year.

[Domenico Fina · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Incipit]
Poco dopo l’alba, o quella che sarebbe stata l’alba in un cielo normale, Mr. Artur Sammler osservò col suo occhio cespuglioso i libri e le carte nella sua camera da letto sulla West Side e sospettò fortemente che si trattasse di libri sbagliati, di carte sbagliate. In un certo senso non aveva troppa importanza per un uomo di oltre settant’anni e per di più senza impegni di sorta. Bisognava proprio essere dei fissati a insistere di aver ragione. Aver ragione era in larga misura una questione di spiegazioni. L’uomo intellettuale era diventato un essere spiegante. I padri ai figli, le mogli ai mariti, i conferenzieri agli ascoltatori, gli esperti ai profani, i colleghi ai colleghi, i medici ai pazienti, l’uomo alla propria anima, tutti spiegavano. Le radici di questo, le cause di quest’altro, l’origine di determinati eventi, la storia, la struttura, i motivi per cui. Nella maggior parte dei casi, entravano da un orecchio e uscivano dall’altro. L’anima voleva quel che voleva. Aveva la propria naturale conoscenza. Se ne stava infelicemente seduta, povera creatura, in cima a sovrastrutture di spiegazioni, e non sapeva da che parte girarsi.

Artur Sammler, un tempo intellettuale in Polonia, sua madre gli regalò "Il mondo come volontà e rappresentazione" per il suo sedicesimo compleanno e lo chiamò Artur in onore di Schopenhauer; poi, in guerra, ha dovuto sparare ed è entrato nel mondo dell'azione; ora ha 70 anni, vive a New York, sente di non avere più le forze per sostenere il mondo contemporaneo. Ha idee bizzarre, brillanti, sconvenienti. Vagamente retrò. Si chiede se l'uomo non faccia bene a lasciare il pianeta Terra prima di autodistruggersi.
Ha una figlia, ai suoi occhi, svitata, i giovani li vede tutti uguali, servi delle mode, predica in modo scomposto, in realtà tutto ciò che è moda, secondo Sammler, è viziato da scarsità di ragionamento. Perfino andare contro le mode con la pretesa di una vita interessante. Afferma che "una vita interessante è il concetto supremo dei deficienti."
Artur Sammler non è uno che giudica solamente, è uno che piuttosto subisce, e pian piano diventa un personaggio grandioso. Sulle copertine delle prime edizioni (più belle dell'ultima orrenda copertina Mondadori, che non è questa che vedete su GR) c'era scritto 'Un Re Lear a New York'. Di sei capitoli i due iniziali sono notevoli, i due centrali non perfettamente scorrevoli e i due capitoli finali sono un capolavoro.

"No, no, La prego di continuare questa spiegazione."
"Spiegazione? Sono un po' contrario alle spiegazioni estese. Ce ne sono troppe. Ciò rende ingovernabile la vita mentale dell'umanità."

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sammler is an important book. Stylistically, it is rich, inventive, original, flawed (of course it is ‘flawed’, it is Bellow…!), full of heart, great lava flows of mood and motion…. Intellectually, it is original, often brilliant, insightful, reactionary, sad, tragic, revolutionary, hopeful.. it is Bellow… a novelist of ideas, as I tried to describe it in my review of Herzog.

But more importantly, Sammler is important because it is Bellow coming into his own. Augie is not Bellow. It was written by somebody else… Somebody in Iowa, maybe. Herzog is Bellow, but uncertain, very flawed (indeed), still immature… but it is New York, urban, late 20th century Bellow in embryo… Seize the Day is a flawless little gem…, but it is just an ‘exercise’, a novella, a conscious attempt by a writer to learn to write, to REALLY write, after all the pretentions of Augie and the missed opportunities of Herzog…. Sammler, by contrast, is Bellow in full Bloom!

Almost…

It is a wonderful and exuberant book – a book in which absurdity and tragedy is transmuted into… what? Acceptance…? Certainly not into melodrama… and not into comedy… it is, after all…, Bellow.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's one of the essential books for understanding 20thC America, though of course it is especially revealing about NYC, which means that 20C America bears more than a tincture of Europe. Mr Sammler rides the bus, and Bellow changes every reader's bus experience forever--the daylight robbery and intimidation, the necessary self-reliance. One other writer has portrayed a bus ride perhaps as well, Flannery O'Connor where the son is amused at his mother's humbling, only to earn regret for the rest of his life.
Mr Sammler is an old Jew puzzled at the sexual contortions of sixties city life, his young female relative with "fucked-out eyes," his lecture being interrupted by a youth, "Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What's he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He's dead. he can't come"(42).
Later, Sammler refuses the key to his daughter's apartment: "He didn't want to walk in when she was with a lover. Such a lover as she would have was surely to be dreaded"(127).
On Shula-Slawa, "Sammler knew her ways; knew them as the Eskimo knows the ways of the seal"(173).

