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.

Very Subtlety Funny

I generally like Saul Bellows and this short book did not disappoint. Bellows is often quite indirect and this is a very subtle book. The humor is not at all explicit, and it seems, is missed by many reviewers. Many reviews seem to think this book is about the alienation of the protagonist. I did not. I thought this book was about the insidious ways we lie to ourselves, and others, about our actions, desires, memories, and feelings.

Grover Gardner is one of the few narrations I will go out of my way to listen too, and this narration is excellent.

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.

A sad day in the life of a man

Today is the day of reckoning for failed actor... Failed extra turned speculator Tommy Willham.
He is a broken man trying to come to grips with an unloving dismissive father and an ex wife wants all and more from Tommy.
This is on of Bellow's sadder tales but worth while and interesting!
Well narrated and full of characters you can't help but relate to.

Excellent Story and Narration!

SEIZE THE DAY is a novel about Tommy Wilhelm (né Wilhelm Adler), a man who is trying to make something of his life after a series of disappointments, failures, and bad luck. A marriage on the edge of divorce and an affair on the edge of marriage (if the divorce should come through), Wilhelm’s relationship with his father, the aging Dr. Adler (a medical doctor), and the decision to invest his life’s savings in lard futures—these are the concerns of Wilhelm’s present as he tries to “make something of himself” and “find himself” in New York City.

A remarkable novel by Canadian-American novelist Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and three-time winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

A Powerful Gut Punch

Though published in 1956, Seize the Day is perhaps even more relevant today. An elegy to American, white male ascendence and expectation, the story takes place over one day, in which all of the failures of the main character come into terrible focus. Grover Gardner is great, as usual, and a great choice for the work of Bellow. I consider myself one who is pretty well read in the canon of great American literature but this relatively minor book of Bellow's had escaped me. I highly recommend it.

Masterful and engrossing

Read Bellow (and “Seize the Day”) for the portraiture of people common and uncommon, for the keen observations of everyday life, for the beautiful prose and the beautiful sentences that you’ll want to read over and over. This one is a “downer” for sure, but a sharply written one, that one will linger, one that will impact and resonate.