Seize the Day

By: Saul Bellow

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as “the type that loses the girl”); and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding and offers him one last hope.

Saul Bellow (1915–2005), author of numerous novels, novellas, and stories, was the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards. He also received the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

©1956 1974 by Saul Bellow. renewed 1984 by Saul Bellow (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“It is the special distinction of Mr. Bellow as a novelist that he is able to give us, step by step, the world we really live each day - and in the same movement to show us that the real suffering of not understanding, the deprivation of light. It is this double gift that explains the unusual contribution he is making to our fiction.” ( New York Times)

Seize the terrible freedom of the American Dream

“You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.”

A Great New York Novel

Not only a great New York novel, but also a great American novel. Highly recommended. Excellent narration.

What a powerful writer and a great reading

I am shamed to say it is my first bellow. OMG! The power of a generational writer is right there. It has a thinking man needs. The conflicts, family issues and dynamic, philosophy and mystery are fully developed in a tautly packed story.
I can not help moving on next Bellow work.
Grover Gardner is amazingly as always

This book was great

I found this book to be very well written. I further found this book to be developmental and maturative for a young man coming of age like myself. I highly recommended it.

Powerfully Moving - Punchy and Concise

A short novel of unexpected tenderness. It gracefully depicts a middle-aged man on the brink of bad times — some of the worst times. It simply follows the internal dialogue of a man who's been down on his luck for a while and things are only getting worse. It follows the man through most of a day in the heat of post WWII New York City. There's something almost Buddhist about this narrative. Attachment leads to suffering. And Life is filled with suffering. The man wants to make things right, but he's always striving to start things over. It doesn't seem like he's living in the here an now. It's like his expectations of others and the love and support that he craves from others prevents him from truly seizing the day.

A moving novel. I feel sorry for the main character and want better for him. But I'm also a little frustrated by his lack of autonomy. This is a tale of modern man in distress. Suffering before enlightenment. No nobility in the suffering. Just sadness and confusion. Despair without the acceptance of Stoicism. Just existence through sorrow and frustration.

This book ends the only way it could have and it didn't end how I expected. Tears and Death at the end, but maybe not in the way that the reader will expect. Beautiful but harsh to define. I'll be thinking about this novel for a while.