From Publishers Weekly
Eros and mortality are the central themes of Roth's frank, unsparing and curious new novella. It's curious not only because of its short form (new for Roth), but because he seems to have assumed the mantle of Saul Bellow, writing pages of essay-like exposition on contemporary social phenomena and advancing the narrative through introspection rather than dialogue. The protagonist is again David Kepesh (of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who left his wife and son during the sexual revolution vowing to indulge his erotic needs without encumbrance. Kepesh is now an eminent 70-year-old cultural critic and lecturer at a New York college, recalling a devastating, all-consuming affair he had eight years before with voluptuous 24-year-old Consuela Castillo, a graduate student and daughter of a prosperous Cuban ‚migr‚ family. From the beginning, Kepesh is oppressed by the "unavoidable poignancy" of their age difference, and he suffers with the jealous knowledge that this liaison will likely be his last; even when locked in the throes of sexual congress, a death's head looms in his imagination. The end of the affair casts him into a long depression. When Consuela contacts him again eight years later, on the New Year's Eve of the millennium, their reunion is doubly ironic in the Roth tradition. Consuela has devastating news about her body, and it's obvious that retribution is at hand for the old libertine. Roth's candor about an elderly man's consciousness that he's "a dying animal" (from the Yeats poem) is unsentimental, and his descriptions of the lovers' erotic acts push the envelope in at least one scene involving menstruation. The novella is as brilliantly written, line by line, as any book in Roth's oeuvre, and it's bound to be talked about with gusto. (May 18) Forecast: Roth's audience is faithful, and the erotic explicitness of this book may attract other readers who have not tackled the author's longer novels. But his longtime refusal to do talk shows or give interviews will as usual limit publicity efforts, and it remains to be seen whether such a narrowly focused story will sell with the rapidity of Roth's longer novels.
From Library Journal
Roth at his most erotic, which really says something. A sixtyish cultural critic who has never managed to commit he's still enjoying the sexual revolution gets all tangled up in an affair with the voluptuous young Consuela.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
Like all Philip Roth's heroes, David Kepesh is a randy, Jewish, angst-ridden Manhattanite. The sexagenarian writes dramatic criticism, teaches, and sleeps with his female students (after the term ends, you understand)--until his obsession with luscious, young Consuela explodes in his mind. Arliss Howard impersonates Kepesh, who narrates the events and their repercussions, in an expressive but somnolent voice. He understands many of the novella's resonances, though neither he nor his producer seems to have gotten the central "joke" of Kepesh's intellectualizing everything. Numerous obvious edits jar the ear. Y.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
The tremendous power of Roth's writing is rooted in his uncanny ability to transform thought into a palpable force. Every potently composed sentence of this taut and ferocious tale--a surging confessional rant by professor and critic David Kepesh, whom Roth first conjured into existence in The Breast and The Professor of Desire and who's now a flinty 70--lands in the reader's mind like a grenade. Kepesh is recounting his infatuation with a former student, a salacious recitation that segues into a provocative critique of the consequences of the sexual revolution and a riveting debate about timeless questions of freedom, pleasure, and love. Roth is a masterful chronicler of erotic desire and obsession, and as his hero describes his helplessness before the voluptuous beauty of the well-bred Consuela Castillo, a self-contained 24 to his rapacious 62 when they first meet, he delves into everything from the extremism of the Puritans to whether or not sex is the only time "you are most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself." Along the way, he also examines the claustrophobia of marriage, the "pornography of jealousy," the "wound of age," and, finally, inescapably, death. Kepesh may be selfish and manipulative, but Roth has imbued him with profound integrity and blazing intelligence--his riffs on sexual politics and the inanity of mass culture are not to be missed. Kepesh owns up to the tragic fact that his pursuit of personal liberty cost him his son's love, and, for all his braggadocio, he truly worships women. Virtuosic, riling, and fearless, Roth is the bard of the modern American psyche. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Elle
"...the eponymous dying animal is not only a certain sort of man of a particular generation, but all of us..." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of Books
“Sorrowful, sexy, elegant . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth’s increasingly remarkable literary career.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.” –The Los Angeles Times
“No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.” –The Boston Globe
Orlando Sentinel
"Small in size..large in insight and wisdom...Roth is spitting out brilliant novels every year. He's an American treasure." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Baltimore Sun
"...a brilliant, demanding and splendidly artful exploration of fundamentals of literature and life" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The San Francisco Chronicle
"...a distinguished addition to Roth's increasingly remarkable literary career." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Newsday
"This little book delivers a chill that you wouldn't get from a Zuckerman novel." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Atlantic Monthly
"In the hard, driving, unsentimental sentences, and with superb dialogue...Roth remained true to his youthful vision" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
?[A] disturbing masterpiece.? ?The New York Review of Books
?Sorrowful, sexy, elegant . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth?s increasingly remarkable literary career.? ?San Francisco Chronicle
?Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.? ?The Los Angeles Times
?No one can come close to Roth?s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.? ?The Boston Globe
Product Description
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.
