Mr. Sammler's Planet: Amazon.ca: Saul Bellow: Books

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?Bellow's oeuvre is both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary.? (Bryan Appleyard, "Sunday Times", London) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Book Description

Attentive to everything, appalled by nothing, "Is it time to go? Blow or be blown?" Mr Sammler asks dispassionately, speculating on the future life of this--or any--planet in this superbly written tragicomexistentianihilistic coup-de-grace. 8 cassettes. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

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First Sentence
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. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

19 Reviews

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3.9 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Not just for fans of dead white men..., Mar 30 2004

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Dangle's girl (Astoria, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Sammler's Planet (Paperback)

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.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Bellow at his almost best, May 1 2003

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"nuprin897" (Bethesda, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Sammler's Planet (Paperback)

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.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Why should I care?, Dec 28 2002

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Prospective Customer (Does it Matter?) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Sammler's Planet (Paperback)

This book was probably the most hit-and-miss I have ever read. I really enjoyed the stream of consciousness internal monologues by the main character, and after having read this and other books by Bellow, I've decided Bellow is the most original thinker of 20th century English language writers, capable of the most profundity. However, this book had little to hold it up in between these moments. The plot was weak, the characters varied from interesting(the protagonist, most of the time) to obnoxious(his daughter and the Hindu doctor).

Other reviewers have made the claim that looking for solely plot is superficial, and while I agree somewhat(but I also think this is their elitist way of intimidating those who didn't like the book into feeling uneducated and stupid), I agree only in the sense that great fiction should ideally have more than simple plot. But this book has almost no plot, nothing more than contrived situations in order to house the author's intelligent postulates. This is fiction, and story is what makes fiction thrum. If Bellow really wanted a context in which to pose these ideas, he should have just released a collection of essays, possibly interrupted with anecdotal short stories and brief allegories(I get that feeling reading most of his work.)

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars European History in New York and on the Moon, i.e. BELLOW!
There is never just one conversation or story in a novel by Saul Bellow, but Mr. Sammler's lifespan and intellectual range make this novel particularly dense. Did I say dense? Read more

Published on May 9 2002 by L. Dann

4.0 out of 5 stars bellow is the best
another brilliant book from mr. bellow.

Published on Oct 5 2001