Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
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Seize the Day

Author: Saul Bellow

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Unabridged: 3 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/10/2011

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

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.

About Saul Bellow

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, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, Bellow served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He taught at New York University, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota and was chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on February 20, 2023

Time flies, it is hard enough to catch a moment… Is it possible to Seize the Day? If Saul Bellow isn’t cynical then he is surely sarcastic. Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony, too. Maybe it couldn't be helped. It was probably even necessary. Wilhelm, however, feared it intensely. Whene......more

Goodreads review by s.penkevich on November 11, 2022

'Nature only knows one thing, and that’s the present. Present, present, eternal present, like a big, huge, giant wave – colossal, bright and beautiful, full of life and death, climbing into the sky, standing in the seas. You must go along with the actual, the Here-and-Now, the glory -’ Following the......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on December 30, 2019

This novella about the morning hours in the life of a man which is falling apart is authentic New York narrative AND somber urban fable. Written in '56, it is still supremely relevant and I bet there are dozens, perhaps thousands, of Tommy Wilhems out there in the world, and they are all MODERN MEN;......more

Goodreads review by Maria on March 16, 2019

Tengo que admitir mi ignorancia: antes de leer esta novela, no sabía que el señor Saul Bellow había existido. Supongo que es normal, es imposible conocer a todos los escritores que ha dado la humanidad. Pero sin duda leeré algo más de él. Carpe Diem, como bien indica, es un grito al "vive ahora, viv......more

Goodreads review by Michael on November 16, 2016

If there was ever a character as neurotic as Alexander Portnoy - it was Wilhelm Adler. Following him around for a day in this short but great novella, I laughed and cried. At times, well most of the time, he is pathetic but as in nearly all of Bellow's protagonists, there is a diehard optimism that......more