Customer Reviews

Mr. Sammler's Planet

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Both as an example of fine writing and as a book that leaves you thinking deep thoughts, this novel is outstanding. One of my rules for determining the "importance" of any book, movie, or other entertainment piece is whether or not it is capable of inspiring change in its audience. This novel is.

Bellow achieves the perfect balance of interior monologue and narrative in Sammler, in which we see the world through the eyes of the erudite elderly man, who, though constrained by his own reserved demeanor, sees the world with his eyes, his mind, and his heart. At a loss, often, to express himself, Sammler filters the world through his intellect. And yet, the truths he knows are intuitive, and he realizes that value in life is found through making and acknowledging the human connection and bond, and living up to the spiritual and moral truths of the "human contract." This is a book about how important it is to love, to connect with other frail, imperfect, crazy humans, how to come to terms with the messiness of life, and make peace with the contradictions between intellect and religion/spirituality.

Living in New York on the charity of relatives, Sammler struggles, and succeeds in, maintaining his dignity in spite of the seemingly depraved surroundings of the city and in spite of his precarious financial and physical conditions. Observing the world around him, Sammler poses many questions about the values that drive us, noting poignantly that bragging about one's vices has become virtue, and that honor, "virtuous impulses," have somehow become shameful.

Yet, the book also has an engaging plot, one that serves the message of the book, and Sammler's many family relationships are amusing and touching at once. Yet Sammler is not the hero of the novel, and we see the hero, (if one can call him that, since he spends the book unconscious) through Sammler's eyes. In doing so, we understand the human achievements that Sammler aspires to, and that he calls us to.

This book is worth the work of reading for anyone who doesn't mind dense but beautiful writing, who will read the same paragraph several times to get all the nuggets out, and who enjoys philosophy, sociology, and "cultural" snapshots.

I will note that this novel, right in line with Bellows other novels, is a bit mysogynistic in its portrayal of women (there is not a woman to respect in this novel, they are either dirty and smelly, cold and slutty, crazy, or lovable but totally clueless). My other complaint is that Bellow, in this novel more than others, is a bit intellectually pretentious, throwing in obscure historical/philosphical references that do not move the novel forward, but that are the intellectual equivalent of "muscle flexing." But neither of these shortcomings detracts from the overall impact of the book. I read it once a year or so to remind myself of important truths as I walk the path of life. Sammler forgives his flawed relatives their faults for all the good they do, and so I too can forgive Bellow his, and take all the good this novel offers.

I can imagine few curses worse, historically speaking, than being born in Europe at the fin de sielce. Being born during this period afforded millions of individuals a front row seat, from the flowering youth into the onset of middle age's end, to this century's most colossal stupidities and unspeakable horrors. First industrialized warfare with its colossal waste during the First World War and then industrialized murder in the second. Artur Sammler, not thoroughly affected by the first war is, in every conceivable respect, a survivor of the second. Sammler exemplifies with his one eye, the other sacrificed to a Mauser rifle butt, what it means to see the world clearly, unmediated in its most extreme forms of viciousness and madness. He has lived life at its extremes.

There are many ways to read Mr. Sammler's Planet, and though it probably detracts from gaining some of the meaning of the work, I choose to read it as part historical document and part philosophical treatise. As a document of the 1960's and 70's, it is a lamentation by Bellow at seeing an environment of what he considers adolescent intellectual arrogance blossom up all around New York coupled with a hedonistic sexual revolution which, though not necessarily condemnable is certainly not commendable. Sammler's New York is a mad house of crime, vice, and utter-ridiculousness. For him, one who saw society fall apart at the seems with disastrous consequences for his life--Bellow's narrative reveals very early on that Sammler should in all actuality be dead--New York is very close to being a modernized Sodom or Gomorrah, but a long ways away from having fire and brimstone rained down upon it. It is only redeemed by being almost stupidly infantile.