These are of course but one thread, another being Sammler's philosophical reflections partly inherited from his European lineage. The last exhibit of Picasso "was in the strictly sexual sense also an exhibition"(66). Margotte, political scientist Arkin's wife, spoke in his name…"and there was no-one to protect his ideas, the common fate of Socrates and Jesus"(16, paperbk, p 19).
On a physician's anticipated hemorrhage, "Did Elya know this? Of course he did. He was a physician…But he was a human…both knowing and not knowing--one of the most frequent human arrangements"(81).
"Democracy was propagandistic in its style. Conversation was often nothing but the repetition of liberal principles"(276). Margotte's "kind and considerate views of people were terribly trying to Sammler." Sammler to Angela, "NYC makes you think of the end of civilization…In one day, Caesar massacred the Tencterii, 430,000…"(304).

When I taught this novel along with a Vonnegut and an Updike, to community college students in the seventies, they were challenged, much preferred the more accessible Vonnegut. I showed similarities between Billy Pilgrim and Sammler, both isolated from society--both in the thick of WWII, and Billy's insanity isolates him as does Sammler's archaism. Both are mentally alien: Billy's, Tralfamadorian, Sammler's, old world historical perspective. Bellow notes Sammler's "divine entertainment of age, seeing patterns"(69).
I tried to convince my students Bellow's novel was the best one we read. In fact, along with Bellow's works from Seize the Day, through Herzog to Ravelstein, he has not been bested, though perhaps Updike's final book in his Rabbit series, Rabbit at Rest, may finally equal his contemporary and rival.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

BkC6) Fun, fun, fun to read. Not the story, mind, but the storytelling!

Have to take issue with myself here. This isn't quite as fluffy as this one-liner makes it sound.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Mr. Artur Sammler survived the Holocaust, but isn't sure he'll survive 1960s New York. Once without food and without dignity and without hope, he looks on bemused as people with everything material the planet can supply wallow in misery and spiritual angst. Sammler, an observer by nature, doesn't know how to get past his own limitations of spirit to reach out to men or up to god to make connections that could guide his fellow beings out of desperation or himself out of stasis.

But this is a novel. A National Book Award-winning novel. So, he does. It is a gorgeous piece of writing.

My Review: This was less catharsis than exegesis for me. Sammler's idea of a Good Life, as opposed to the Americans he sees around himself living The Good Life, is knowing the terms of the contract...what's expected of me, now that I'm here? what is it that makes a life worthy, therefore worth living?...presupposes that there is an inherent moral compass and that it's oriented the same way for all people, that is along the Judeo-Christian axis.

Hmmm.

Well, go with it, I instruct myself, because it's the author's thesis, not yours. So I did, and I found the resolution to Sammler's crisis very moving.

But, if I'm honest, it still irks me that there is a monopolar world of the spirit, and there is nothing at all outside of it allowed in. Still...it's some wonderful writing!

[Grazia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sono contrario alle spiegazioni

Mr Sammler è un signore sulla settantina, secco, con un unico occhio funzionante, dotato di ombrello per sostenere l'andatura claudicante, di orgine polacca emigrato negli Stati Uniti, luogo in cui lo conosciamo.

Mr Sammler è un intellettuale ebreo sopravvissuto all'olocausto fingendo di essere morto tra i morti veri sepolti in una fossa, privo di vestiti, a sua volta portatore di morte per ottenere abiti e cibo. Questione di sopravvivenza.

Ora osserva il mondo dal suo monocolo e non si trova. Non si riconosce in alcun comportamento. La distanza del suo osservare e pensare e l'affannarsi per angustie vuote e modaiole delle persone che lo circondano è siderale. Tanto che anche il lettore non capisce se siano effettivamente assurde e rocambolesche le vicende che accadono agli strampalati e fuori dalle righe parenti di Mr Sammler o se sia il suo sguardo a farceli apparire tali.

"Accetta e concedi che la felicità consiste nel fare ciò che la maggioranza degli altri fa. Allora devi incarnare ciò che incarnano gli altri. Se si tratta di preconcetti, il preconcetto. Se la furia, che sia la furia. Se è sesso, allora sesso. MA non contraddire la tua epoca. Limitati a non contraddirla. A meno che per puro caso, tu non sia un Sammler e sia convinto che il posto d’nore sia fuori."


Mr Sammler non ama dare spiegazioni.

«Spiegazione? Sono un po’ contrario alle spiegazioni estese. Ce ne sono troppe. Ciò rende ingovernabile la vita mentale dell’umanità.


Mr Sammler ama le distinzioni, pensa che la verità sia avvicinabile solo per approssimazione e ci si debba accontentare di quella, e che l'unica cosa saggia sia non giudicare l'operato altrui. Non permettersi proprio di farlo.

Perché ciò che importerà guardandosi allo specchio alla fine del viaggio, sarà l'essere stati fedele a sé stessi.

Al contratto sottoscritto con la propria coscienza. Così come il nipote cui deve riconoscenza per essersi preso cura di un sopravvissuto come lui e la sua eccentrica figlia.

"Lui sapeva che doveva rispettare, e le ha rispettate – attraverso tutta la confusione e le abbrutite buffonate di questa vita in cui noi corriamo a precipizio –, ha rispettato le condizioni del suo contratto. Le condizioni che, nel più profondo del suo cuore, ogni uomo conosce. Come io conosco le mie. Come tutti conoscono le loro. Poiché tale è la verità di tutto questo – che tutti noi conosciamo, Dio, che conosciamo, che conosciamo, conosciamo, conosciamo”.

Mr Sammler, è stato bello conoscerti.
Il tuo ragionare arguto e privo di condizionamenti e luoghi comuni mi mancherà.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is it time for me to give up on Bellow? So many people I respect love old Saul. There's a Sufjan Stevens song with 'Saul Bellow' in the title. He's meant to be everything I like: a stylist, an intellectual, a cultural critic unafraid to speak his mind. And yet.

Plot spoiler alert, but really, the plot is beside the point: at the heart of this over-stuffed chair is a wonderful farce. Sammler's daughter steals/borrows a manuscript that Sammler has little use for; the best bits of the book consist in his attempts to give it back to its author. Also, Sammler becomes a little obsessed with a well-dressed pick-pocket. And someone is dying. And there are about 50 other little backstories that, in my experience at least, just detract from the gloriously farcical core.

I usually like books in which the main character is racist, sexist, homophobic, prudish and ridden by class biases, because I have no time for sentimental literature. Mr. Sammler is just such a man. Does he remain such a man at the end? He asks someone to stop the pick-pocket, who is trying to take yet another minor character's camera. The immigrant attacks the pickpocket, possibly intending to kill him, as a favor to Mr. Sammler, who is mortified.

The pickpocket is black; the man who intervenes is a declassee European immigrant. Mr. Sammler is, finally, able to connect with the pick-pocket who has previously held him against a wall so he, the pick-pocket, could wag his cock at the old Sammler.

Now, this could be a wonderful analogy for politics in America (where race trumps class every time; a black president can be elected, but never a poor one), but it obviously isn't. It could be about Sammler's psychology (latent guilt for killing a German whom he didn't have to kill, while fleeing from Nazis). But the main point seems to be that you can be a racist, sexist, homophobic prude, just so long as you prefer to avoid violence.

I don't like that, but there's a lot I should like about this book. There are some great bits of cultural conservatism:

"An oligarchy of technicians, engineers, the men who ran grand machines, infinitely more sophisticated than this automobile, would come to govern vast slums filled with bohemian adolescents, narcotized, beflowered, and 'whole'. He himself was a fragment, Mr. Sammler understood. And lucky to be that."

"Individualism is of no interest whatever if it does not extend truth."

"Democracy was propagandistic in its style. Conversation was often nothing but the repetition of liberal principles."

"They sought originality. They were obviously derivative. And of what--of Paiutes, of Fidel Castro? No, of Hollywood extras... better, thought Sammler, to accept the inevitability of imitation and then to imitate good things... make peace therefore with intermediacy and representation. But choose higher representations. Otherwise the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be."

And yet I found this book dull, dull, dull as can be, thanks to layers of 'realist' fluff, which hid all that cultural criticism and farce: every individual so finely delineated, even if they appeared only for three pages; every object described in 'loving' detail, even if it was totally inconsequential; every idea 'properly' embedded in a character's conscience. Without that, the novel would have been about 150 pages, and I would have loved it.

Or would I? Because I also don't understand the obeisance to Bellow's writing. It seems to be little more than a second-half-of-the-20th-century period style to me. Fragments. Stream of consciousness kind of. Unwillingness to either embrace or shun free indirect, but why?

So, I am defeated. Prove to me that I should try Herzog for the third time, or that I should bother to try Augie March. I don't want to give in, but I'm on the edge.

[Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a bit of a novice when it comes to the work of Saul Bellow. This is a bit of an educational travesty or unforgivable ignorance on my part. I completed an English literature major in the early-to-mid 2010s and never recall a single professor or student ever mentioning Bellow. I only discovered his work because I was already acquainted with Philip Roth's novels and have become a regular reader of Commentary. So a few years after discovery of Bellow, I read Herzog, which appeared to be his most enduring work and now have moved on to Mr. Sammler's Planet. My reaction to both works was much the same as both works share significant similarities. Both have aging intellectual type protagonists who are bewildered by the people and changing world around them, and a dense, introspective prose style. Although I know only a limited amount about Bellow, I've heard that his characters, especially the leads, tend to be facsimiles of himself in someway, which of course is quite common for many writers but still aids in interpretation of the work.

Mr. Sammler's Planet has been characterized as "an erudite and fastidious meditation on the decline of liberal America" by Tablet writer Howard Johnson, and "the first neoconservative novel" by Dominic Greenhttps://newcriterion.com/issues/2018/... of The New Criterion. I think Green and Johnson's takes are reasonable and represent at least some of the psychological journey of Bellow's titular lead, but it doesn't quite capture everything about Bellow's moral messaging. Because this seems certainly to be a moralizing novel, and in some ways it is an old-fashioned morality that Bellow is an apologist for, but it is also a surprisingly strong rebuke to nihilism and cynicism about humanity. This is why I think this book resonates with readers (though this may no longer be true for contemporary readers). Bellow gazes into the moral abyss (e.g. the portions about Sammler's horrific WWII experiences) and what he sees as the derangement of American social mores, but he turns away toward the horizon. Bellow still thinks the proper response to barbarism of all kinds is humane endurance.

Bellow's central idea, emphasized by the concluding lines (“The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”), is that there is a clear, intuitive, and universal moral sense shared by all humans, but there are many other forces (especially of the late American 1960s in this work) that try and interfere with the obligation to follow those intuitions. One of the forces Bellow identifies is fear and is vividly captured with the dapper Black pickpocket character. So I feel that a lot misidentification of purported reactionary sentiment in Bellow's book. What is seen as Sammler's bigotry or retrograde ideas by reviewers past and present is Bellow laying himself bare so as to improve himself. Through Sammler, Bellow appears to be honestly exploring his own anxieties (and those of many others similar to and different from him) and subsequently confronting them so as to be a better human. He is working toward a better humanism, especially when he is forced to recognize what the giving in to his fear and weakness can do.

Unfortunately, I think Bellow novels will not find an eager audience today or the near future in the academy or with popular audiences. His style and thematic content will be read as anachronistic, unrewardingly difficult, and malignantly reactionary today. I certainly struggled a bit with the prose style and think a re-read would benefit me. Moreover, Mr. Sammler's Planet may simply be a bit too much a work of its time. I'm not sure the subtleties of its commentary will be grasped by a younger generation of readers who have little to no awareness of the zeitgeist of two decades ago let alone six!

[Simona Petrescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all-time favourites. One of those books that are oozing with metaphor and double meaning, so much so, that you are at a loss what to say to describe it.

Above all, I think, a novel about humanity, centred on the metaphor of seeing. Obsessively recurring words: eye, see, look, gaze. "To see was delicious". Sammler, the main character, is one-eyed. He sees the world with the one healthy eye - and he sees crime in action, which fascinates him and stuns him. He sees violence which sickens him, and sees the moon, fat and yellow in the Manhattan sky. The other eye he lost when he was nearly killed - through violence, again. Seeing is the act of understanding, of seeing through the appearances of the worldly life.

Related to seeing is the constant panning and zooming view, from the detail of life on planet Earth, its fallacies, its erring and self-deluded flesh, out into the outer space, to "Sammler's planet" - at times meant as a place of refuge, other times as a detached viewing point of the big picture of humanity, at other times still just a phantasmagorical illusion of the technology-possessed world (colonizing the moon).

And Sammler himself: disabled through his one-eyedness, having literally come out of the grave though not truly a survivor (he had not survived, just lasted, says Bellow) of the Nazi mass killing - and yet, a king in the kingdom of the blind ("the blindness of the living"). His growth: from being only half-human (one-eyed, half-dead) and seeing through the world's schemes with detached analytical sense, to being capable to weep and sense loss.

And beyond the ever-present metaphors, the ever-present ambiguity: the tone of the text. At times ironical, at times paternal, always brilliant, always pregnant with meaning, human and humane.

