Word: sammler
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...contemporaries. Bellow has been the most rigorous naysayer to nihilism of his era. He has never tried to hide the gloomy truths about modern life or gloss over all the sound reasons (starting or ending with Auschwitz) for a thinking person to despair. His most memorable characters (Herzog, Mr. Sammler, Henderson the Rain King) can list in sometimes comic detail all the symptoms of the decline of the West. Almost alone in serious contemporary fiction, though, Bellow's heroes think that a cure may be worth...
...richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic...
...Sammler's Planet...
Despite its geopolitical subject, the result is a typical Bellow production: part meditation, part crank letter, tinged with the doubt of Ecclesiastes and the faith of Moses, full of quicksilver insights and deep Talmudic scholarship. It is as if the Messrs. Sammler, Humboldt and Herzog collaborated on a travel-cum-history book, pulling in several directions to keep it aloft...
...into a jungle and leaves human beings cut off from each other and the past? When he is advised to be himself, young Augie March replies: "I have always tried to become what I am. But what if what I am by nature isn't good enough?" Mr. Sammler, the aging survivor of European culture, contemplates the result of barely two centuries of galloping individualism: "The idea of the uniqueness of the soul. An excellent idea. A true idea. But in these forms? In these poor forms? Dear...