The circles that Sammler travels in and his acquaintances are, and this is a great understatement, decidedly strange. The circle of survivors of World War II--camp survivors, veterans of the Red Army, or his daughter who was hidden in a Polish Catholic convent--are grotesqueries suffering from weird fetishes, capable of incredible violence, or simply incapable of being reasonable human beings. The young Americans who Sammler is forced to suffer could make lifetime studies for Freud, Jung, or Lacan. They are wild children borne of extravagance and wealth who have only redeeming qualities--two are hucksters, and one is described by her own father as a "sloppy c***." Sammler sees them as the product of a society that is going deeper and deeper into madness--all three are in fact being analyzed--and is incapable in its present state to live life in a way that accords with normal values. Since Sammler survived the greatest calamity of the twentieth century though, just watching the conduct of many of these people, many of whom is down right comical. Sammler's New York is a big stupid child that is unaware of itself.

Sammler is an extremely intellectual man, who during the two days in which in the narrative takes place lives what is rightfully called a life of the mind. Ideas are central to his existence, and he sees many of the problems with New York, which is extended into a microcosmical metaphor for the whole of America and the entire world. One of the reasons that Sammler so broods upon this is that the United States is about to launch humankind onto the moon, and seemingly bring about a new era of human civilization--i.e. transporting humanity with all its problems into frontiers unknown. Though space travel is only fleetingly mused about in the conversations that Sammler has with his highly intelligent and utterly sane friend, the Indian professor of Biophysics, V. Govinda Lal, any mention of it in the books publication year, 1970, would have invoked it. As one who looked death straight in the face and saw human bestiality at its most brutal, Sammler sees it, just as sees humanity with much skepticism. Sammler's planet is profoundly flawed and filled with people who seem incapable of even basic courtesy. His whole narrative begs the question: what business do they have in space?

One thing that I have always liked about Bellow's novels is central role that ideas play in his character's lives. Sammler is the best example of this that I have yet seen. Named for the great nineteenth century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer and a great admirer of H.G. Wells, the self-described Polish-Oxonian anglophile is best described in the way that he himself described Wells: "simply a mass of intelligent views." Not only an intellectual though, he is also a severe critic the modern world. For him it is the values of his decidedly un-intellectual nephew and patron, Elya Gruber, which are most praiseworthy. He is a picture of generosity and familial loyalty even with his over-sexed daughter and huckster son--there is nothing about him that is not easily pardonable. Sammler knows though that Elya is atypical though. The world around him is frivolous, impatient and unwilling to look with even the slightest tolerance upon views that are not their own. He even goes so far as to extend the squalor of Spanish Harlem to Columbia University's intellectual demeanor. Both are squalid, but at least the first is only based economical impoverishment; the second's squalor is self-imposed stupidity and arrogance. Sammler sees the intellectual heroes of most of these young people, like Theodore Sorel, as celebrants of the kind of catastrophic violence that he just barely survived two decades before. This does not bode well for the future of human race.

The only major criticism that it seems possible to have of this work is that much of it seems the irascible lamentation of a man, namely Bellow not Sammler, who is disgusted with excesses of sixties cultural revolutions. A great deal of the narrative becomes bogged down in parodying theses excesses with the grotesque behavior of the characters which embody these extremes. When this occurs, the novel becomes almost a polemic against values that it views as contrary to civil society--i.e. Sammler employs the same level of intolerance he finds so abrasive he finds in those who look askance at his views. If that fault can be forgiven, and it is fairly easy fault to overlook even, the novel becomes exactly what it attempts be; an argument for decency, courtesy, and kindness. Values that are very difficult to oppose.

This is my sixth Bellow novel. For first timers, I would highly recommend Henderson the Rain King over this work because Henderson is an easier, funnier, and more exuberant read--a great parody of the Hemmingway novel. That said, Mr. Sammler's Planet is classic Bellow. The protagonist, Mr. Sammler, is heroically flawed (as all of Bellow's protagonists are) and is caught at a point in his late life where numerous themes challenge his moral center: misogyny, pessimism, death, the human condition, the social contract, filial duty, the achievements of science, and modern western philosphy among other themes--and in any great Bellow work, there are so many themes!

