Mr. Sammlers Planet (Penguin Classics)

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(4 stars) - Mr. Sammler's Planet is this Earth of war, crime, violent death but also love among people
Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow's wrote this short novel in 1970. It deals with a few days in the life of the aged Polish scholar Mr. Artur Sammler. Sammler survived a mass burial during the holocaust during which his wife was murdered and he lost an eye beaten in by a gun butt. Sammler escaped to the West.He is retired and leaving in a rooming house owned by a Jewish German woman. Sammler is European in his lifestyle having trouble adjusting to the way things are done in the United States.
Sammler and his kooky daughter Shula (living apart from her brutal Russian-Israeli husband Eisen) live well in New York City. They are supported by the wealthy Dr. Gruden who is Sammler's nephew. Dr Gruner is a widower with two adult dysfunctional children. His two children are Angela who is a promiscuous self-centered femme fatale and Warren his brilliant but feckless son who enjoys wild exploits with planes and riding into Russia on a donkey and flys over residential houses in New Jersey in a small plane. He is always talking about ways to make a fortune. The book will end with the death of Dr. Gruner due to a broken blood vessel. His children are not caring of their father though Sammler is there to mourn the doctor.
The book's plot concerns Shula's stealing of a manuscript of the moon from a visiting Punjabi scholar Dr. Lal. She later becomes enamored of Lal and seeks to have him court her. Dr. Sammler has the manuscript located and returned to Lal after several mishaps.
Dr. Sammler is attacked by an African-American thief who exposes himself to the prim Pole. Sammler will later show compassion to this thief when the man is being beaten on a New York Street. Sammler had seen death in all its bloody incarnations during World War II. He killed a Nazi while hiding in the Polish forest where he was hiding in starvation. Sammler hid in a grave during the war being resurrected to life following liberation. He speaks with insight into evil in the human heart.
Sammler is working on a biography of H.G. Welles whom he knew in London prior to World War II He spends his days frustrated by the chaos, crime and American ways on display in New York.
The book is hampered by long philosophical discussions. Bellow is eager to display his opinions on a wide range of philisophical issues most pertinently those dealing with death, sex and man's inhumanity to man.
The book uses sexual imagery and crude language on the lips of its wealthy and upper middle class characters. Bellow is good at describing characters. Mr. Sammler reminds one of Pere Goriot in the Balzac classic who is subject to the decline of his family and their callousness to parents, tradition and faith. None of the characters is without major flaws including Dr. Gruder who did abortions for Mafia figures.
This short novel is worth reading in our age of terrorism and violence worldwide. Bellow is a wise sage of modern culture.

(4 stars) - "Mr. Sammler's Planet" by Saul Bellow
Typically perplexing Bellow fare. His interverted conduit here is Artur Sammler, an aging Holocaust survivor living in New York City. Mr. Sammler is wise, acute, and painfully observant of the twisted humanity that surrounds him in the great city. Plot-wise the story is typically thin; a black effete pickpocket flashes Mr. Sammler, a close friend is slowly dying in the hospital, and he has to deal with recovering a professor's manuscript about H.G. Wells that his daughter had stolen for his sake. However, the book is intensely internal and neurotic. The overall theme of the book is of society spoiling our planet, and the whistful desire to shoot from a rocket somewhere else in the galaxy, clean and untouched, and begin again. Bellow writes prose that is oftentimes turgid and almost unreadable, but there are of course moments here and there of astounding beauty. Sammler's final conversation with Professor Lal in particular, where Sammler is finally able to articulate his thoughts, is equal parts dense, dogmatic, and absolutely shimmering. Read it for yourself, but prepare yourself for a challenging trip.

(3 stars) - Bellow par Bellow
Mr Sammler's Planet was a novel written when Bellow was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce from one or other or his wives and as a result is tainted by a nasty seam of misogyny which prevents the full actualisation of his female characters. Mr Sammler himself is a delightful fictional creation - an elderly old world intellectual at sea in the mid 20th Century America with its bitter currents of violence and primacy of harsh capitalism. The other characters are not Bellow's finest - in particular the women, portrayed as predominantly fickle creatures, with many odours, slaves to their sexual appetites and always in need of primping and binding themselves.

For a stronger take on the battle between ideas and modern culture in the American 20th Century, look at Bellow's much stronger 'Humboltd's Gift' which takes on similar themes but works them into a masterfully mature big canvas novel of 1970s Chicago.

(3 stars) - Coherence is better than psychoanalysis!
I started reading this book when I was 18 and picked it up again a couple weeks ago.

It is just as well as at 55 I can much better appreciate it than I could have at 18.

The book shines when it condenses into two or three sentences women, the diaper revolutionaries and especially for me the pan of psychoanalysis. Many of these things I have arrived at myself over the years and it was wonderfully heartening to hear them in this book.

There were parts of the books where Bellow launches into deep complex philosophisizing that are frankly opaque and tiresome...I finally started to skip over some of them.

Also the part about the Hindu scientist just seemed to show Bellow didn't know much about Hindus and 3rd world countries. Lal was an unbelievable character--French literature and all.

But the other characters were beautiful and wonderful...the genius moron and the sexed out daughter and Shula.

Coherence is better than psychoanalysis any day I agree Bellow! A good read.

(5 stars) - Prescient Deserving of Appreciation
For me, Saul Bellow can do no wrong.

What a prescient, timely book. Easily misunderstood or falsely judged by non-fans, this exploration of a "registrar of madness" is impeccable with just one incidence of a unBellow-like overshooting. Yet, it should give us hope...

A Ruthlessly contemporary bite of New York life ripped out by strong mandibles...providing a nourishment still...

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