I didn't just read this book - I felt that I actually lived it too. I was so caught up in "The Swede's" great life turned horribly bad that it was a real relief when it was over! Roth saturates...
The characterization in this book is admirable, but it flounders in the plot and narrative departments. Much time is spent in pondering ontological and deterministic questions, as well as...
Philip Roth really gets inside the skin of Alex Portnoy, the thirty-three-year-old Commissioner of Human Rights (or something) in John Lindsay's New York of the 1960s. We see his development from...
happy with the product but took a long time (1 month) to finally get delivered to me.. but i imagine this is because it was being sent from the USA to australia.
The readingworld of books that affect the reader's sense of being in that world (like Pereira Declares [Sostiene Pereira] by Antonio Tabucchi) helps readers to understand their personal world....
Up until reading this book, the only work of Philip Roth's I had ever read was Goodbye Columbus, when I was in college. I remember liking it very much. That was thirty years ago. Roth appears to...
"I Married a Communist" is the vengeful roman-a-clef response to Clair Bloom's reportedly harse memoir of her marriage to the author, Philip Roth. The story is of a man blacklisted during the...
I read this book after I read Everyman and I am surprised at how the two books are similar, right until the graveyard scene where Sabbath/Everyman meets his digger: The childhood in New Jersey, the...
Sex - both in practice, and in mind only - tends to play a large part in Roth's books. However, seldom as much as in this one. The dirty old man here is of course officially Mickey Sabbath, but I...
Having read other of Philip Roth's novels, quite excellent indeed, I went out and bought Sabbath's Theater. It has outstanding prose since Roth is a good narrator, but I kept feeling like not...
I'll divulge right away I've never been a huge Roth fan, but this book easily ranks as one of the funniest two or three novels I've ever read. So rich in characterization and detail, so epic in...
The great thing about Philip Roth is that even his failures are pretty fun to read. This is one of them. (There are others, too: The Breast, Our Gang, When She Was Good.) So what, I say. The Great...
This was my first Philip Roth book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought the descriptions of the pain that Zuckerman felt were brilliant. One passage where he describes one of his women...
After a false start with The Human Stain, I am making my way through all the Zuckerman books, in order. I quite liked The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound. I like The Anatomy Lesson too, but...
I have read roth's books before and usually enjoy them. this book was a chore to read. nathan zuckerman's brother dies in bypass surgery and then we find the same brother in Israel so that the...
This is a series of essays and speeches satirizing the dead Richard Nixon. It is not a novel; various 'chapters' are written like plays, in script format, and even like short stories. Dialogue...
Sure, it's by far the most dated of Roth's novels, and often over-the-top. Who really needs a Nixon satire at this point? Or even a reminder of some pretty bad times? Well, it turns out that the...
This satire on the Nixon Administration was flat when it was written, and is even flatter today. The extraordinary talent and inventiveness of Roth on occaision lose themselves in formula-...
The HUMAN STAIN is one of the most rewarding novels of our time. It represents the very best of contemporay fiction. I cannot add to all of the excllent commentaries, except to urge you to read...
I'm a great admirer of Philip Roth's books, and I have no doubt that he's one of the country's greatest novelists (in fact, I don't quite understand why he hasn't been awarded the Nobel). But even...
Let me just start with the silliest comment: the only way to find out whether you like this book or not, is by reading it. Most reviews here and on Amazon.uk reflect ambivalent feelings. After...
Roth is a great writer but I have always found his output a bit uneven. Some of his books such as this one are instant classics and others such as this novels sequel, "The Anatomy Lesson" are...
I'm working over several thoughts having finished this book last night as my chest cold grew worse. I've read "The Ghost Writer" before. But it was years ago, I was 24 then. I found it on the shelf...
Roth is not the typical author. He doesn't subscribe to conventional wisdom of beginning, climax, conclusion, etc. He concentrates on characters, issues and dialogue. This book, however, didn't...
