Mr Sammler's Planet - Saul Bellow

Overwhelming read, Hard not to be over awed by Sammler s urge and tendency to condense the vast disparate lives events and spoken words into few lines of meaningful summarization, After all each one of us try to do the same when confronted with questions of difficult kind while dealing with vagaries of Life.

This Novel condenses the Jewish  American life as a whole into a set of characters, each idiosyncratic in its own way to expound the big picture of falling apart of something existing , What existed earlier seem to be of some value with some hidden rot, flamboyantly replaced now with new set of individualistic maladventures amoralities and indecisiveness leading us into the next generation lives.

In author s own words, As we struggle to summarize, life speed past us at breathtakingly, only to pause at the moments we can remember. This is spectacularly inversed by Man in 20th century. He is trying to create best set of moments, best set of things, best set of choices for himself as an individual leaving anything else worth pursuing as a  secondary choice creating the unintended 'banality of the best' further fuelling discontent. Astonishingly mundane drab dull monotony repetition  are chosen by the great minds of our generation to connect with the infinite, while lesser mortals wrestle to bring the infinite into our best moments and list of things.

Adding to so many words already spoken , each man  deeply knows his terms of contract for the life of what he does and how and why ?

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Sammler -Shula 

Black pickpocket -Feffer - Eisen, Israel

Eisen - Shula 

Elya Gruner - Mrs Elya Son Wallace - Daughter Angela -

Margotte 

Dr Govinda Lal 

Emil the rolls Royce driver from the mafioso