Tommy Wilhelm is a worried man. Once charming, he has failed to make it big as an actor in Hollywood, left his family and lost his job as a salesman. Now he lives in the Hotel Gloriana in New York City, while his successful father lectures him about changing his life. But Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - and has given his last $700 to the mysterious, philosophizing Dr Tamkin to invest. Is the smooth-talking Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off? Or does he offer him one last chance to make it out of this ...
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Tommy Wilhelm is a worried man. Once charming, he has failed to make it big as an actor in Hollywood, left his family and lost his job as a salesman. Now he lives in the Hotel Gloriana in New York City, while his successful father lectures him about changing his life. But Wilhelm clings to the hope that his luck is about to turn - and has given his last $700 to the mysterious, philosophizing Dr Tamkin to invest. Is the smooth-talking Tamkin ripping Wilhelm off? Or does he offer him one last chance to make it out of this mess?
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Seller's Description:
Fair in fair dust jacket. 9th printing, from 1968. It's an ex-library Hardcover with usual markings, stamps, stickers, pocket, etc. -Disclaimer: May have a different cover image than stock photos shows, as well as being a different edition/printing, unless otherwise stated. Please contact us if you're looking for one of these specifically. Your order will ship with FREE Delivery Confirmation (Tracking). We are a family business, and your satisfaction is our goal!
Saul Bellow's Seize the Day is a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Schlemiel--or failed actor. It follows a day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm who teeters on the abyss, his marriage on the rocks, who is alienated from his father, out of work, and close to financial ruin. Bellow's prose is quirky and eccentric, and his tone tragicomic. Norman Mailer has called it unfairly the first of the "cancer novels," yet Wilhelm is a figure of such pathos that the novel doesn't fully rise to the level of tragedy. Leslie Fieldler has noted that Bellow's sense of the absurd is influenced by Nathanael West, author of Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust. Even after the awarding of the Nobel Prize, Bellow himself has seemed an equivocal figure in American letters, perhaps because his novels are refractions of a University of Chicago intellectual's perspective--and reaches a pitch of sourness and bile in Mr. Sammler's Planet--for whom questions of Jewish identity have been at times peripheral. This reader's appreciation of Bellow's work has been qualified at best, and I don't pretend to be an unabashed fan.
