"A goyisch idiot flying a stupid plane."What a coincidence: just as I was finishing this book, Philip Roth was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Prize for the third time, for his "Everyman".
"A political catastrophe of unimaginable proportions was transforming a free society into a police state, but a child is a child, and all I could think about in my bed was that when the time came to move her bowels, Aunt Evelyn would have to do it on our storage bin floor."
This sentence, a gem like many others, jutting out of the backdrop of the political climate, summarizes the mood of the book: the child does not quite understand the consequences of what is happening to him and watches how the adult characters react to the gradual and then sudden political changes.
From my German point of view I envy Americans that they have an author like Roth who can explain American history for them in the form of novels. This is is only one in a series of Roth novels that does that.
The book gives me a chance to talk about my experience with American literature in general. I started with Saul Bellow when I was still a teenager. His books are hardly penetrable for someone of this age group, but I read, Augie March, Victim, Herzog (this one in German), Sammler's Planet (in German also), Humboldt's Gift. I also tried The Dean's December, but found it dull. But Henderson the Rain King was the most accessible for a teenager, and I read it twice. This was all just after he won the Nobel Prize. That is how I discovered him. Much later I read his Ravelstein. This was my start of reading books by Jewish authors. Several others followed: Bernard Malamud (most of his novels, the bulk of his short stories), I.B. Singer (who had won the Nobel Prize two years after Bellow), and Roth. Roth's first, and only novel for a long time, I read was his unavoidable Portnoy's Complaint. A few years ago I read his American Pastoral, which found heavy reading. The Plot Against America is much more accessible.
As for American literature, who can best Philip Roth for his large scope of topics?
"A political catastrophe of unimaginable proportions was transforming a free society into a police state, but a child is a child, and all I could think about in my bed was that when the time came to move her bowels, Aunt Evelyn would have to do it on our storage bin floor."
This sentence, a gem like many others, jutting out of the backdrop of the political climate, summarizes the mood of the book: the child does not quite understand the consequences of what is happening to him and watches how the adult characters react to the gradual and then sudden political changes.
From my German point of view I envy Americans that they have an author like Roth who can explain American history for them in the form of novels. This is is only one in a series of Roth novels that does that.
The book gives me a chance to talk about my experience with American literature in general. I started with Saul Bellow when I was still a teenager. His books are hardly penetrable for someone of this age group, but I read, Augie March, Victim, Herzog (this one in German), Sammler's Planet (in German also), Humboldt's Gift. I also tried The Dean's December, but found it dull. But Henderson the Rain King was the most accessible for a teenager, and I read it twice. This was all just after he won the Nobel Prize. That is how I discovered him. Much later I read his Ravelstein. This was my start of reading books by Jewish authors. Several others followed: Bernard Malamud (most of his novels, the bulk of his short stories), I.B. Singer (who had won the Nobel Prize two years after Bellow), and Roth. Roth's first, and only novel for a long time, I read was his unavoidable Portnoy's Complaint. A few years ago I read his American Pastoral, which found heavy reading. The Plot Against America is much more accessible.
As for American literature, who can best Philip Roth for his large scope of topics?
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