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Laddar... My Life as a Man (1970)av Philip Roth
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. Un po' indispettito dalla cronologia delle traduzioni (tali per cui mi trovo a leggere ora la prima apparizione di Zuckerman dopo che ne ho gia' letta l'ultima) non posso tuttavia che scivolare lietamente tra questi dialoghi e questa New York cosi' cinematografica - almeno, nella mia immaginazione. Non c'e' trama da salvare; non rimango piacevolmente stupito dagli intrecci dei tre racconti: dal meta-intreccio tra i tre racconti invece si'. Una bella capacita': ma d'altronde, lo si sapeva gia'. Altro tassello dell'opera omnia di Roth, da accostare agli altri, con sempre sommo piacere. De succesvolle aankomende schrijver Peter Tarnopole is minder succesvol in zijn liefdesleven. Maureen lokt hem met een leugen in een huwelijk en is daarna niet van plan hem los te laten. Alimentatierechtzaken zijn het gevolg, met weinig succes voor Maureen omdat Peter niet naar Hollywood wil om daar het grote geld te gaan verdienen. Intussen is Peter ook niet echt gelukkig met Susan, het totale tegendeel van Maureen. Zijn schrijfwerk lijdt er onder. Maar uiteindelijk lukt het toch een boek over zijn leven als man, dat zo totaal verschillend blijkt te zijn van de voorstelling die hij van het leven had gemaakt op basis van de grote literatuur. I don't know off hand how many Roth books I've read now, but I suspect it's easily in the two digits. I've also read more essays, reviews and entire books of criticism of Roth than any sane person should. A common criticism of his work is that he portrays women poorly, that he is in fact a misogynist. Maybe it's because I didn't graduate from college and was therefore able to avoid any sort of Gender Studies class, but I never really had a problem with his portrayal of women. He typically has two extreme versions of women in his novels. Woman 1 : Simple, easy to get along with. There to please. Lacking any sort of personality or sense of self. Woman 2 : Bold, articulate, straight forward. Demanding and challenging. In most of his stories, his protagonist will at some point have to decide between these two types of women. They always struggle to choose and the outcome is never the same. While I have considered that it would be nice if he'd occasionally write about a more balanced woman, I don't think that every book I read has to incorporate every type of person ever, so I mostly scoff and roll my eyes at the more feminist criticisms of his work. Then, I read this book. Stop the presses, it's true : Philip Roth hates women. Knowing as much as I do about his background, it is clear to me that this book was a direct attack on his first wife, who died well before the book was written. This novel is the story of their relationship, their downfall and her eventual death. It reads as a bitter, scathing, one-sided and completely unfair assessment of their relationship. The woman is a crazy person, he is perfect. All of their problems were her fault. It was gossipy, hostile and downright unpleasant to read. I will not be reading this again and I'm hoping to soon forget it. That said, the prose was beautiful. He wrote some interesting tidbits about Chicago and the first 1/4 of the book, before he got nasty, was intriguing enough. In summation : Uh, don't read this unless you really, really hate women.
Never in our history have Americans been so driven to expose themselves; in our recent revaluation of all values, privacy has been one of the big losers. Ingår i förlagsserienMeulenhoff editie (419) Priser
A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Roth's most blistering novel. At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying--and failing--to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg--a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Klassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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Here Roth fictionalizes the history of his relationship with his first wife, Margaret Martinson (who married Roth in 1959, separated from him in 1963, and then, it would seem, dragged him through the purgatory of early 1960s divorce law until she died in a car crash in 1968) ostensibly to demonstrate the slipperiness and relativity of "truth," not, mind you, by narrating part of the story through the eyes of a woman whom Roth/Tarnopol/Zuckerman depicts as a demonic and possessive lunatic, but to tell the events three times, varying details of plot (his father is a Dale Carnegie-reading shoe store owner or else a bookkeeper; his brother a lapsed musician or else a human rights activist; his sister married to a couple of stock Italian stereotypes or else a Lincolnesque land developer; his "other woman" is a neurotic pill-popping heiress or else the daughter of the Zipper King) but in every case from the perspective of the wounded man, in more or less the same angry, ranting style.
Here are three versions of reality, Roth says, with a wink, and in each of them, my first wife was a monstrous, deranged succubus.
A classic case of he said, he said, he said.
The metafictional structure, then, comes off as a smokescreen, masking a sustained attempt to settle one's scores with a woman who is no longer around to defend herself. And even supposing Roth/Tarnopol/Zuckerman's crucifixion of Margaret/Maureen/Lydia is fully merited by her, the cross to which he nails her serves as a ladder to sweeping assertions about women and men in general:
How little chance that coy qualification has, not only against the sweeping and damning generalization it qualifies, but against the meaning inherent in the novel's form, which gives three versions of reality, always from the man's perspective. The phrase that comes to mind is not "unreliable narrator" but "plausible deniability."
However strangely compelling and occasionally very funny the resulting novel may be (at least I found it so, from time to time and despite myself, though some readers may well be repelled by the unremitting intensity of rage) it is also an unpleasant one. ( )