Word: sammler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles (1 last week) 2. The Godfather, Puzo (2) 3. Travels with My Aunt, Greene (5) 4. The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, Breslin (3) 5. The Inheritors, Robbins (6) 6. The House on the Strand, du Maurier (4) 7. Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow (9) 8. Love Story, Segal 9. The Seven Minutes, Wallace (8) 10. Fire from Heaven, Renault...
...Terms of Life. The comedy ends with Sammler recommending his friend's soul to God. He did what was required of him, says Sammler. "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 inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As we all know. For that is the truth of it-that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know...
...know. Perhaps; but Sammler is the first Bellow character who has not misplaced the information so thoroughly that an entire novel was required to follow him through the search for it. The earliest searchers found nothing. The hero of Bellow's accomplished but thin first novel, Dangling Man (1944), sleeps, eats, does nothing. There is little focus to his faint discontent, and while his paralysis of spirit is clearly a statement of some kind, it is not one that he understands...
...asked, in a roar, Bellow's central question-how can a good man, no weakling, live in the modern world?-and he must have some answer if the novel is to be more than a hideously bad joke. The roaring is that of personality, and a line of Sammler's applies: "Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder." Henderson roars himself out literally-impersonating a lion-when the author's mad plot sends him into the bush with a tribe of lion worshipers. He returns...
...episodes in Mr. Sammler." said Saul Bellow "are meant to be typical of the madness in New York City middle-class life. But," he adds with characteristic low-key irony, "I may be a little behind...