The narrative is simple: a close third person point of view brings us inside Mr. Sammler's head as he interprets and analyzes the events in his life: his dying nephew, a pick pocket who assualts him, greedy relatives, a missing manuscript, and his Holocaust experience. There are long philosophic digressions, sometimes humorous, sometimes didactic, that can frustrate, confuse, and enlighten the reader, all within the space of a single paragraph. This density of thought is one of the supreme challenges of Bellow, but as an ardent fan (who only "gets" a mere fraction of what he's talking about), the payoff is exponentially greater than the effort I put in. The only narrative flaw I find is in the dialogue between Sammler and Dr. Lal. It's structured in a Platonic form--reminiscent of the final chapter in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--and the section seems forced and stilted compared to the rest of the novel.

Bellow's prose is as strong as ever. We return to New York City in the late 1960s, much filthier and more violent than the setting of Seize the Day. His descriptions of people and places are vibrant, and his comic timing masterful.

Ultimately, Mr. Sammler's climatic quest, like all of Bellow's protagonists, lies not in some external feat of physical valor but in a confrontation with the progtagonist's soul. Faced with the death of his nephew, Sammler must come to terms with his life as holocaust survivor, elitist intellectual, misogynist, and man.

Saul Bellow is not for everyone... But if you are introspective, self critical, and enjoy philosophic and comic writing, than this would be an ideal 2nd or 3rd Bellow novel.

How did Saul Bellow get into my head? How does this man-whom I picture as some kind of Ur-white male, entombed in Great Books, plastered with awards and walled up in an ivy tower-speak so directly to my experience as a young woman in 2004? I guess is the same reason that Tolstoy gets to the heart of failing relationships more vividly than any chick-lit author, and Flaubert's descriptions of desire are so much more piercing than any "Sex and the City" episode. Sheer, freaking genius.
Don't let Bellow's "white-maleness" or the blizzard of high-culture references scare you off-this is an incredibly moving and powerful book. Sammler, a Holocaust survivor and exiled European intellectual, is watching his life run down in 1960s New York. So much has changed, and so much stays the same. As I was reading this book on the subway in 2004, Bellow could have been sitting next to me in the car, describing what was happening on the platforms rushing by. "Sammler" made me miss my stop more than once, needless to say. His America is "vast slums filled with bohemian adolescents, narcotized, beflowered and `whole.'" Yet all of Sammler's and his family's sufferings are somehow uplifting, illustrating the power of a mind over the external world.
Please read this book.

After escaping death in World War II, Mr. Sammler lives out his days in New York City. He is an observer and a half-blind prophet in a time of social decay and moon exploration. This is the sort of book in which nothing world-changing happens and yet the world is changed: Sammler explores the cause of social decay and the apocalypse, humanity's chance for new life on the moon, and what it means to be human and participate in the human experience.

There are two ways to read this book: either to take it at the surface level, simply for what it says, or to try and unravel what is truth and what is error. Sammler the protagonist, observer, and prophet, is literally half blind, and his observations and theories are therefore skewed. The reader can chose to take this into account or to ignore it.

As it stands, without taking into account Sammler's blindness, the book is brilliant. The concepts raised by all characters make sense, and Sammler's final observations, no matter how pessimistic they may be, real a lot about our culture. The concept of the indistinguishable masses is in no way unique to Bellow, but the conclusion that follows--that men respond to the masses by attempting to create identities (through exaggeration and vocalization or normal human traits) both makes sense and explains a lot.

Unraveling the book proves to be much more difficult, and it is a big investment for any reader to make. I cannot, myself, pretend that I have completely unraveled the novel. I can say this, however: if Sammler's views seem too negative, the reader can remind himself that Sammler's views are also limited and skewed by his unique misperception. Sammler presents only one view of humanity. There are others out there, but the book is worth reading if only to see this one view. Mr. Sammler's Planet is engrossing, well written, bitingly satirical, and a worthwhile read for what it says about men, individuals, society, and the apocalypse.

'Mr.Sammler's Planet' attracts criticism for being too much an excuse for the exegesis of a series of ideas; yet to take this criticism at its word and to imagine Bellow's work recast as a collection of essays would be to reveal how these ideas require a novelistic framework for their power. The ideas seem to be gestural and provisional, with little in the way of evidence or argument to bolster their claims, and a large fraction of their suggestiveness comes from the very fact that they are uttered by the persona of Mr.Sammler himself.

