Philip Roth, página 2 de 15

Primera recopilación de escritos de Joseph Roth publicada en España que cubre la trayectoria de su madurez, desde Weimar a su exilio parisino. En estos textos apreciamos la sensibilidad del novelista para captar y transmitir emociones y la inmediatez y concision del periodista. Su intuicion para la politica y su agudeza visual, propia del artista que aprecia cada detalle, convierten sus escritos periodisticos en una de las mas destacadas aportaciones literarias sobre la primera mitad del siglo XX. Su lectura nos permite hoy acompañarle, trago tras trago, mientras contempla como Europa se aleja de la razon y se sume en la desesperanza. Traductor: Eduardo Gil Bera. Prologo: Eduardo Gil Bera.

Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth's startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, 'are melted into air, into thin air'. Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in Everyman and Exit Ghost, and the bitterly ironic retrospect on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels. The Humbling is Roths thirtieth book.

"No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you''re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college-as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete''s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated. The agency of Kepesh''s undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged-helplessly, bitterly, furiously-into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

Philip Roths 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter . A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writers young and beautiful wife. Theres also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader cant help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roths voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animal than Everyman . (Oct.)

Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth's startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, 'are melted into air, into thin air'. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. 'Something fundamental has vanished'. His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback. Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for the bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not towards comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long day's journey into night, told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura and gravity, all the ways that we persuade ourselves of our solidity, all our life's performances - talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation - are stripped off. Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in "Everyman" and "Exit Ghost", and the bitterly ironic retrospect on youth and chance in "Indignation", Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels. "The Humbling" is Roth's thirtieth book.

The Humbling, Roth`s thirtieth book, is the shattering account of Simon Axler, one of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, who has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance? told with Roth`s inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity.

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E.

Returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman - incontinent and impotent - comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Walking the streets he quickly makes several connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. In a rash moment, he offers to swap homes with a young couple.

When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her irresponsible, alcoholic father thrown in jail. Since then, Lucy has become a furious adolescent - raging against middle-class life and provincial American piety - intent on reforming the men around her: especially her incompetent mamas boy of a husband, Roy.

Now a major motion picture based on Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece American Pastoral, starring Ewan McGregor and Jennifer Connelly. 'Swede' Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life sustained by his devoted family, his demanding yet highly rewarding (and lucrative) business, his sporting prowess, his good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until the sunny day in 1968, when the Swede's bountiful American luck deserts him. The tragedy springs from devastatingly close to home. His adored daughter, Merry, has become a stranger to him, a fanatical teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism that plunges the Levov family into the political mayhem of sixties America, and drags them into the underbelly of a seemingly ascendant society. Rendered powerless by the shocking turn of events, the Swede can only watch as his pastoral idyll is methodically torn apart.

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled?