Philip Roth
Paperback | Pages: 432 pages Rating: 3.93 | 58611 Users | 4264 Reviews
List Books As American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)
| Original Title: | American Pastoral |
| ISBN: | 0099771810 (ISBN13: 9780099771814) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | The American Trilogy #1, Complete Nathan Zuckerman #6 |
| Characters: | Nathan Zuckerman, Seymour Levov, Meredith Levov, Jerry Levov, Dawn Dwyer |
| Setting: | Newark, New Jersey(United States) New Jersey(United States) |
| Literary Awards: | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1998), Audie Award for Solo Narration - Male (1998), Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for Roman (2000), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (1997), International Dublin Literary Award Nominee (1999) |
Narrative During Books American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)
Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998)In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.
Define Appertaining To Books American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)
| Title | : | American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1) |
| Author | : | Philip Roth |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 432 pages |
| Published | : | March 5th 1998 by Vintage (first published 1997) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Literature. Novels |
Rating Appertaining To Books American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)
Ratings: 3.93 From 58611 Users | 4264 ReviewsCritique Appertaining To Books American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)
Should be a five star book and would have been with a good editor. As it stands Roths self-pleasuring digressions, his pedantic cataloging of sideshow detail kept spoiling it for me. Still a brilliant achievement but there were times when I wished Saul Bellow had written it.It is getting exceedingly rare to find books that are well-written and yet hard-hitting and surprising at nearly every turn. Usually, you get just one (like the nearly unreadable Infinite Jest that I can still not get through) or the other (like The Outfit or, say, Game of Thrones). So, when my movie producer friend mentioned that his employer Lakeshore Entertainment would be releasing a film version of Roths American Pastoral, I picked the book up (my first by Roth) and I was blown away. It is
This is Roth's masterpiece, in case you want to read one or two of his books, now that he is gone. Apparently Philip Roth was a difficult man. He had a reputation, by his own admission, as a cad, a bounder, profligate. "Reputation," which doesn't mean it is true, though it may be. His ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom, with whom he lived for something like 18 years, castigates him in a memoir that makes him look almost psychotically ruthless, I seem to recall from reviews (never read the book,
Clearly a lot of research went into this book. I only wish Roth hadnt been so compelled to show off every single trinket of minutiae, arcania, and esoterica (yes, I invent words when necessary) that he could acquire relating to the glove-making industry in New Jersey. The book is unquestionably too long, and the political allegory can feel a bit oppressive as one strives to believe in characters that remain just short of plausible (excepting a few bit players, such as the bullying heart surgeon
Third reading. The book starts off as an homage to a man the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, looked up to as a child because of his athletic achievements in local sports: Seymour Levov, the "Swede." It also presents itself in the early going as an homage to the so-called "greatest generation." But this opening is deceptive. For the closer we come to the Swede and his family the more we see his tragic flaws of character. Perhaps his most pervasive flaw is to be a nonthinker, a man for the most part
This is the most self-indulgent, pointless book I have ever read. I would string together a series of poorly crafted run-on sentences to attempt to describe this terrible work, but then I would be simply imitating Roth. I wish that I had the hours that it took me to read this book back. I also wish that Roth's editor would come to my apartment so that I could punch her/him in the face. An utterly pointless story coupled with, as aforementioned, ridiculously self-indulgent and dense prose, made
Back in late 2004 I had a lot of things happening: I had just gone through a significant break-up in October of that year, I had a bit of an uncomfortable situation with a not-so-secret-admirer sniffing around where I worked at the time, and I was in the early stages of a new relationship that I wasn't sure I wanted to even be a relationship. That December I was having a hard enough time reading one page, let alone finishing any actual books.I picked up Philip Roth's The Plot Against America
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