Les planètes de M. Sammler

Mr. Sammler’s Planet is the only novel by Saul Bellow to examine the Holocaust in any depth. It takes place mostly in the mind of a seventy-year-old Jewish survivor, Artur Sammler, and is a protracted meditation on the human condition in the light of his experience as an assimilated Jewish intellectual in pre-War Poland and England, as a victim and soldier during the Second World War, and finally as a refugee in New York during the sexual and cultural revolution of the sixties. The power of the novel lies in the conflation of very different worlds remembered or observed by Sammler. Inspite of a life on three different planets as it were, M. Sammler recognizes a proclivity for inhumanity in human beings everywhere. He favours restraint rather than utopian projects to escape the human condition. In this he is akin to Hannah Arendt. And although Sammler disparages the notion of banality of evil early on in the novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet can be read as a variation on the ideas expressed by Arendt, in particular her insistence on the need for gratitude for human existence as it has been given

Art · Human condition · Judaism · Literature · Nazism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theology · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Religious studies