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Friday, April 01, 2011

Reading Saul Bellow's "Sammler's Planet"

I am reading Saul Bellow's "Sammler's Planet". Here's the review article in wikipedia

It's about a holocaust survivor, a scholarly and erudite kind of soul who is slowly assimilating into New York society. His struggle comes out as real and agonisingly familiar to someone who lives in Bombay. I especially like the use of short sentences - something I use myself - and the pithiness with which ideas (even metaphysical ones) are put across. 

Bellow examines among other things colonisation of the moon (a certain Govinda Lal is behind this!) the fraudulence prevalent in business, "You had to be patient with the stupidities of power, with the fraudulence of business." And then says, "It was plain that the rich men he knew were winners in struggles of criminality, of permissible criminality. In other words, triumphant in forms of deceit and hardness of heart considered by the political order as a whole to be productive; kinds of cheating or thieving or (at best) wastefulness which on the whole caused the gross national product to increase."

Must say this is going to be a hummer of a read.

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