*

The bare biographical facts pertaining to Mr.Sammler are salient. He is a Holocaust survivor. He has killed a man. He survives through the generosity of an ersatz nephew, and exists as a witness to the times, rather than as a participant. Whatever his likeness to Bellow in other respects, he is starkly different in regards the above. Consequently, as one reads it is possible to repeatedly ask what would a Holocaust survivor make of the state of the modern world. Sammler's actual take is but one answer. Perhaps the core of his answer is the idea that a sense of order is ineliminable in humankind, be this couched in terms of a consensual or objective morality, or in the frankly religious terms of an existent God, and that we know that there are limits to the ways in which a human life can be rightly lived - this is presented as a tremendously strong and inspiring idea, a real wellspring of optimism. And it is one thing for Saul Bellow, Canadian born and blessed with a stellar literary career, to say this as in an essay, but quite another thing to have Mr.Sammler, a resurrected victim of obscene persecution, hold this as his most sacred truth.

*

Impotence is an idea explored repeatedly, along with the related notion of false potency. Sammler is the embodiment of a kind of impotence. He is, perhaps through his history, robbed of the arena in which to act - indeed he characterises himself as 'hardly human' for the ten years after the war. Instead he thinks, and words by his account have no business in necessarily being translated into action. They can and do exist for their own sake. Being embarassed by this 'impotence', as is evidenced in Sammler's quotation of Hamlet, can lead to chaos and terror, to actions beyond control - to a false and inauthentic potency. Potency has obvious sexual connotations, and this is further complicated by Sammler invoking Schopenhauer's esoteric theories where "The organs of sex are the seat of the Will"; just as there exists a misguided attempt to make words potent by using them as a springboard for action, so too the sexual bloom of the sixties is questioned as an example of another kind of sterile potency.

*

This last point is related to some unattractive aspects of the book. It seems entirely legitimate to take the book as a misogynist tract. No female character is cast in a positive light - condescension is the best attitude that can be mustered; the worst is overt abuse, with a welter of Neitzchean, or Schopenhauerean, invective labelling women malodorous, mad, their flesh criticized to the point where an incidental character is branded a 'dugong', and where reproduction occurs courtesy of the 'female generative slime', and female sexual desire becomes summarized in the slur, 'a sloppy c***'. What the intention is behind all of this I do not know. Is it a deep resentment of Sammler's against the fertility of youth? His own amorous life is conspicuously avoided. Is Bellow actually hinting at his own demons, which he can only discuss tangentially? In any case, I found this aspect of the book stale and offensive.

*

Likewise, the African-American presence in the book is of an over-dressed phallus-wielding pickpocket - a figure that cannot help but provoke a reaction in the reader. As a further generalization, Sammler speculates that, "From the black side, strong currents were sweeping over everyone...Millions of civilized people...acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone." My edition of the novel is without Stanley Crouch's introduction, where such issues are apparently discussed. Still, Bellow's motivations might be simply to uncover the power of prejudice, to level the pessimistic charge that humans are inherently tempted to be prejudiced. Another instance is cited where Sammler's Polish rescuer, Cieslakiewicz, reverts to his native anti-Semitism in the years after the war, having risked his life to save Sammler during. Perhaps we are all being asked to recognise our own capacity for prejudice and our own capacity to overcome the same.

*

The misogyny and prejudice present in the book again highlight how it is a novel and not a camouflaged series of essays. Our reactions are constrained and conditioned by the very fact that we are reading a work of fiction, and that an unspecified distance lies between the views mouthed by the characters and those of the author.

*

The word surface is easily digested, often being broken into ready mouthfuls as in a telegram. It seems a mimicry of fragmentary thoughts, pouring through a mind that mainly has itself for company. This inwardness lends it coherence and a rather cloying self-righteousness; there certainly is a strict limit to this mind's capacity for self-criticism, as distinct from judging others, which Sammler does instinctively, even if under the disingenuous guise of indifference. It is a voice poorly suited to outward communication, and Sammler's quoted conversation is often brief and awkward, his interjections being pleas for his interlocutor to regain silence. Worst of all is his interminable interaction with his Indian alter-ego, Dr.Lal - if this is an example of an 'essay', then I'm afraid it is confused, confusing, and lame. Lal's moon-related musings are equally vapid. Wyndham Lewis once characterised Joyce's 'Ulysses' as 'a record diarrhea' - Sammler offers some stiff competition.

