Philip Roth's Masterwork
I have a whole lot of post topics in my head right know, and I don't know which one to write about. So I'll just talk about the latest book that I think you should read because I am reading it. This is what I call "my old standby post".
Currently I am reading American Pastoral by Mr. Philip Roth. I have been hearing about this book, more or less, since it won the Pulitzer Prize, and I must say that I wish I had read it earlier. I have never read one of Roth's novels before, and so I wasn't too sure what to expect. I mean he was the guy who wrote a whole story about a man turning in to a breast. (Kinda of a Kafka for the 1970s post-existentialist-Carter-is-in-the-White-House milieu. (You know, man turning into beast, man turning into breast.)) In fact, all the reviews (of American Pastoral I read said more or less the same thing, "We never thought Roth had a novel this good in him" and his follow up novel all the reviews said the same thing again "we hoped Roth wouldn't revert back to his ways after American Pastoral but of course he did". So I was a little intrigued and I am very glad I started the book. Now for a qoute.
Or maybe he was just a happy man. Happy people could exist too. Why shouldn't they? all the scattershot speculation about the Swede's motives was only my professional impatience, my trying to imbue Swede Levov with something like the tendentious meaning Tolstoy assigned to Ivan Ilych, so belittled by the author in the uncharitable story in which he sets out to heartlessly expose, in clinical terms, what it is to be ordinary. Ivan Ilych is the well-placed high-court offical who leads "a decorous life approved of by society" and who on his deathbed, in the depths of his unceasing agony and terror, thinks, "'Maybe, I did not live as I ought to have fonde.'" Ivan Ilych's life, writes Tolstoy, summarizing, right at the outset, his judgment of the presiding Judge with the delightful St. Petersburgh house and handsome salary pf three thousand rubles a year and friends all of good social position, had been most siple and most ordinary and therfore most terrible. Maybe so. Maybe in Russia in 1886. But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and start to crow, "It doesn't get any better than this." they may be a tlot closer to the truth then Leo Tolstoy ever was.
Who ever though Roth had it in him?
Currently I am reading American Pastoral by Mr. Philip Roth. I have been hearing about this book, more or less, since it won the Pulitzer Prize, and I must say that I wish I had read it earlier. I have never read one of Roth's novels before, and so I wasn't too sure what to expect. I mean he was the guy who wrote a whole story about a man turning in to a breast. (Kinda of a Kafka for the 1970s post-existentialist-Carter-is-in-the-White-House milieu. (You know, man turning into beast, man turning into breast.)) In fact, all the reviews (of American Pastoral I read said more or less the same thing, "We never thought Roth had a novel this good in him" and his follow up novel all the reviews said the same thing again "we hoped Roth wouldn't revert back to his ways after American Pastoral but of course he did". So I was a little intrigued and I am very glad I started the book. Now for a qoute.
Or maybe he was just a happy man. Happy people could exist too. Why shouldn't they? all the scattershot speculation about the Swede's motives was only my professional impatience, my trying to imbue Swede Levov with something like the tendentious meaning Tolstoy assigned to Ivan Ilych, so belittled by the author in the uncharitable story in which he sets out to heartlessly expose, in clinical terms, what it is to be ordinary. Ivan Ilych is the well-placed high-court offical who leads "a decorous life approved of by society" and who on his deathbed, in the depths of his unceasing agony and terror, thinks, "'Maybe, I did not live as I ought to have fonde.'" Ivan Ilych's life, writes Tolstoy, summarizing, right at the outset, his judgment of the presiding Judge with the delightful St. Petersburgh house and handsome salary pf three thousand rubles a year and friends all of good social position, had been most siple and most ordinary and therfore most terrible. Maybe so. Maybe in Russia in 1886. But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and start to crow, "It doesn't get any better than this." they may be a tlot closer to the truth then Leo Tolstoy ever was.
Who ever though Roth had it in him?
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