Inside Flap Copy
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.
From the Back Cover
“[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of Books
“Sorrowful, sexy, elegant . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth’s increasingly remarkable literary career.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.” –The Los Angeles Times
“No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.” –The Boston Globe
About the Author
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary
awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s
Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book
Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National
Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human
Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos
of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received
his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H.
Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he
received the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six
years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The
Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians
Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 2003—2004.” In 2007 Roth received the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.
Excerpted from The Dying Animal by Philip Roth. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
I was no longer in that phase of my life when I thought I could do everything. Yet I remembered it clearly. You see a beautiful woman. You see her from a mile away. You go to her and say, Who are you? You have dinner. And so on. That phase, when it's all worry-free. You get on the bus. A creature so gorgeous everybody is afraid to sit next to her. The seat next to the most beautiful girl in the world -- and it's empty. So you take it. But now isn't then, and it'll never be calm. It'll never be peaceful. I was worried about her walking around in that blouse. Peel off her jacket, and there is the blouse. Peel off the blouse, and there is perfection. A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation and prepared her for him.
Eros and mortality are the central themes of Roth's frank, unsparing and curious new novella. It's curious not only because of its short form (new for Roth), but because he seems to have assumed the mantle of Saul Bellow, writing pages of essay-like exposition on contemporary social phenomena and advancing the narrative through introspection rather than dialogue. The protagonist is again David Kepesh (of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who left his wife and son during the sexual revolution vowing to indulge his erotic needs without encumbrance. Kepesh is now an eminent 70-year-old cultural critic and lecturer at a New York college, recalling a devastating, all-consuming affair he had eight years before with voluptuous 24-year-old Consuela Castillo, a graduate student and daughter of a prosperous Cuban ‚migr‚ family. From the beginning, Kepesh is oppressed by the "unavoidable poignancy" of their age difference, and he suffers with the jealous knowledge that this liaison will likely be his last; even when locked in the throes of sexual congress, a death's head looms in his imagination. The end of the affair casts him into a long depression. When Consuela contacts him again eight years later, on the New Year's Eve of the millennium, their reunion is doubly ironic in the Roth tradition. Consuela has devastating news about her body, and it's obvious that retribution is at hand for the old libertine. Roth's candor about an elderly man's consciousness that he's "a dying animal" (from the Yeats poem) is unsentimental, and his descriptions of the lovers' erotic acts push the envelope in at least one scene involving menstruation. The novella is as brilliantly written, line by line, as any book in Roth's oeuvre, and it's bound to be talked about with gusto. (May 18) Forecast: Roth's audience is faithful, and the erotic explicitness of this book may attract other readers who have not tackled the author's longer novels. But his longtime refusal to do talk shows or give interviews will as usual limit publicity efforts, and it remains to be seen whether such a narrowly focused story will sell with the rapidity of Roth's longer novels.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.From Library Journal
Roth at his most erotic, which really says something. A sixtyish cultural critic who has never managed to commit he's still enjoying the sexual revolution gets all tangled up in an affair with the voluptuous young Consuela.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
Like all Philip Roth's heroes, David Kepesh is a randy, Jewish, angst-ridden Manhattanite. The sexagenarian writes dramatic criticism, teaches, and sleeps with his female students (after the term ends, you understand)--until his obsession with luscious, young Consuela explodes in his mind. Arliss Howard impersonates Kepesh, who narrates the events and their repercussions, in an expressive but somnolent voice. He understands many of the novella's resonances, though neither he nor his producer seems to have gotten the central "joke" of Kepesh's intellectualizing everything. Numerous obvious edits jar the ear. Y.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
