Customer Reviews

Seize the Day

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This is Bellow's most perfect work. Its tale of Money , Madness Murder Machine is yet another take on the Willy Loman small business -man- tragedy theme. Tommy Wilhelm the hero of the book is s a struggling , divorced father of two temporarily living in the same hotel in Upper West Side Manhattan that his father, the successful and mean, Dr. Adler permanently resides in. The action is contracted into a few days in which Wilhelm who has invested his last money with the dubious healer, brilliant crackpot Dr. Temkin , sees this money and his hope of rescue, disappear.
The work captures the spirit of a certain kind of West- Side New York Jewishlike culture. It has hilarious and brilliant portraits of minor characters, like the small- time agent Maurice Venice who has guided Wilky's brief film- career to disaster. It is rich in the philosophy of failure and success, of desperate hope and search for deliverance.
Its final scene in which the broken- Wilkie comes by accident upon a funeral cortege and begins weeping uncontrollably - is a tremendously powerful one. Bellow builds the Wilky character beautifully, his heavy mind and heart 'sinking' to the ocean- floor like the Lycidas whose elegaic lines learned in high- school re- echo deep within himself.
For every human being who has striven and failed, who has known what grief is , this masterpiece will be a wrenchingly moving tale.