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 streng [...]

"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 WindWhen 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 [...]

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 w [...]

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 fiveThe 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, does [...]

Libro stralunato, inquieto, a tratti lento l e n t o l e n t o ,un secondodopocorrearottadicollo verso il porto, verso la nave dei folli attraccata al molo che ci aspettaSi, lo sguardo sognante e spaesato e fiducioso di Sammler mi piace, è nelle mie corde, uomo sempre in bilico, uomo inquieto, mai immobile, mai domo.

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 [...]

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 a [...]

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 [...]

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� [...]

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 s [...]

Eis uma obra-prima. Um livro para ler ainda muitas vezes. Dentre as tantas, tantas coisas que eu teria a dizer, uma das mais marcantes é ver um homem que escapou do holocausto (que escapou do holocausto!) considerar-se moralmente inferior a um outro, que viveu uma vida mais ou menos normal num país de primeiro mundo. E convencer-nos disso! De que julgar uma vida humana quanto a seus méritos soteriológicos é uma tarefa muito mais complexa do que pode parecer em certos casos. Não importa o q [...]

This book vastly lowered my estimation of Saul Bellow, which was based primarily on the quality of the novella, Seize the Day. Like Seize the Day, Mr. Sammler's Planet certainly has compelling moments and ideas that testify to Bellow’s deep imagination. Yet, the novel also reveals Bellow's immense limitations due to his profoundly anti-modern views, which are racist and politically retrograde. What is most troubling about the novel is the racism, as well as the sexism, which characterizes blac [...]

I just finished this yesterday. So, with a very short perspective on this, I present my review:With the scent of urine now back in full force in the Great Metropolis (it having begun to fade during the Dinkins administration, virtually disappearing during Giuliani's tenure, and beginning to waft back into every pair of Gothamite nostrils during Bloomberg's illegal third term) Saul Bellow's 1970 hate-letter to New York (written as only a Second City denizen could write it) seems, at times, prophe [...]

At first it was the all the lists that did me in, that weighed on me like work undone. Lists of words, on every other page it seemed, clogging the capillaries of my eyes. Enlightenment, universal education, universal suffrage, the rights of the majority acknowledged by all governments, the rights of women, the rights of children, the rights of criminals, the unity of the different races affirmed, Social Security, public health, the dignity of the person, the right to justice-- the struggles of t [...]

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 [...]

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 d [...]

სოლ ბელოუზე ბიოგრაფიას როდესაც ვამზადებდი ჟურნალი "ბუქსითისთვის", როგორც ჩანს, რადგან კარგად ვერ მოვიძიე ინფორმაცია, ქართულ ენაზე პირველ თარგმანად დიოგენეს მიერ გამოცემული ჰენდერსონი, წ� [...]

Just finished reading "Mr. Sammler's Planet" by Saul Bellow. It is a beautiful story of a holocaust survivor, who relives his horrors in the holocaust of his daily life in New York in his late age. Saul draws beautiful parallels between the old and the new, but it was a difficult book to get into. Once past the 100 pages, the book turned out to be quite stunning. A quintessential book from a Nobel prize winner.

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 [...]

Livros excelentes são aqueles que fazem você se perguntar, quando termina: o que faz um livro ser excelente? Por que raios eu gostei tanto deste aqui? E é bom que você se pergunte, porque apreciar um livro – ou de uma obra de arte qualquer – não pode ser um privilégio exclusivo da emoção. Ou: para que a experiência seja completa, a obra, além de satisfazer o seu gosto estético, também há de contentar a sua expectativa ética.O Mr. Sammler’s Planet é excelente exatamente por i [...]

A novel in the Library of America, this Bellow story was an exercise in using more words than necessary to avoid telling a story. My dislike for the novel could be because I’m used to less intellectual fare, or it could be that I listened to the audiobook. The book contains many lists of concepts used to describe Sammler’s thought, and many of the terms are quite flowery. Of course, this is all in line with the character, but it did get boring. Perhaps I felt the ennui especially listening t [...]

"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)

Oh, Mr Sammler mi rivolgo direttamente a lei, perch�� altrimenti non so come uscirne���.!!!Lo so, lo so, immagino gi�� cosa penser�� di me: ���Questa ragazza �� pazza���! Forse si, Mr Sammler, ma che posso fare? In fondo lei stesso faceva notare che in questa societ�� o si �� pazzi oppure, se si �� in grado di elevarci al di sopra della pazzia, si pu�� diventare Santi. E poi di che si stupisce? Lei oramai sar�� abituato a convivere con i pazz [...]

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 [...]

I think that it is difficult to overstate how good a writer Bellow was. His writing is dense – not only in the way language is used, but in the expression of ideas and emotion, and the completeness of characterisation.Artur Sammler is a man who sees everything but doesn't connect. He is doubly an alien – a Polish Jew who had integrated into English society between the wars, mixing in intellectual circles (HG Wells and the Bloomsbury group), now living in New York where both his Europeaness a [...]

Published in 1970,Mr. Sammler's Planetis in some ways a book of its age, when anxiety over the state of America was at a peak: student protests, the Vietnam war, racial tensions, political assassinations, urban decline all seemed to give the times an apocalyptic character. Set against all that was the impending exploration of the moon. So Bellow comments on the Zeitgeist through the eyes of a man who has survived another apocalypse: the Holocaust. Artur Sammler has seen the worst that can be thr [...]

This book has many long paragraphs of stream-of-conscious from Mr. Sammler, who, at the twilight of his time, finding the world around him a riot of discomforts both physically and mentally. The writing is witty and biting, unsparing, and often with long sentences with sonorous adjectives strung together moving toward a crescendo of contempt or anger, which dominates the first part of the book.In mid book, things start to take shape. Sammler's relatives were given full play in their own acting, [...]

Bellow is so good that it almost seems trivial to complain about the deep misogynist tinge on Mr. Sammler's planet. Sammler, a septuagenarian, is overwhelmed by the sexuality of the women who surround him, including his flighty bag-lady daughter. Somehow I doubt that you or I, in our century, would be overwhelmed by the estrogen or whatever it is emanating from these ladies. But for Sammler everything woman-related is tights, legs, knees, thighs, female smells, hair, wigs, food preparation, pant [...]

Have just finished Mr Sammlers planet and truly I have fought to finish this novel. It had moments which drew me in and characters that were interesting on occasions but the huge amount of over descriptive introversion was simply frustrating and totally boring in a number of areas. I can understand that we were being taught the meaning of life or at least sammlers life and the way he was viewing the vast changes that were happening in the way individuals lived their lives at this time but surely [...]

I don't know why this book made it onto my reading list. I think it was on one of the Wall Street Journal's weekly "Top Five Books on . . ." lists a few months ago for some topic or category that I cannot recall now. What I do know is that I liked the writing more than the story. This was my first book by the award-winning Bellow. If I had to summarize it in one sentence I'd say "old man who's been through hell in his life deals with the rot of late 60's New York, the meaning of life, spoiled yo [...]