In this book, Bellow has succeeded in doing something he never quite managed before--or at least not quite so successfully. He has created a character who embodies his ideas, who serves, in fact, as his spokesman, yet remains convincing in his own right. Sammler is more than the sum of Bellow's parts. Where Augie March, Henderson and Herzog were brilliant, Sammler is brilliantly human.
— The New York Times, 1970

The most important writer in the second half of the twentieth century...Bellow's oevre is both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary. -- Sunday Times of London

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Dazzling . . . [Bellow’s] entertaining and provocative howl of rage is a tour de force of disillusionment and disgust at the descent from high culture to barbarism.” —TheArticle

“The most important writer in English in the second half of the twentieth century . . . Bellow’s oeuvre is both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary.” —Sunday Times (London)

It’s as much about the language in Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel as it is about the philosophical, and what better narrator to handle Bellow’s complex characters, ideas, and luscious layering of words than AUDIOFILE Golden Voice George Guidall? Arthur Sammler is a Polish refugee—a Holocaust survivor with only one good eye. But that doesn’t keep him from seeing. Guidall portrays the septuagenarian Sammler as an observer of the human condition. He calls himself a “registrar of madness.” He worries about everything from human optimism to human suffering. He is “sorry for all and sore at heart.” Sammler’s encounter with a pickpocket, his anxiety about his daughter, his other familial concerns—Guidall recounts them all. But it’s Bellow’s language that resonates in his expert performance. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine