{"id":2281,"date":"2013-03-19T08:16:50","date_gmt":"2013-03-19T12:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/?p=2281"},"modified":"2013-03-19T08:16:50","modified_gmt":"2013-03-19T12:16:50","slug":"philip-roth-at-80-the-novelist-of-desire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/2013\/03\/19\/philip-roth-at-80-the-novelist-of-desire\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Roth at 80: the novelist of desire"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Roth1_2512877b\"<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153In the coming years I have two great calamities to face: death and a biography,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says a poker-faced Philip Roth. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hope the first comes first.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He is speaking at the start of a new PBS film, Philip Roth Unmasked<\/a>, based on extensive interviews with the author, and made to coincide with his 80th birthday. You can understand him wanting to guard his own story. His work over the last 50 years \u00e2\u20ac\u201c from Goodbye, Columbus<\/em> (1959) to what he claims is his final work, Nemesis<\/em> (2010) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has mined his own Jewish upbringing in Newark, testing and teasing the reader to guess what is fact and what is fiction. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As Jonathan Franzen comments here it has always been Roth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shtick to seem \u00e2\u20ac\u0153more honest\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153more outrageous\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than any other writer. His early work was condemned by Jewish organisations that felt he showed Jews in a bad light. He responds here as he did 50 years ago by saying he told the truth: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There were Jewish girls who bought diaphragms, there were Jewish men who were adulterous.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Sex is the driving force of Roth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work. His favourite moment in Ulysses<\/em> is when Bloom ogles a pretty girl by the sea while surreptitiously arousing himself. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153At it again,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Roth, quoting Bloom. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That should be on my tombstone!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Roth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s masturbatory classic Portnoy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Complaint<\/em> (1969) goes at it, again and again. Its combination of sex, comedy and high art made the book a hit, selling 350,000 copies in its first month. The novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s genesis is fascinating. Always funny in company, Roth had never seiously tried doing the same on the page. Alexander Portnoy, the Jewish boy who can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t leave it alone, was the perfect vehicle. Framing it as a confession to a psycholoanalist gave him permission to say what he wanted, whatever way he liked. Roth warned his parents the book might make trouble for them and sent them on a cruise when it was published. But his father, far from being ashamed, sold copies on board signed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hermann Roth, Philip Roth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s father\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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More here.<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0(Note: Saw “Unmasked” and loved it. At the Film Forum in Chelsea. Free. If you can, go and see the film)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

via 3quarksdaily http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2013\/03\/philip-roth-at-80-the-novelist-of-desire.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+3quarksdaily+%283quarksdaily%29<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In the coming years I have two great calamities to face: death and a biography,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says a poker-faced Philip Roth. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hope the first comes first.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He is speaking at the start of a new PBS film, Philip Roth Unmasked, based on extensive interviews with the author, and made to … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Philip Roth at 80: the novelist of desire”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[153,245,6],"class_list":["post-2281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-reader","tag-3quarksdaily","tag-azra-raza","tag-ifttt"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2skW4-AN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}