The tremendous power of Roth's writing is rooted in his uncanny ability to transform thought into a palpable force. Every potently composed sentence of this taut and ferocious tale--a surging confessional rant by professor and critic David Kepesh, whom Roth first conjured into existence in The Breast and The Professor of Desire and who's now a flinty 70--lands in the reader's mind like a grenade. Kepesh is recounting his infatuation with a former student, a salacious recitation that segues into a provocative critique of the consequences of the sexual revolution and a riveting debate about timeless questions of freedom, pleasure, and love. Roth is a masterful chronicler of erotic desire and obsession, and as his hero describes his helplessness before the voluptuous beauty of the well-bred Consuela Castillo, a self-contained 24 to his rapacious 62 when they first meet, he delves into everything from the extremism of the Puritans to whether or not sex is the only time "you are most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself." Along the way, he also examines the claustrophobia of marriage, the "pornography of jealousy," the "wound of age," and, finally, inescapably, death. Kepesh may be selfish and manipulative, but Roth has imbued him with profound integrity and blazing intelligence--his riffs on sexual politics and the inanity of mass culture are not to be missed. Kepesh owns up to the tragic fact that his pursuit of personal liberty cost him his son's love, and, for all his braggadocio, he truly worships women. Virtuosic, riling, and fearless, Roth is the bard of the modern American psyche. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Elle
"...the eponymous dying animal is not only a certain sort of man of a particular generation, but all of us..." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of Books
“Sorrowful, sexy, elegant . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth’s increasingly remarkable literary career.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.” –The Los Angeles Times
“No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.” –The Boston Globe
Orlando Sentinel
"Small in size..large in insight and wisdom...Roth is spitting out brilliant novels every year. He's an American treasure." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Baltimore Sun
"...a brilliant, demanding and splendidly artful exploration of fundamentals of literature and life" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The San Francisco Chronicle
"...a distinguished addition to Roth's increasingly remarkable literary career." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Newsday
"This little book delivers a chill that you wouldn't get from a Zuckerman novel." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Atlantic Monthly
"In the hard, driving, unsentimental sentences, and with superb dialogue...Roth remained true to his youthful vision" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
?[A] disturbing masterpiece.? ?The New York Review of Books
?Sorrowful, sexy, elegant . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth?s increasingly remarkable literary career.? ?San Francisco Chronicle
?Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.? ?The Los Angeles Times
?No one can come close to Roth?s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.? ?The Boston Globe
Product Description
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.
Inside Flap Copy
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.
From the Back Cover
“[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of Books
“Sorrowful, sexy, elegant . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth’s increasingly remarkable literary career.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.” –The Los Angeles Times
“No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.” –The Boston Globe
About the Author
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary
awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s
Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book
Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National
Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human
Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos
of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received
his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H.
Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he
received the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six
years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The
Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians
Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 2003—2004.” In 2007 Roth received the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.
Excerpted from The Dying Animal by Philip Roth. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
I was no longer in that phase of my life when I thought I could do everything. Yet I remembered it clearly. You see a beautiful woman. You see her from a mile away. You go to her and say, Who are you? You have dinner. And so on. That phase, when it's all worry-free. You get on the bus. A creature so gorgeous everybody is afraid to sit next to her. The seat next to the most beautiful girl in the world -- and it's empty. So you take it. But now isn't then, and it'll never be calm. It'll never be peaceful. I was worried about her walking around in that blouse. Peel off her jacket, and there is the blouse. Peel off the blouse, and there is perfection. A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation and prepared her for him.
How do I know a young man will take her away? Because I once was the young man who would have done it --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
