Gallimard's Quarto Edition Reunites Two Saul Bellow Novels

Gallimard has published a new Quarto edition pairing Saul Bellow's novels *Herzog* and *Mr. Sammler's Planet*, translated into French. The volume brings together two Jewish intellectuals burdened by European culture: Moses Herzog, defeated by sexual competition and writing imaginary letters to humanity, and Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor resisting the irrationality of 1960s America. The novels explore intelligence confronting nihilism, with human relations expressed in unvarnished cruelty. Herzog's delusions of grandeur yield comic effects, while Sammler endures absurd violence. Solitary meditation on death becomes the characters' only freedom. Laurent Perez notes that the new translation adds heaviness compared to Jean Rosenthal's earlier version, which captured the 'semoule où pédale Herzog'. A second volume is forthcoming.