Philip Roth Orden de los libros

Originally published: New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

An extraordinary work in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and starting point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as a chemist and his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition.

Филип Рот (р. 1933) - признанный классик американской литературы. Это единственный писатель, трижды награжденный премией Уильяма Фолкнера. Самая нелепая и ничтожная случайность может дать трагический поворот человеческой судьбе. Так, и юного Марка череда ошибок, незаметных на первый взгляд, ввергла в кровавый хаос Корейской войны. Череда ошибок и кипящее в нем возмущение.

Patrimony is a true story about the relationship between a father and a son. Philip Roth watches as his eight-six-year-old father, famous for his vigour, his charm and his skill as a raconteur - lovingly called 'the Bard of Newark' - battles with the brain tumour that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long engagement with life. Written with fierce tenderness, Patrimony is a classic work of memoir by a master storyteller.

Nathan Zuckerman ritorna a New York, la città che ha lasciato undici anni prima. Durante quel lungo isolamento sui monti del New England, Zuckerman non è stato altro che uno scrittore: nessuna voce, niente media, né minacce terroristiche, nemmeno una donna, zero notizie, 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 è con una giovane coppia alla quale, agendo d'impulso, offre uno scambio case: i due lasceranno la Manhattan del dopo 11 settembre per il suo rifugio di campagna, e lui ritornerà 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 ciò che credeva dimenticato - l'intimità, il gioco vitalissimo fra il cuore e il corpo. 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, è ormai una vecchia stremata dalla malattia ma ancora decisa a preservare la memoria dell'autore americano che per primo, nella sua esemplare austerità, ha mostrato a Nathan la via solitaria per la vocazione creativa. Infine il terzo incontro, quello con l'aspirante biografo di Lonoff, un giovane segugio letterario pronto a tutto pur di stanare il 'grande segreto' del maestro. Di colpo invischiato - come mai avrebbe voluto o previsto - nelle trame dell'amore e della perdita, del desiderio e dell'animosità, Zuckerman mette in scena un dramma interiore di vivide e intense possibilità. E mentre intesse un fitto dialogo con il primo romanzo della serie, "Lo scrittore fantasma", "Il fantasma esce di scena" esplora nuove circostanze che arricchiscono lo stupefacente universo narrativo di Philip Roth.

Roth's "Nemesis" is the story of a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

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 60s, 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 toward 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 retrospective on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels.

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.

What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? 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? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad--mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.--From publisher's description.