"Then, bending open the notebook, he read, in sepia, in rust-gilt ink, "The Future of the Moon". "How long", went the first sentence, "will this earth remain the only home of Man?"
How long? Oh, Lord, you bet! Wasn't it the time - the very hour to go? For every purpose under heaven. A time to gather stones together, a time to cast away stones. Considering the earth itself not as a stone cast but as something to cast oneself from - to be divested of. To blow this great blue, white, green planet, or to be blown from it."

And here a few lines on the very first page. Such a compelling start into a book:

"Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly."

And where does the soul stand at the end of the book? Here the very last lines:
"Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who... (...) At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet - through all the confusion and the degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding - he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it - that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

The soul knows.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

a man finds himself buried amongst bodies during world war two. he escapes and wanders back into life. he as the narrator may still be buried, or tries to live life but as a man who remains buried in that pile of bodies. bellows does a masterful job in portraying the narrator attempting to now live in a world that no longer has a god by conforming to his outdated customs, which have passed and been replaced by a new set foreign to him. despite style and pace this is a searing novel of survival as our narrator grasps for hope somewhere so he can continue to survive.

[Ionuț Anastasiu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cel de-al treilea roman al lui Saul Bellow care a obținut Premiul National Book Award (în anul 1971) abundă în reflecții amare despre condiția umană, despre nebunie etc., având un apăsat caracter escatologic. Finalitatea "speciei" umane constituie deci una dintre temele centrale ale cărții și nu este limpede dacă specia în cauză va primi o a doua șansă, dacă va avea acces la renaștere, așa cum a fost cazul eroului eponim al cărții, domnul Artur Sammler, ce a fost împușcat și îngropat de naziști, dar, ca prin miracol, a reușit să se salveze (spre deosebire de soția sa și după ce a omorât la rândul lui un nazist). Acum domnul Sammler trăiește în America, unde este mai degrabă un întreținut.
Prin urmare, tema morții este fundamentală aici și se referă nu doar la faptul că mulți dintre cunoscuții domnului Sammler, șaptezeci și ceva de ani, sunt morți - "Oriunde te uitai sau încercai să te uiți, dădeai de răposați. Îți lua ceva să te obișnuiești" - sau că "nepotul" și binefăcătorul său, doctorul ginecolog Elya Gruner se află pe moarte, ci și la planeta noastră în general, ce ne este tuturor și casă, dar și cimitir. Părea că omenirea ajunsese în anii '70 la momentul în care va abandona măcar parțial această planetă și își va muta casa și cimitirul și pe alte planete.
Dar și nebunia este prezentă la tot pasul în carte, Artur Sammler fiind un adevărat specialist în acest sens. Iată cum își structurează reflecțiile:
"E nebună specia noastră?
Dovezi destule.
Totul, desigur, pare invenţia omului. Incluzând nebunia. Care poate fi încă o creaţie a acelei inventivităţi chinuitoare. La nivelul prezent de evoluţie umană, se menţineau propuneri (și Sammler înclina parţial spre ele) pe baza cărora alegerile se reduceau la sanctitate și nebunie. Suntem nebuni doar dacă nu suntem sfinţi, sfinți doar în timp ce planăm deasupra nebuniei. Atracția gravitaţională a nebuniei trăgând sfântul spre prăbușire. Câţiva ar putea să priceapă că puterea de a-ţi face datoria zilnic și prompt este cea care naște sfinți și eroi. Nu mulţi. Majoritatea au fantezia unor salturi către stări mai înalte, simţindu-se doar suficient de nebuni cât să se califice".
Intriga romanului este, așa cum ne-a obișnuit Bellow, aproape inexistentă, firele din care e alcătuită destrămându-se pas cu pas către un final mai mult sau mai puțin așteptat: domnul Sammler urmărește în autobuz un bărbat de culoare care fură din gențile femeilor, face o reclamație la poliție, dar polițiștii nu-l bagă în seamă, iar acest lucru va avea consecințe stranii; fiica lui Artur, rătăcita Shula, ce strânge gunoaie de prin tomberoane și este obsedată de ideea că tatălui său, ce a lucrat 20 de ani la Londra "în calitate de corespondent la ziare și jurnale varșoviene" și l-a cunoscut bine pe H. G. Wells, nu i se vor recunoaște meritele, fură manuscrisul cu titlul Viitorul Lunii al savantului hindus Govinda Lal, fapt care s-ar putea sau nu să aibă consecințe dramatice; unul dintre foștii cititori ai domnului Sammler, tânărul Lionel Feffer, îl roagă să țină un seminar la Universitatea Columbia despre scena britanică a anilor '30, iar Sammler le vorbește studenților despre proiectul Cosmopolis pentru un Stat Mondial, în care fusese și el inclus, dar acolo se petrece ceva neplăcut; Wallace, fiul doctorului Gruner, este măcinat de ideea că tatăl său a ascuns în casă banii ce proveneau din legătura sa cu mafia (făcea operații de avort ilegale atunci când era solicitat) și acționează ca un bezmetic; de asemenea, este inclusă povestea halucinantă a lui Chaim Rumkowski, "regele evreu nebun din Łódź". Nu este prea mult, dar nici puțin, romanul are multe atuuri, dar nu este cea mai bună carte a scriitorului american. Lectură plăcută!

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Só os teimosos querem à viva força estar certos. Estar ou não estar certo não depende senão da explicação dada. O intelectual tinha-se tornado uma criatura que explica. Os pais às crianças, as mulheres aos maridos, os conferencistas aos ouvintes, os especialistas aos leigos, os colegas aos colegas, os médicos aos doentes, o homem à sua própria alma, explicavam. A origem disto, a causa daquilo, a raiz dos acontecimentos, a história, a estrutura, as razões pelas quais. A maioria das coisas entrava por um ouvido e saía por outro. A alma sabia muito bem o que queria. Possuía a sua sabedoria natural. Repousava, infeliz, sobre superestruturas de explanação, pobre ave, sem saber em que direcção voar."

_____________
Prémio Nobel da Literatura 1976
Saul Bellow nasceu no Canadá em 10 de Junho de 1915 e morreu nos Estados Unidos da América em 5 de Abril de 2005.

[Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

📖 Bellows won many awards for his writing. This novel included. His writing is fierce, intense and deeply philosophical.

In a largely stream of consciousness pattern, he offers us a morality play from the POV of Sammler’s mind, a man who survived the Nazis of Poland.

📖 Brilliant writing, often raw and blunt. Not for everyone but for those for whom it works they will be going deep.

[Szplug · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the sun set upon the sixties there was a great belief in progress, an enthusiasm for the future and the potential of a humanity in the process of throwing off the chains of oppression and moral rigidity, of embracing individuality and the paramountcy of the self, encapsulated in the technological miracle of the imminent moon landing. Yet even as this hope was spreading like a fever, crime, familial dissolution, and urban decay were settling upon the United States, an unwelcome layer of grime clinging to a nation charging down a playing field overhung with the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war. Certain Americans - like the titular Mr. Sammler, an elderly jewish survivor of the death camps of World War II and denizen of a crumbling New York City - could only view this faith in progress with a jaundiced and cynical eye; as the capitulation to the sensual, personal and emotional of the morals, virtues and sense of community that had enabled the country to attain its present wonders and marvels.

Sexual potency and virile radicalism - the energy of the uprising - trumps rational erudition and dusty mores with the younger generation, a point driven home to Mr. Sammler in a visceral manner by the tumescent exposed prick of a brazen black street burglar - a silent warning to the witness of his boldness (and, perhaps, to the white majority of a new-found black confidence in post-Civil Rights America) - and the students at a lecture given by Mr. Sammler at Columbia University in which he is shouted down with scornful declarations of being a withered fossil with juiceless testicles. Against the meandering, selfish and licentious peregrinations of his daughter, great-nephew and great-niece, Mr. Sammler holds in great esteem his sick nephew Elya, a patron in every sense of the word, a man who believes in fidelity to family, doing one's duty and sacrificing one's own pleasures and desires if it advances the welfare of one's kin; and doing it all with an innate kindness and generosity that Mr. Sammler finds lacking even in himself. His hardened and at times ungenerous nature was forged in the desperate realities of wartime Europe - that of late sixties America by a surfeit of material prosperity and looming armageddon. In the face of abundance or apocalypse, who will deign to sacrifice?

Bellow is a meaty writer, dense and probing and philosophical, and his mature works reflect a growing conservatism and doubt. Mr. Sammler is formed from the same skeptical material, one that cannot concede the future's potentiality when wandering through New York neighborhoods that are concrete wastelands. Yet within the coruscating chaos of the younger generation he can only hope there lies the seeds of a recovery of the familial adhesion and sense of duty that forms the core of a strong society. A lesser known piece from Bellow, still a challenging read but well worth it.

[Carloesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il pianeta di Mr.Sammler naturalmente è la terra, luogo che rischia di diventare sempre più inospitale, per cui secondo alcuni (come per il Dr. Govinda Lal che segue le orme di H.G. Wells) presto potrebbe essere abbandonato per la luna.
Il pianeta di Mr. Sammler è l’America, e in particolare lo è New York dopo essere scampato miracolosamente ad Aushwitz e alla barbarie nazista e poi a quella dell’antisemitismo nella Polonia già liberata. Ma anche in questo nuovo pianeta i segni della decadenza della civiltà si fanno sempre più evidenti. E’ un mondo che sta perdendo senso, un mondo destinato alla rovina, che Sammler cerca faticosamente di interpretare, senza volerlo per questo giudicare.
Il pianeta di Mr. Sammler è la sua famiglia ebraico-newyorkese: quella del ricco nipote Elya medico e affarista forse con frequentazioni mafiose, ma ora moribondo in ospedale. Fu lui ad accogliere (e ancora di fatto mantiene) il vecchio zio intellettuale e la sua stramba figlia Shula in fuga dall’Europa devastata. Ed è quella dei figli di Elya, viziosi, edonisti e sbalestrati, ma che considerano il vecchio zio come la voce della saggezza e confidano a lui e solo a lui (come fosse una specie di giudice-sacerdote di famiglia) i propri segreti e debolezze, per altri indicibili.

Elya sta morendo, la nuova America sta morendo, l’intero pianeta sta morendo, ma zio Sammler è già stato a contatto con la morte, è sopravvissuto e si sente predestinato a sopravvivere ancora (o meglio, “a durare”, un po’ più degli altri) anche “a tutto questo caos e alle sue abbrutite buffonate”.
Perché noi tutti abbiamo un contratto con Dio, anche se pochi rispettano le sue condizioni. Che noi tutti conosciamo nel profondo del nostro cuore, se vogliamo riconoscerci ancora come esseri umani, appartenenti a questo pianeta.

Rileggerlo, dopo molti anni, ne è valsa la pena.

[Dinah Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I randomly chose this novel to learn of a different author. At first I felt lost—then it clicked, I was reading a literary style with a stream-of-conscious narration and a freestyle structure. I needed to read carefully to keep the storyline together. Bellow is a skilled writer who wrote of an aging Holocaust Survivor in a community where his life was a bit chaotic— to include the hardship of assimilation. A thought provoking read.

[Frabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intellettuale ebreo polacco, sopravvissuto per un niente all'olocausto e divenuto americano, Mr. Sammler, ormai vecchio, avrebbe esperienze e idee interessanti da trasmettere, ma i suoi compagni di strada, soprattutto una serie di sbalestrati parenti, lo ascoltano poco ed ancor meno seguono i suoi consigli. Se stessero a sentire con un po' d'attenzione, saprebbero che Mr. Sammler non ama le spiegazioni, che tutti son pronti a dare, ma ama le distinzioni; e che detesta la vita tutta domande-e-risposte, perché pensa ci si debba ritenere soddisfatti della verità che si riesce ad avvicinare per approssimazione; e che l'ampliamento dello spirito è il vero scopo dell'esistenza; e che la cosa migliore è essere disinteressati e non giudicare; e... Ma tanto, non l'ascoltano, fanno di testa loro e con che risultati!
Be', c'è da sperare che almeno qualche lettore sappia cogliere qualcosa di buono da Mr. Sammler...

[The Frahorus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ed eccomi finalmente giunto a parlarvi di una lettura che non è stata facile ma che mi ha fatto scoprire un autore gigantesco: Saul Bellow. L'autore ci presenta un intellettuale in pensione, Mr. Artur Sammler, il quale è diventato cinico, misantropo, razzista, misogino che decide di passare gli ultimi anni di vita studiando la natura umana. Della scrittura di Bellow e della storia che ci narra mi ricorda, come stile, Joyce nel suo mitico Ulisse: un protagonista che ragiona continuamente e vive la sua quotidianità piena di eventi casuali e spesso strampalati e mi ricorda anche molto Woody Allen nei suoi dialoghi dotti e divertenti, pieni di cinismo e nevrosi varie.

Tra le perle che dice Sammler nel romanzo cito un commento riferito ai giovani: "sembrano scimmie negli alberi intente a defecare nelle loro mani, per poi bersagliare tra le urla i sottostanti esploratori".

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a stop-action photograph of a century rushing by on full blast. Not just any century; this is the twentieth, the time when traditional society went by the boards. The author aims his lens within New York City, so we might expect a pretty interesting still. That’s just what we see.

Taken in 1969, this snapshot shows a world turned over in a generation. We see madness and eccentricities, and it’s not clear what they mean. The book documents this change, but even more so it attempts to figure it out. Happily for me, Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a book of ideas.

In thinking over the ferment, the protagonist, Artur Sammler, works in the medium provided by New York City’s jarring juxtapositions, and Sammler’s own family provides examples. Mr. Sammler is transfixed by the new type persons, a cosmopolitan, go-anywhere-do-anything species. Smart and sharp, this emerging tribe hangs ten on the avant garde, always there and gone before you’ve even had time to sip your morning coffee. The only missing ingredient is good sense. Shopping, schlepping daughters vie with obsessed, nutcase sons to amaze their fathers and the proper, London-bred Sammler. But it’s not just these kids: Everyone seems caught up in the theatrical improvisation that now defines personality.

Mr. Sammler puzzles out the century’s changes, and his musings give the book its call. He finds flawed the incessant urge to “explain”; it’s more important to “distinguish.” He thinks today’s histrionic madness is rooted in an individualism that in turn might not be rooted in any truth. He sees that this individualism is itself rooted in the loss of personal power brought on by the century’s complexities.

Trying to change society or fit in is a doomed project in this century: A moon motif (as in "fly to the moon") represents the unprecedented need of modern people to tear away from the rest of humanity. But this striving need Mr. Sammler begins to doubt. He wonders whether personal standards are best contrived internally and individually, or whether a freely chosen Kantian devotion to some external duty might better serve the new world. Modern society has hit the perfect existential crisis.

The writing style bears Bellow’s distinctive stamp. If we could see his prose, it would have clean lines; if we could eat it, it would taste crunchy. This style nailed my attention, and it accounts in good part for the high rating I give the book. Mr. Sammler’s planet is still very much our planet, and the ideas found in the book are relevant to our lives today.

[SurferRosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ennesimo miracolo letterario di Saul Bellow, che riesce a scrivere un bellissimo romanzo con personaggi credibili, trama funzionalmente dosata, dotato di un impianto filosofico con profondità da fondale oceanico che viene a dispiegarsi in perfetta armonia con gli altri elementi costitutivi.
Mr. Sammler, ebreo polacco, prima snob frequentatore dei salotti bene della Londra anteguerra, poi sopravvissuto all'Olocausto facendosi strada nudo fra nudi cadaveri, trascinandosi fuori dalla fossa comune dove invece rimane sua moglie, vive ormai ultrasettantenne nella New York di fine anni '60.
Mr. Sammler che non ama le spiegazioni, incline al soliloquio, riflette sulla civiltà moderna che osserva col suo unico occhio buono e qui vediamo il Bellow grande cantore della follia della metropoli, di tutta la sua nevrosi, del malessere che ne attanaglia gli abitanti - la lucidità, la cura del dettaglio con cui l'autore dipinge questa realtà provocano impressioni acute, vivide, universali -, con laceranti interrogativi su individualismo e società di massa. E' qui il cardine su cui ruota il romanzo: “è negli ultimi due secoli che la maggioranza della gente nei paesi civilizzati ha rivendicato il privilegio di essere degli individui”, dice Sammler; e, si domanda poi, quali frutti sono stati raccolti? Soprattutto dolore, sofferenza, nuove nevrosi, probabilmente perchè la società in cui questo individualismo ha vissuto il suo sviluppo in realtà lo nega, spingendo sulla rappresentazione di sé, sulla teatralità, sull'essere interessanti quando invece (fosse anche solo a livello inconscio) percepiamo la nostra inadeguatezza ad essere umani, a dovere essere umani.
E' il rapporto del sé con la comunità la vera ossessione di Sammler, lui che di fatto è ritornato dalla tomba, esperienza che lo ha reso “deforme”: è l'esperienza della morte, la morte di cui non possiamo sapere nulla perchè siamo vivi, dice a un certo punto, la morte che in noi vivi provoca i sentimenti dolorosi del lutto che altro non sono che un'espressione dell'amore, cioè di un sentimento che appartiene alla vita; ne abbiamo tuttavia la consapevolezza, come afferma Sammler nel finale con quel ripetuto “noi conosciamo”.

[Ffiamma · Rating 4 out of 5]

insieme a herzog, il libro di bellow che ho amato di più. la storia gira un po' a vuoto ma la scrittura è magistrale e il personaggio del vecchio mr sammler resta nel cuore. peccato non lo ristampino.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dunque: una specie pazza? Sì, forse. Sebbene la pazzia sia anch'essa una mascherata, la proiezione di un motivo più profondo, un risultato della disperazione che ci coglie dinanzi alle infinità e alle eternità." (p. 131)

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reactionary sees the 60s as the end of civilization, tries to comprehend them through half-digested philosophies, and reaches a sort of acceptance.