After reading a Phillip Roth novel it is sometimes unclear as to whether the author has created a 'round' character, and this is no less true regarding Nathan Zuckerman in his debut appearance in...
The Prague Orgy (1984) is the epilogue to Philip Roth's (1933) Zuckerman trilogy: The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983). It is the fourth of nine novels...
I cannot believe that Harold Bloom praises this work. It is a nihilistic, vulgar, not- at-all -funny, quite-disgusting piece of trash. It shows us something too about the vast range and...
How does a light skin black man "an oxymoron" if I ever heard one pass himself off as a Jewish man? First off, ask any black person who has family members of every shade, if any light skinned black...
In this book Roth sets the story of an African- American college professor who has spent his adult life "passing: as white against the backdrop of the Clinton -Monica Lewinsky scandal. The...
As I write this, there are over 180 reviews of this book on Amazon. As I read through them I am struck by the detailed descriptions of how poorly written it is, and am subsequently surprised that I...
I first bought this book because I was doing research on Philip Roth. I did find it interesting at times. I thought he should have mentioned that Primo Levi committed suicide later on. I enjoy him...
A Useful, But Unremarkable, Collection of Rothiana
"Shop Talk" is a collection of ten previously published interviews, essays and recollections by Philip Roth. The pieces originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of...
Maybe a masterpiece, maybe a misogynistic, self-indulgent mess
For any writers of fiction, English majors, or just avid readers, this is a must-read. Book snobs and other elitists will smile and feel self-satisfied at the abundance of literary allusions and...
Philip Roth tells his story from his perspective. After this novel, he became involved with British actress, Claire Bloom, for a long-term relationship. Their marriage in 1990 ended in divorce by...
I went back and read Goodbye Columbus, then Letting Go on purpose and just loved Letting Go even more the second time around. Roth was showing flashes of his magic with his short stories, but his...
Three-and-a-half stars. As much as I dislike some of what Roth has written, I can't deny that he's one of the greats in American literature. "Letting Go" reads as you might expect Roth's first...
I have read "Letting Go" after reading "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Zuckerman Bound" and I felt bitterly let down by this book. It felt cold, devoid of any real humanity, as opposed to others that...
Those of us that have seen a friend or family member in a bad marital situation may want to look away when they read this book. "When She Was Good" is almost too realistic at times, which can make...
I had wanted to read a book by Philip Roth for a while, and I must say I was disappointed! The characters were real and interesting, but the plot was sloooooooooow, to the point of being...
Although I've read almost all of Philip Roth's books, this is the first pre-"Portnoy" novel I've tackled. Very strange to think this book was written by the same man. Although there are...
Best known for Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Pastoral, Philip Roth's 1972 novella, The Breast, tells the story of David Kepesh, an...
I don't have much to say about this story, other than it is not silly enough or over the top enough to be good. Absurdism is fine, but there isn't really much beyond a man turning into a giant...
I'm a big Philip Roth fan. I love his lush prose, the endless sentences that wind their way around an idea and bring the reader effortlessly along. I love how he can recreate a time and place in...
This was a really bad book by an incredible writer who was trying to do too much with too little. Some have argued that the story, told almost completely in dialogue form is a wonderful...
This is a novel written entirely in dialog. With that limitaiton, Roth has to strech the limits of dialog to the maximum in order to do the other work of story-telling. There's a...
In OPERATION SHYLOCK, the character Philip Roth travels to Israel, where he plans to interview Aharon Applefeld, a gentle writer whose subject is the disappearance of the Jews from Europe and the...
In Operation Shylock, Philip Roth once again plays himself. This time he stumbles into a bad mental episode triggered by lousy sleeping pills when he discovers that someone in Israel is imitating...
Philip Roth is a taste I haven't acquired yet. He is lauded by critics - including Harold Bloom, who just happens to be a friend of his - as perhaps the greatest living American writer. Before...
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