*

The plot, as described elsewhere, is simple and stupid. The minor characters are chastised cartoons. You certainly do not keep reading for any one of these factors, rather it is for the crazed amalgam of them all. For all its apparent order, this novel is a mess, and there is no other medium apart from a novel that accommodates a mess so well. It is hard for me to think of another novel that investigates the same territory as "Mr.Sammler's Planet" - a septuagenarian Holocaust survivor, surrounded by the giddying turmoil of Sixties New York, crushing a collage of disparate elements into his own, one-eyed, unique view. Despite Sammler's claims that, 'this liberation into individuality has not been a great success', this novel appears to be evidence to the contrary. It stands alone, another instance of the basic mystery of subjectivity.

Mr. Sammler is a Polish Jew who escaped death at the hands of the Nazis at the cost of sight in one eye.

He is a survivor. He now lives in New York City in the 1960's, supported by his nephew who is but a few years younger.

Sammler, a intellectual with that gentlemanly old world manner, is now trying to come to terms with the culture he sees in NYC at the time, including how most of relatives have taken to it, the Holocaust and WWII in general. And, what the meaning of being a survivor is, both for himself and for the world he now finds himself in.

But just as his physical vision, thanks to the Nazis, is but half and distorted, so is his sight and vision into his soul. (Anyway, that's my metaphorical take on the bad eye.) He is emotionally removed.

As for Bellow's writing, it was great! This was my first Bellow book and I read it only because friends I highly respect so recommended him. I was flabbergasted that the writing was so good. Not at all heavy but yet trenchant in content and to the point. The scene where Sammler gives his talk is classic. His inability to understand the 60's culture and those in it, including his relations, yet having to deal with them, is often simultaneously riotous and deadly serious.

It's easy to see why this book won the National Book Award.

Note: Kosinski's _The Painted Bird_ has a complementary and sometimes similar subject matter. Imo, each books adds greater depth and meaning to the other.

I am a Bellow fan and have read 12 of his 13 novels, and created "An Amazon Guide to Reading Saul Bellow."

In case you are new to Bellow, his novels reflect his life, his writings, and his five marriages during his five active decades of writing. He hit his peak as a writer around the time of "Augie March" in 1953 and continued through to the Pulitzer novel "Humbolt's Gift" in 1973. He wrote from the early 1940s through to 2000. His novels are written in a narrative form, and the main character is a Jewish male, usually a writer but not always, and he is living in either in New York or Chicago. Bellow wrote approximately 13 novels plus other works. Bellow progressed a long way as a writer over the five decades. This story was written near the peak of his career in 1970 and is nothing like the early novels "Dangling Man" or "The Victim" written 25 years earlier. Those were heavy slow reads. "Dangling Man" is often boring, and Bellow was in search of his writing style in that period of the 1940s. The present novel was published in 1970 is light reading, and written in an easy to follow style. It is just 260 pages long, about average or less than average for Bellow. It is good to excellent but a bit weaker than the brilliant writing of "Herzog," and probably on par with the entertaining read "Humbolt's Gift" but just half the size of that book.

It is set in New York in the 1960s and is about a retired European Jew, and his relatives. He has a daughter, Shula, but lives with a niece Margotte related by marriage; she is the niece of his departed wife. The story involves his nephew, Elya Gruner, an M.D., and the nephew's daughter, Angela.

The first quarter is very slow and not a great read. It concerns background information on the family, and Sammler's run in with a pickpocket. At some point - around page 50 or so - the reader gets restless, but that all changes suddenly on page 75 when Artur Sammler describes his survival while his wife Antonina dies at the hands of the exterminators in World War II:

"When Antonina was murdered. When he himself underwent murder beside her. When he and sixty or seventy others, all stripped naked and having dug their own grave, were fired upon and fell in. Bodies upon his own body. Crushing. His dead wife nearby somewhere. Struggling out much later from the weight of the corpses, crawling out of the loose soil. Scraping on his belly. Hiding in a shed. Finding a rag to wear. Lying in the woods for many days."

At that point the reader is made aware of the special person that Mr. Sammler is, and the past horrors of his survival. It changes one's persepective on the rest of the book.

There are many trademark Bellow touches, and as usual he spends a lot of time thinking and describing women's bodies and clothes, and having flashbacks to his youth and the holocaust, and in general thinking about the shortness of life. The escape from death makes his character seem a lot stronger and we are more in tune with his slow and deliberate pace throughout his life.

The story follows the death of his younger nephew by complications similar to a stroke. At the end of the story, Sammler stands over the body of his dead nephew, Elya, the M.D., and thinks these thoughts:

"At his best this man was much kinder than 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 degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding - he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his innermost 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."

Sammler thinks about his nephew, himself, and other men and wonders where we will go. He hopes that each of us have done the best that we could with our lives.

This is an unusual novel with a nice introduction by Stanley Crouch. 5 stars. Recommned.

In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow uses Sammler as an unwitting witness to a cast of characters who border on the burlesque in their quirks and oddities. The device is clever, since we get the feeling that Sammler is perhaps a witness from another planet, or more to the point, the inhabitant of a new, transformed world. And this is apt: Sammler emerged from a pit of dead bodies in the Holocaust, a sort of rebirth to a new world. How does one live in this new, post-Holocaust world? Bellow gives few answers, but provides a series of interpretations of western civilization through Sammler as mouthpiece. In a sense, it is a novel about how we continue to live when our ideas about life prove themselves to be bankrupt.

Three stars for this novel means five for Augie March; I'm rating the author against himself! Bellow's later work, of which this might be the first harbinger, tends to muse rather than move given the lack of energetic plot. After the first hundred pages, setting up the major and minor characters and promising a half-satirical, half-serious look at intellectuals in 1970 NYC--sort of an updated Glass family from Salinger's oeuvre--MSP's pace settles into a rut until it wears out 150 pp. later. Yet, the last paragraph is beautiful!

Parts of this novel do shine. Especially at the start, the bruised condition of Sammler invites pity more than put-downs, and the criticisms he makes of his urban jungle have only become more prescient, sadly, with 35 years to erode further the Gotham infrastructure. I found much less ranting than obituaries of the late Bellow had set me up to expect here. Stanley Crouch's introduction helps place the context of the novel within black-Jewish relations at the end of the 60s and the slide into the catastrophic 70s decade and "drop dead, New York." Crouch understandably given his interests promotes the black pickpocket figure that motivates the first section of the book, but this character largely drops out until the rather forced, awkwardly staged, and overly symbolic climactic scene very late in the story. Still, I wish the introduction in the 2004 Penguin paperback was inserted at the end of the novel, as Crouch does include story spoilers.

Equally crucial are the Dr Lal's and the setting's lunar subtexts, the aftermath of a napalm attack by the Israelis in the Six Day War (the best scene in the book, and I wish there was more of the Jesuit photojournalist Fr Newell), the Holocaust and the return from the grave and the murder of a German soldier, the post-60s collapse of a livable city, liberal cant, Wellesian asides, and failed Olaf Stapleton Cosmopolis world scheme--Crouch correctly draws your attention to these as key elements that carom off Sammler's own musings and longings, as with many of his later novels from this point on, especially on Judaism and the (non?)existence of the soul after death in the minds of aging protagonists. The use of "we" by the omniscient narrator a couple of times only unsettles more the reader.

But Shula, Eisen, Fetter, Wallace, and Lim all disappoint as the supporting cast after initially promising entrances, the subplot of Wallace and Fetter's plane never engages, and that of Lim makes the middle of the book (as Crouch notes) sag for at least fifty pages as the Indian prof and Sammler chat in a conversation that probably only Goethe could have pulled off, not two speakers in English as a second (or fifth) language after a weary day in a sultry city, no matter how learned they both were.

This is Bellow's flaw: much of his high-flown thoughts here could've been placed better in essays rather than as fiction. Far too much of this content drifts and loses dynamism, and I do not believe this is intentional for the character of Sammler, for it characterizes Bellow's figureheads that from this novel on began to take over his novels. They're fascinating in small doses, but fail to leap off the page into convincing figures you could imagine meeting given your own presumed lack of erudition and creature comfort that his metropolitan bon vivants possess.