Philip Roth, página 2 de 15

"Nathan Zuckerman ritorna a New York, la citta che ha lasciato undici anni prima. Durante quel lungo isolamento sui monti del New England, Zuckerman non e stato altro che uno scrittore, niente di cui occuparsi a parte il lavoro e la vecchiaia da sopportare. Vagando per le strade come un fantasma che torna da una lunga assenza, Nathan Zuckerman fa tre incontri che in breve tempo spazzano via la solitudine gelosamente custodita. Il primo e con una giovane coppia alla quale offre uno scambio case: i due lasceranno Manhattan per il suo rifugio di campagna, e lui ritornera alla vita cittadina. Ma, dall''istante in cui li incontra, Zuckerman desidera anche un altro scambio: la sua solitudine per la sfida erotica rappresentata dalla giovane Jamie, il cui fascino lo riattrae verso tutto cio che credeva dimenticato. Il secondo contatto lo stringe con una figura del suo passato, Amy Bellette, musa e compagna del primo eroe letterario di Zuckerman, E. I. Lonoff. Amy, un tempo irresistibile, e ormai una vecchia stremata dalla malattia. Infine il terzo incontro, quello con l''aspirante biografo di Lonoff, un giovane segugio letterario. Di colpo invischiato - come mai avrebbe voluto o previsto - nelle trame dell''amore e della perdita, del desiderio e dell''animosita, Zuckerman mette in scena un dramma interiore di vivide e intense possibilita. "

"Nello ""Scrittore fantasma"" uno Zuckerman ventitreenne, pieno di sacro fuoco per la letteratura, va a rendere omaggio a Emanuel Isidore Lonoff, lo scrittore che considera suo maestro, e in lui non incontra soltanto una figura paterna, un modello a cui assomigliare a tutti i costi. Diviso tra le esigenze della propria arte e le ""pretese"" della vita, Lonoff e il fantasma dello scrittore che Zuckerman stesso diventera. In ""Zuckerman scatenato"" ritroviamo Nathan alla fine degli anni Sessanta, divorziato, ricco, e molto, molto inquieto. Ha pubblicato un libro scandaloso che gli ha fruttato un milione di dollari, ma la sua vita e nel caos. Con ""La lezione di anatomia"", lo scrittore quarantenne viene colpito da un male misterioso e decide che e venuto il momento di cambiare vita, lasciar perdere i libri e il sesso, e il ruolo del malato, per diventare lui stesso medico e curarsi da solo. ""L''orgia di Praga"", che riproduce le pagine dei taccuini sui quali Zuckerman annota il suo soggiorno fra gli artisti proscritti nella Praga dell''occupazione sovietica, funge da epilogo alla trilogia e appone un sigillo sensazionale all''intricata struttura dell''opera magna di Roth sulle conseguenze impreviste dell''arte. "

Philip Roth''s twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, "Everyman", is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth''s Everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he''s made a mess of marriage. "Everyman" is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

One of the greatest living American writers, Roth returns with the final Zuckerman book. Haunted by his earlier works, the melancholy of "The Ghost Writer", the counterpoint of the imaginary and the real in "The Counterlife" and the dialogues of "Deception", this is a reminder of Roth's incomparable style and themes. His previous book, "Everyman", was a huge international bestseller, with over 66,000 copies sold in hardback, and was also hugely critically acclaimed.

En esta novela de 2001, Roth retoma al personaje de David Kepesh (El pecho y El profesor del deseo). Kepesh tiene aquí ya más de sesenta años, es un eminente crítico televisivo y uno de los catedráticos estrella en una universidad neoyorquina cuando conoce a Consuela Castillo, una atractivisima estudiante de veinticuatro, de modales refinados e hija de un matrimonio de ricos exiliados cubanos. Empiezan una aventura sexual que resulta ser una bomba que hace añicos el mundo intelectual y erotico de David. Desde la revolucion sexual de los sesenta, cuando abandono a esposa e hijo, Kepesh se ha dado a experimentar lo que llama la masculinidad emancipada, escapando al alcance de la familia o de una pareja. Con los años ha logrado refinar lo que mamo de esa exuberante decada de protesta y libertad hasta encajarla en una vida plenamente ordenada, donde sigue teniendo, con jovenes estudiantes, vias de escape al mundo del eros y asimismo sabe mantener la distancia estetica suficiente. Pero la juventud y belleza de Consuela, una obra maestra de la voluptuosidad, desarman por completo los constructos por los que se rige David, quien se ve convertido en un posesivo obseso sexual condenado a arrastrarse por el oscuro lodazal de los celos. En la narracion del descenso de Kepesh, Roth despliega un impresionante repertorio de variaciones sobre eros y tanatos, la licencia y la represion, el egoismo y el sacrificio. Con El animal moribundo titulo tomado del poema de W.B. Yeats Navegando hacia Bizancio: Mi corazon entero consumid, que esta enfermo / de tanto desear y, atado a un animal / que agoniza, no sabe ya ni que es; dejad / que me acoja al artificio de la eternidad Philip Roth logro una de sus novelas mas penetrantes y abrasivas.

Sale el espectro, la novela donde Roth dice adiós a Nathan Zuckerman, su célebre protagonista y álter ego, es un estudio profundo de la obsesión, del olvido, de la resignación y del deseo imposible de satisfacer.Como un Rip Van Winkle que regresa a su ciudad natal y lo encuentra todo cambiado, Nathan Zuckerman vuelve a Nueva York, la ciudad que abandono once años atras.Al recorrer las calles como un aparecido, enseguida establece tres relaciones que hacen estallar su cuidadosamente protegida soledad. La primera es con la joven pareja con la que acepta intercambiar domicilios. Pero desde el momento en que los conoce, Zuckerman tambien quiere intercambiar su soledad por el desafio erotico que representa la joven, Jamie, cuyo atractivo le hace volver a cuanto creia haber dejado atras: la intimidad, el vibrante juego de los sentimientos y el cuerpo.La segunda relacion es con un personaje que Zuckerman conocio siendo joven: Amy Bellette, compañera y musa del primer heroe literario de Zuckerman, E.I. Lonoff. Amy, irresistible en el pasado, es ahora una anciana consumida por la enfermedad.La tercera relacion es con el aspirante a biografo de E.I. Lonoff, un joven sabueso literario que hara y dira cualquier cosa para acceder al gran secreto de Lonoff.Sale el espectro, cuyas paginas tienen ecos de una obra anterior de Roth,La visita al maestro, es un salto asombroso en una nueva fase del insaciable compromiso de este gran escritor con la narrativa.Reseña:Todo el material narrativo lo maneja Philip Roth con un envidiable dominio de la escritura. Su manera de relatar es magnetica y atrapa.Jose Maria Guelbenzu, Babelia, El Pais

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jaime, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.

La vigésimo novena novela de Roth cuenta la historia de la educación de un joven judío, hijo único de una familia de carniceros kosher del Newark de la década de 1950. Tentado por las oportunidades que le depara el futuro y asfixiado por las estramboticas restricciones de un padre excesivamente aprensivo, decide trasladarse a una universidad luterana de Ohio, donde debera enfrentarse al antisemitismo, a la represion sexual y a la amenaza que plantea sobre los jovenes del pais la necesidad de reclutas para la guerra de Corea. Una historia intima de inexperiencia, imprudencias, resistencia intelectual, descubrimientos sexuales, coraje y terror.

"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.)